Game of tag banned!

[musicguy]

I don’t see anywhere in that article where it says that notable injuries were occuring. Are we talking about a scraped knee? If that is a notable injury, then I have a list of about 5,000 “notable injuries”. We all survived and none were any worse for the wear. Thats why they make band-aids.

I think that regardless of the spin, this is all about litigation potential and about adults that think that they need to comandeer every activity that a child does.

As kids, we threw snowballs, crabapples, and about every other thing we could think of at each other. We pushed each other down. We jumped off of things. Most importantly, we had fun. As an adult, none of us do any of these things. We learned how to behave, how to act appropriatly, how to treat people with kindness. It always worked before. What is so different now?

[Milossarian]

Not to hijack, but I’m curious as to your derogatory interpretation of the FOXNews story, wring.

You said:

Of course, the “fox news” (we report, you decide) didn’t give the entire story, as shown here

A. the game was not banned totally, just that it had to be supervised by an adult (ie not to be played during lunch recess when there was inadequate supervision),

B. while they mentioned self esteem etc, the reasons given also included (and conveinently missing from the Fox account) :

quote:

In the past school year, tag and other chase games have been responsible for two concussions, a couple broken bones and countless bumps, bruises and scrapes among the students, she added. (For similar reasons, flag football was also forbidden during recess but, like tag, is played during physical education classes.)

The FOXNews story says:

In the school’s weekly newsletter, Samarge told parents that without adult supervision, the game would be banned. The principal said children playing tag suffered both physical and emotional injuries.

I mean, I know FOXNews is evil – EEEEEEEEE-VIIIIIIILLLLLL!! – but, what gives?

I agree - someone may be doing some spinning here. It’s unclear to me, however, whether that someone is the principal, now emphasizing the injury angle of it, following public outcry over emphasis on the self-esteem consequences of being “it.”

Gee, I always thought being it was fun.

[wring]

** Milo** the Fox news story included the line ‘both physical & emotional injuries’ but emphasized the self esteem aspect (that was the ‘hook’ to the story) and specifically didn’t include the information about the seriousness of the injuries (musicguy they had concussions and broken bones in some cases).
I offer as proof of my take on their ‘spin’ the OP itself - who while linking to the damned article in the first place made said “banned 'cause of self esteem”, neither of which was actually the truth. The headline of the story itself is “The game of tag is out” which was inaccurate to say the least (but I"m sure that the more accurate, but less inflamatory “the game of tag must be supervised” wouldn’t have been such fun, eh?)

and in fact, the first damned paragraph of the story has the specific inacuracies that the OP highlighted

— A Santa Monica elementary school has banned the game of tag, once synonymous with youth and innocence, because they say it creates self-esteem issues among weaker and slower children.

So, I think I’m quite justified in my finding that the FOX news department while eventually admitting some of the facts, quite intentionally highlighted and emphasized things that were factually inaccurate, but would make for more ‘splash’.

Do you really not see a problem there?

as for how the rest of this discussion has evolved:

1. No, there is no way that adults can prevent all injuries/bad things from happening to children and still allow children to thrive and grow.

2. However, that being said, it is still important to do practical things to minimize those injuries and bad things, this seems to me to do exactly that.

3. as to what else do kids do during recess? Well, they generally played on playground equipment.

[Guinastasia]

You know, when I was in 7th grade, the boys all made up a game called, “Let’s rush Kathi”. They would all come at me, from all directions-running, knowing I was a hopeless klutz. They’d laugh, everyone would stand around and point, and I’d end up on my knees.

I used to ride the bus home with my head down, my hair hanging in my face, so no one saw me cry while people threw cookies at me, said I was dirty, smelly, had lice, that my dad “fucked dead people”, that I was a loser, a retard, etc.

Yeah, sure. Kids are just being kids.

:rolleyes:

[Odesio]

*Originally posted by Guinastasia *
**You know, when I was in 7th grade, the boys all made up a game called, “Let’s rush Kathi”. They would all come at me, from all directions-running, knowing I was a hopeless klutz. They’d laugh, everyone would stand around and point, and I’d end up on my knees.

I used to ride the bus home with my head down, my hair hanging in my face, so no one saw me cry while people threw cookies at me, said I was dirty, smelly, had lice, that my dad “fucked dead people”, that I was a loser, a retard, etc.

Yeah, sure. Kids are just being kids.

:rolleyes: **

And this has what to do with games like tag?

Marc

[partly_warmer]

Guin,

not that it will make amends, but picking on things that don’t defend themselves is common animal behavior.

