Tag, you're gone!

(deep SIGH)

First they took away Dodgeball, saying it was too violent. Then a couple of kids fell off the see-saw and monkey bars, so away they went. Soon after that, all the tall metal slides were replaced by short plastic corkscrew slides that don't allow you to pick up any speed at all. Before long somebody also said that even swings were too dangerous for playground play. Now just when you thought parents and schools couldn't get any more ridiculous and pussified than they already are, you know what some school board in Attleboro, Massachusetts decided this week? Apparently the game of Tag is no longer an appropriate game. Tag! I mean... TAG for Christ's sake! Claiming "Recess is a time when accidents happen," the Willlette Elementary School has now deemed one of the most basic, elemental and pure games of childhood to be too rough and dangerous for kids to play. What's more amazing is that there's nothing amazing about this particular decision. Apparently schools all over the country have been taking similar measures for years. In 2002 a Santa Monica school banned the game saying that it "creates self esteem issues among slower and weaker children."

I just don't even know what to say about this decision that isn't already self-evident to anybody who grew up in any previous generation, though I think George Carlin definitely said it best a few years ago when he said: "Grownups are taking all the fun out of being a kid just to save a few thousand lives. It's pathetic."

I'll skip all the remarks and comments of how stupid and moronic this decision and other decisions like it are (I'm sure all of you reading have a least a dozen comments of your own that you could insert here... and if you don't, well then you're a hopeless case anyway who should never have kids of your own) and instead skip right ahead to the big picture and its long term implications.

Every generation fears the generation that comes after it. Our grandparents were horrified by the rock-n-roll that our parents grew up listening to. Our parents were horrified by the brain-numbing MTV programming we watched like Beavis & Butthead and Singled Out. It's expected. You think your parents are prudes and you wish your kids would be into the wholesome things you used to be into. But now that my generation is stepping into the roles of parenthood a new and disturbing trend is happening. We're actually saying that all the things we loved about being a kid are no longer good and valid forms of entertainment. Instead, we claim they're damaging to the body and psyche of our frail little children. That's what we're saying, but the more I think about it, the more I think it goes deeper. Parents aren't really vilifying things that are dangerous. What they're really trying to forbid is any activity that kids can participate in without the direct supervision of a group of adults.

I never made that leap of logic until I read a short article that talked about how soccer is now the number one sport engaged in by the youth of America. And what immediately occurred to me was that the article or the study or whatever it was had left out one key word from that declaration. What it should have said was that soccer was the number one organized sport in America. Whenever you see American kids playing soccer, it's almost without exception a structured, organized event with official teams, coaches, referees, and soccer moms from the boosters club selling refreshments and car magnets in the shape of soccer balls. You almost never see a group of four or ten unsupervised kids trying to kick a soccer ball through a makeshift goal they set up using a couple backpacks. That's what kids in every other country in the world do, but not in America. No, in America I would stake my life on saying the most popular sport that kids engage in, irrespective of any kind of supervision, is basketball. Kids don't need an organized group of parents in order to play basketball. As long as they have a ball, a net and a hard surface they'll shoot hoops for hours just for the sheer joy of playing. But since there's no way to poll every pickup game on every cracked asphalt court in the country, soccer is the sport that wins the most popular title.

And that suits the parents of my generation just fine. For some reason, parents my age just can't stand the idea that their kids could be having any kind of fun in any activity that they didn't personally orchestrate and supervise. Give kids the opportunity and a rubber ball or three and they'll organize their own game of dodgeball. They'll monitor themselves, coach themselves and referee themselves. Give them the chance and they'll run around for an hour, chasing each other and tagging each other in the most unstructured game ever created. There's no need for parents. There's no need to keep score. There's no need to even determine a winner. You just play the game until you get sick of it, at which point you move on to something else. I'm not sure why, but games like that, games that we ourselves used to play, freak out the parents of my generation. It's inconceivable to them that their kids would do anything without their direct influence. And that's why things like playground equipment and unstructured games like tag and dodgeball are going away. "Safety" and "self-esteem" are just easy scapegoats for the real truth, which is today's parents are scared shitless that their kids... might not need them.

I don't know where all this insecurity originated and why it seems to be unique to the parents of my generation. Is it that we wish our own parents would have spent more time playing with us that we feel compelled to make sure our kids never spend a joyful minute outside our presence? Is it the reports of kids being stolen out of their own yards are making us too scared to let our kids leave our personal guardianship for any reason whatsoever? What is it that makes games like soccer, where literally dozens of kids can be supervised all at once, more preferable to games like tag where kids can supervise themselves? Why on earth is our generation unique in vilifying ourselves by vilifying the things we used to love? And where will it end? How much of our children's lives will we attempt to structuralize with no thought given to what we're depriving them of?