While there are some good elements in here, I think a complete lack of all physical contact is too much.
Of course, I worked out a deal in Grade 6 where I didn’t have to go outside for recess, so what do I know.
Question: What about other countries? Is it as similarly stupid in Europe and Australia? Japan?
On a related note, I’m noticing a trend of parents that are waaaaay too overprotective. My co-worker dropped her daughters off at a summer day camp program. On the first day, when you had to register, the line-up seemed really slow.
Why? Because moms were presenting multi-page lists to camp staff – it seemed they wanted to hermetically seal their children away from anything that might possibly have germs, dirt, or result in a scraped knee. The woman ahead of my co-worker presented a list to the camp staff of “special conditions for her child”. It sort of went like this: “Sammy is a allergic to grass. He’s afraid of water so don’t make him go in the pool. And he doesn’t like to run.”
So in keeping with the spirit of that first day of camp, when she got to the front of the line, she told the staff that she too had “special conditions for her children”:
“When I come back to pick them up, make sure they aren’t dead.”
Geez, between this thread and the one about “why did my school lie to me?” (about lessons taught using outdated information, or worse, popular legend taught as fact.) I’m inclined to start a Straight Dope School for the Fight Against Ignorance and Numb-Nuttery.
Of course one of the taglines would have to be “Kids fall down and get dirty. Deal with it.”
Agreed. It seems every time I’m around the parents of my daughter’s schoolmates, I end up telling them to lighten up about once every five minutes. Kids aren’t as delicate as they think.
I can remember some of the really old teachers from my elementary days (old enough to have been alive during the Great Depression) would tell kids that were fighting to come get their paddling when they decided they had had enough. I don’t remember anyone ever getting hurt, just really worn out.
I keep picturing that scene from A Wrinkle in Time (the book. There was no movie) where Meg and co. arrive on the dark planet and are walking down a residential street. All of the kids march out and are either bouncing a ball or (I think) jumping rope to the same relentless, mechanical rhythm. ::shudder::
Bullying definitley should be addressed, but I think we’re all in agreement that a sweeping “no contact” rule is a piss-poor way of doing it.
Bullying isn’t solved at all this way and will just get a lot more passive-aggressive – the kind you read about in the news where kids become so emotionally tormented by their bullying peers that they get physically ill or seriously emotionally fucked up from the very cruel but “non-physical” abuse.
I got plenty of lumps in school. Got pummeled failry regularly. Better supervision to prevent the pummeling would have been appreciated, but “no contact” would have really messed up our general socialization.
And IMHO the passive-aggressive terrorizing was far worse than a good many of the lumps I got.
Reminiscing…
One of the best schoolyard games we had in winter was over on the “Little Hill” (we weren’t allowed on the “Big Hill” after awhile because sliding down repeatedly had polished the snow to a sheet of pure ice and we were gaining way too much speed – the collisions were getting dangerous). The Little Hill game was basically called “All the Little Kids Must Overthrow the Big Kids.” The big kids were at the top of the hill – little kids tried to take it over!
Very much a contact sport with the 8th graders launching little kids back down the hill while little kids tried to pile on the 8th graders to outnumber, overwhelm, and eventually clobber them and drag them down to the bottom. Whereupon the 8th graders would have to fight their way back up to the top with a dozen little kids on their backs trying to keep them at the bottom.
This game could not be done in the summer because you needed to be able to slide, plus the snow and snowsuits cushioned a lot of the various impacts you’d sustain.
Good times! You’d go home bruised but happy!
I’m just waiting for the day they send em home from the hospital after giving birth to em in their own little hermetically sealed bubbles.
There are reasonable compromises, but I don’t think many people are interested in them. Those worried about risk and lawsuits won’t be happy short of this nonsense, and others won’t be happy unless dodgeball is brought back and the teachers let the kids sort the bullying out themselves. I say good riddance to dodgeball. I also think that it is a good idea for adults to step in and stop fights or physical cruelty and teach against the mental torture doled out by young kids all to often.
They’re going to ban that next. Soon, all kids will be able to do at recess is walk quietly around the playground, thinking contemplative thoughts, and perhaps humming a quiet tune, provided it didn’t interfere with the meditation of the students nearby. They may not be able to walk around in sunlight, however, for fear of getting sunburned. The schools may need to cover their playgrounds.
Oh, and throwing rocks at people? Right out.
Oh, we used to dream of having our teeth smashed out during a round of cinderblock-toss!
I liked dodgeball and murderball (basically dodgeball but with every man for himself) a lot in school in the seventies and early eighties. I guess I’m just old.