We did something like you describe to a girl in grammar school, and weren’t even aware it bothered her. Picture a bunch of over-achievers, developing whole weapons systems for the purpose of destroying one (rather innoffensive) girl. After months she confronted us, in tears. We were flabbergasted. We hadn’t actually intended to insult her. She couldn’t believe we were so stupidly insensitive. Hope you’re well Bernie, wherever you are.

I guess you’re saying there’s a close match between the taunting that goes on in tag, and other informal kid recreations? Would it have manifested itself in another way if tag wasn’t there? In our school, we were very protective of our “underdogs”. So tag was pretty innocuous.

[pepperlandgirl]

As kids, we threw snowballs, crabapples, and about every other thing we could think of at each other. We pushed each other down. We jumped off of things. Most importantly, we had fun

Uh, you had fun. Not everybody enjoys getting beaned with a snowball, getting pushed into the pavement, and being at the receiving end of “every other thing we can think of.”
I’m not saying that you musicguy, specifically did these things…but in a general sense, the children doing the throwing and pushing had a bit more fun than the kids who were doing the ducking and the running…

[Guinastasia]

I guess my point is, sometimes, these kinds of things DO get out of hand-and the whole “emotional bruisings” thing isn’t a touchy feely term. Let’s face it-kids can be cruel, and often it does hurt. Quite a lot.

I did then face up to my tormentors. (Actually, I cringe to this day-I stood up, in front of the entire class and told them off. They felt really bad, then.)

[Tristan]

When I was in 8th grade we didn’t have recess. But the fun thing for the popular bunch to do was make wooden rods in woodshop with my name burned into them.

These guys would get themselves up to a full run (football players, baseball jocks, etc.) and blast me in the back of the calf with these rods.

The one time I got the ball playing flag football, I got tackled by 3 guys and was bruised and sore for a week and a half.

Tag? Tag was a socially accepted reason to slap me hard enough to leave welts that sometimese lasted for days.

Once, I brought a gun to school.

However, I got through it. I’m stronger for it.

But I think that adults are blind to the fact that kids are bullies, and tag and other sports/games are sometimes covers for that behavior.

Note: I’m teaching my kids how to play tag early. I hope they have fun with it.

I’m also teaching my daughter how to kill with her bare hands when she’s old enough.

On a totally different avenue, we live in a society were a kid comes home with scuffed up knees and the school is suddenly at risk for a multi-million dollar lawsuit. That could be part of it, though unsaid.

[Odesio]

*Originally posted by pepperlandgirl *
**

Uh, you had fun. Not everybody enjoys getting beaned with a snowball, getting pushed into the pavement, and being at the receiving end of “every other thing we can think of.”
**

I gotta agree with good 'ole Pepper here. Although as a youth there were times I engaged in throwing rocks or other hard objects it isn’t something I’d encourage as normal healthy behavior. A snowball fight among consenting children is fine.

[anecdote] When I was 6 during one recess I was throwing rocks at a school wall. A richochet ended up hittind a little kindergarter girl in the head and split her scalp wide open. I felt pretty bad and never had a chance to apologize. <sniff> Little girl, if you got beamed in the head by a 1st grader in Munich, Germany circa 1982 I’m sorry.[/anecdote]

Marc

[Sam_Stone]

I won’t make any apologies for bullies, and as a kid I was a self-appointed protector of other kids from bullies - I quit the football team because the rest of the team was abusing smaller children who were using the field.

That said… Schools today are FREAKING NUTS. My daughter is going to grow up not knowing what a merry-go-round is - because every school and park in the city has removed them. Tetherball is gone, because a kid could get smacked in the face if he wasn’t looking. Dodgeball has been banned because the little kids got beaned more often. Zero tolerance laws expel honors students for giving friends a tic-tac, or in one case an honors high-school student was expelled because he went out to his truck to eat his lunch, and some busybody saw him using a breadknife to spread butter on his bread. A school district in the states wants mandatory drug tests for all kids taking extra-curricular activities.

You know what’s going to happen? We’re going to raise a generation of self-absorbed, clueless brats who think the world revolves around them, and who have no respect for a society that has shown them no respect in turn. They won’t know failure, they won’t know how to deal with a group of people, and they won’t know how to stand up for themselves. God help us when these little darlings hit the real world and discover that actions have consequences.

When I was in school (not that long ago - 1968-1980), you could still get the ‘strap’ for doing something insanely bad. But that threat of corporal punishment kept the bullies in line, because they were the ones who generally wound up getting it.

So now we’re not allowed to punish kids - and you wonder why the bullies are running wild? Have we really done the smaller kids a favor by removing corporal punishment from schools - and thereby greatly increasing the amount of corporal punishment these kids get at the hand of their bigger peers?

My daughter is starting school this fall, and I just know that I’m going to be fighting the fight against school stupidity for the next 12 years…

[partly_warmer]

*Originally posted by Tristan *
I’m also teaching my daughter how to kill with her bare hands when she’s old enough.

I’m just a voice in the crowd, but I’m asking you not to do this.

Kicking a guy’s balls in when he’s over the line? Ok. Defending herself when someone’s threatening? Ok. Killing him? Not ok.

From personal experience with the martial arts, training anyone to kill another person affects their attitude. They become hostile. They treat insults as potential “encounters to the death”. This is, excuse me, martial art crap. It comes from “sifus” who are trying to make out that life is one big physical encounter between good and evil. And anyone except you, is evil. Counter-productive garbage. Counter-intelligence garbage.

You may criticize. I’m not about to be polite. Believing that one is in the right and everyone else is an object to be destroyed is contrary to (almost) every religion in the world.

[tomndebb]

I look at my mom’s grade one class. They play tag. They’re fair. They give little Pheobe, who is not the fastest on her feet athletically (and who is a tiny little peanut) her chance. All the time. They are concerned about how the other kids feel.

Then, by the time they hit grade 4, they seem to forget this “play fair” skill. WHY? What are we teaching them along the way that changes that?

One answer may be found in talking to the kids themselves. I have a drama class that is made up of grade 4 to grade 6 age kids. From listening to them, I found that they’ve been drilled into believing that their “self-esteem” comes first, that THEY come first, no matter what, and no matter who tells them otherwise.

When I was in school (not that long ago - 1968-1980), you could still get the ‘strap’ for doing something insanely bad. But that threat of corporal punishment kept the bullies in line, because they were the ones who generally wound up getting it.

So now we’re not allowed to punish kids - and you wonder why the bullies are running wild? Have we really done the smaller kids a favor by removing corporal punishment from schools - and thereby greatly increasing the amount of corporal punishment these kids get at the hand of their bigger peers?

I think these two perspectives indicate one problem with even wrestling with the issue. So many of us have such widely disparate experiences (or interpretations of those experiences) that any general rule coming out of this discussion is going to simply look wrong to some other group of posters.

My first thought when reading Elenfair’s anecdote was that the first graders had obviously gone to day care centers where they had been instilled with notions of fairness. My fairly vivid memories of kindergarten and first grade are of being taunted and bullied by the pack. There was never any attempt by kids to “be fair.” There was one nice guy a year older than I who tried to get me included in pick-up baseball and other activities, but most kids were willing to make sure that I stayed “It” in tag or was first out in elimination games or last picked for team games. And the kids who were marginally better or worse than I was were treated the same way. And while small children are capable of spontaneous and remarkable gestures of generosity, the basic attitude of small children is one of “What’s good for me?”

On the other hand, my corresponding memories to those of Sam Stone are that the corporal punishments had little effect on bullying (for a couple of reasons): the bullies saw their ability to absorb punishment as a mark of their toughness and the teachers rarely punished bullying, per se.
A kid could get paddled if he actually beat up another kid (although they frequently escaped by having their buddies all testify that it was a fair fight that the defeated kid started), but most fights were treated as just fights where the victor and the loser were punished equally. However, actual intimidation tactics and unobserved elbowing, kicking, pencil-poking, etc. were generally ignored by teachers, and children who voiced complaints about being bullied were treated as whiners and tattletales. (I had one teacher for two years who actually supported the bullies, but she was an odd person who was not typical of my other 11 years of K-12. Most teachers simply treated bullying as a “part of growing up.”)

[bluecrayola]

I can’t imagine the type of permanent damage the game of “Duck Duck Goose” will cause.

[aldiboronti]

Low self-esteem, huh? How is it that every single troubled teenager I encounter, or have any knowledge of, has a massive self-esteem, and in fact esteem themselves far superior to any adult, and way too worldly wise to need instruction or advice from anybody older than themselves or outside the circle of their equally estimable buddies?
Another group, of course, that have no problems with their self-esteem, are psychoanalysts.

[Sam_Stone]

One memory I have from grade five: One kid in our school was a continual bully. One day I was standing in the hallways when this bully came along, and he walked up to one of the smaller kids and slapped the kid’s books out of his hands. Then he used bent his fingers into a ‘cobra’ head and started jabbing this little kid until the kid started crying.