Ya know, in twenty years kids won’t be allowed outside for recess unless they’re strapped into kid-sized padded hamster balls…
Already happened, Nintendo was sued years ago for this very reason. I’m trying to dig up the article, but it’s getting lost in all the lawsuits against Nintendo for inducing seizures. I also saw a few where they were blaming Pokemon for starting a gambling habit. :rolleyes:
I’d say shoot these scumfucking lawyers, but then people would get mad at me.
Man, I loved dodgeball too! I was one of those wirey little kids who was always one of the last two, and I was also on the bottom tier of the social scale so everyone was always rying to peg me off. I had a blast!
There is a huge difference though between electing to play dodgeball and being forced to play dodgeball in gym class by a sadistic teacher. Lots of us would play dodgeball at recess because we wanted to. When a teacher made a classroom full of kids play it was terrible because there were some kids who hated it, were lousy at it, and would get creamed.
Hey, at least these kids still get recess, or something like it. Many schools, facing pressure from parents to include things like foreign languages or computer skills classes are giving up recess completly.
If you have the kids strait-jacketed they can’t hurt each other and you won’t get sued. And lawsuits, more than any real concern for health and safety, are what drive the play out of the playground. Shakespeare had the solution centuries ago, but it was never carried out when it might actually have been accomplished. Now there are too many greedy lawyers encouraging greedy parents to look to lawsuits as a way to make money.
I was a kid in the 50’s, a far less litigious time, and play time was exactly that. Teachers supervised the playground to prevent actual mayhem, but kids were allowed to express themselves physically as long as no weapons were used. I was always the smallest boy in my grade. I had to deal with bullies occasionally, but I don’t remember being terrorized. It was just the way life was, and I was being prepared for the way life is. I liked games like dodgeball and flag or touch football. We had a grass field at the end of the playground where we played football, and the most fun I had playing was when I got blocked hard and went flying ass-over-tea-kettle. A bruise was a badge of honor. I broke my wrist once falling off my bicycle, and once the pain was over having that sling was really cool. It would have been cooler, though if I’d broken the bone in a game of football.
Todays kids have to play in bubble pack. Fun has become outlawed. And I thought my mother was over prtotective.
I give them some of the blame, but I save most for the people on juries that let them win stupid cases. If stupid suits always lost, lawyers wouldn’t be so quick to file them and defendants wouldn’t be so quick to settle them.
One thing I haven’t really seen mentioned in this thread is the recent change in mindset among parents about what school is for. it used to be ‘teach them to read and write’ and now, especially in grade school, it seems to be a lot more about ‘raise my kid for me’ but don’t do it in a way I wouldn’t approve of or I’ll sue.
So much of this would be unnecessary if parents looked to themselves instead of schools to instill morals and common sense in their children.
True.
Lastcall, your comments are dead on.
Like Weirddave and ** Abbie Carmichael**, I’m flummoxed by the lack of imagination that I see in some children today.
Putting on my creaky old lady voice: When I was a girl, a tree branch became a launch pad, a fort, a rocket, a palace in the sky.
A ball was all you needed to begin a convoluted game with numerous rules that shifted and changed as often as the players did.
Tetherball was my favorite recess game-although my lack of co-ordination meant I often took a ‘facer.’
However, when I came home, bruised, battered and happy-my parents didn’t bewail my injuries or assume that I needed some sort of protection, they just yelled at me for breaking my glasses for the 5th time in as many weeks.
My parents consider bumpss and bruises part of a happy childhood.
I read an interesting article recently (sorry, no cite) which postulated that parents too often rush to shove a toy at the baby when it cries-rather than allowing it to learn to amuse itself with it’s toes or nose.
It also examined the consequences of always solving a child’s problem for him.
Too often, over zealous parents fail to accept that the child must, as part of a maturing process, discover solutions for himself-even when the decisions are wrong.
The article drew the line at extremes of bullying, of course.
Last year, we spent Thanksgiving with some friends and their 11 year old daughter.
It was painful because the kid simply could not come up with anything to entertain herself despite a room full of toys, a stack of video games, books, DVD’s,books and a neighborhood to roam on her bike.
I remember when we were in between the 70’s playground-on-concrete and todays hermetically sealed, tiny, plastic primary color playgrounds: The early 80s Creative Playground!
Sure, you had the minor problem of chemically-treated wood (containing arsenic), but I’m sure it was much safer than…concrete playground floors. I remember some of the creative playgrounds were across the playground from the older, concrete ones, and the concrete and metal looked positively Gothic in its menace, manifestly dangerous.
But there is simply no paragraph to describe the Creative Playground. Some were castles with multiple (sometimes mirrored!) tiny passages within the wooden block, some were chains of platforms dangling 15 feet off the ground (sometimes connected with only an upright 2*4!) But NO! Due to some lawyers insistence that we NOT expose our children to arsenic :), we can never experience that joy again.