The vice principal came around the corner and observed this. He walked straight up to the bully, picked him up by his shirt, and slammed him into the lockers (not hard enough to hurt him, but certainly hard enough to scare him). He then said, “The Cobra, huh? You mean like this?” and jabbed the bully a couple of times. Then he set him down and said, “If I see or hear of you hurting smaller kids again, you’re coming to my office for the strap.”

We never had any trouble from that bully for the rest of the year on the schoolgrounds. He learned a valuable lesson - that no matter how big and strong you are, there’s always someone bigger and stronger.

If that vice principal did that today, his career would probably be over.

The thing is, childhood is the time when you start having to learn how to get along with others, INCLUDING those who are unreasonable, violent, etc. It’s also the time when you’re supposed to learn things like how to handle failure gracefully, and that actions have consequences. And since humans are naturally competitive, it’s important to learn how to compete fairly, how to avoid those who won’t compete fairly, etc. Life’s tough, and kids have to learn at least a bit of this from the earliest ages.

When kids get to high school, we start to transition them to adulthood. That means they should be getting more responsibility and freedom, not less. But that also means you have to have pretty severe punishment for truly bad and dangerous acts. After all, getting a strap or some punishment that makes you uncomfortable is NOTHING compared to what the criminal justice system will dish out in just a couple of years from then if the behaviour continues. In my high school, the ‘uncomfortable’ punishment was meted out by the phys-ed teacher. Detention wasn’t just sitting in a classroom - you had to report to the gym teacher, who made you run laps around the schoolground. It was hard work, and we tried our damnedest to avoid it.

Today, we don’t allow the kids to be punished, so they are out of control. So we put heavy restrictions on their freedoms with ‘zero-tolerance’ rules that expel decent kids and ruin their educations, and teach them that society is capricious and uncaring.

How cynical would you grow up to be if you worked your ass off, became an honors student, and then got expelled from your school because your mom packed a bread knife in your lunch box, which was never brought into the school in the first place?

How cynical would you become if you were a good kid who, because you wanted to join the astronomy club, was forced to pee into a bottle and turn it in while the stoners and bullies who never join extra-curricular activities don’t have to?

The school system today is seriously screwed up.

[musicguy]

*Originally posted by pepperlandgirl *
**

Uh, you had fun. Not everybody enjoys getting beaned with a snowball, getting pushed into the pavement, and being at the receiving end of “every other thing we can think of.”
I’m not saying that you musicguy, specifically did these things…but in a general sense, the children doing the throwing and pushing had a bit more fun than the kids who were doing the ducking and the running… **

Actually my point was, we all had fun. 15 or 20 of us(ages 7 to 11 or so). We were all doing the throwing and ducking and running and pushing. None of us became any worse for the wear.

And please don’t think that I am advocating that kids should be allowed to throw rocks at each other or any activity that could land them in the IC unit of a hospital. But to outlaw snowball fights and tag and dodgeball are to remove things that are far less dangerous IMO, than riding in the family car, riding a bicycle, or having instilled in you that everyone is nice and everyone wins. Kids raised this way are in for a rude awakening.

[musicguy]

And guin,

I feel for you and am sorry for what you had to go through. You obviously have a good heart and are a nice person. But another trait that I have noticed is that you don’t take shit from anyone on these boards and are willing to stand up to that which you don’t agree. Do you think that you would be this way if everyone had always been nice to you and you hadn’t felt what it was like to be on the other end? Perhaps that is why you are so compassionate. Thats not a judgement, just an honest question.

[Dr.Lao]

I have to wonder if this policy was instituted for legal reasons. Could a parent sue the school because their kid got a broken arm? If so, what do you think the first question the school will be asked? I’m guessing it will be, “Where was the supervision?” I have no idea whether a parent would prevail in such a suit, but most schools cannot be bothered with them. Supervising potentially injurying activities could reduce the school’s exposure to litigation by reducing the number of overall injuries and having an official record of what happened if a child happens to get injured.

[Guinastasia]

Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps I would have been a snot.

I don’t know-but on the other hand, I tended to be very VERY hostile back then. I remember after telling off my entire class, one guy came up to me and said, “you know, on the first day I came”-he was new in the middle of the school year-“I came up and said hi to you, and you just mumbled hello and walked away.”
And I remembered, and I realized-it was just a defense mechanism. It took me a while to get over that-I still tend to shy away from people. Here, it’s different, because it’s on the internet. But in real life, I tend to be very meek sometimes, and I cry easily. I don’t like confrontations in real life.

BTW, thanks. Really, that’s very sweet!