Risk aversion is reasonable human reaction. Learning how to deal with risk, though, is just as important.
The banning of tag at a Colorado Springs school has become a national story. It’s elicited plenty of snickers and head-shaking for pure absurdity.
Though measly in the bigger picture, perhaps Americans are finally noticing that common sense is being slowly strangled by good intentions.
And good intentions, no doubt, fueled the Discovery Canyon Campus administrators in Colorado Springs District 20 to ban “tag” and “chase” on its playground. Be grateful they hadn’t followed the lead of some Florida playgrounds and banned “running” altogether.
Apparently plastic, malleable gym equipment built atop spongy ground cover just isn’t safe enough for some kids.
“Life involves risk, and you can’t take risk out of life,” says Hara Estroff Marano, editor at large for Psychology Today magazine and author of the forthcoming “A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting.” “Risk is often defined as a measure of uncertainty. It is part of life – the greater part of life, actually. … The games of chase and tag serve an important purpose for kids. Kids are playing out and enacting, in some way mimicking, survival strategies. It is important for their development.”
Aren’t we constantly being told that our kids are fat? (Sorry. Gravitationally challenged?) With all the hand- wringing over childhood obesity, you will be excused for feeling confused when a school forbids one of the few games that feature spontaneous exercise.
Regimenting student life at this level also exposes laziness in school administrators. Yes, tag is an exclusionary game. (So is life.) That some kids use the game as an opportunity to bully others can’t be argued. But what lesson do we teach students – bullies and the bullied – when we create collective consequences rather than individual ones?
All the wrong ones, would be my guess.
The problem many schools face, as Marano sees it, is that a few zealous parents can often dictate policy for the entire school. These people mistake intrusive parenting with good parenting.
“I often see parents allowing anxiety to overtake them, and it obliterates their understanding of children,” says Marano. “In the end, the goal should be to raise independent kids. Teachers, sadly, are the victims and are sometimes helpless when they’re up against the parents.”
As a coddling father who habitually makes poor choices, I realize allowing your children to deal with the vagaries of life or unpleasant emotional experiences is easier said than done.
Then again, there are big problems and small ones. We all know the big ones. The small ones surely begin with being “it” in tag.
Marano, though, sees more in tag. She says there are data to back up her claim that eradicating games like tag undermines deeply important behaviors in children. Rambunctious games, physical activity and contact, she says, have stimulating effects on brain growth.
“The thing is that this kind of play arises from the needs of kids,” she explains. “They are solving their own problems with this sort of play. The games children devise have meaning to them. The rule-bound games of parents are not the same. When children make the rules, they learn to stick to them, and this is enormous in their development. They are learning to tame their own impulses. They develop their own language. These are subtle aspects of play.”
Parents watch in horror as every tragedy involving a child is endlessly covered by the news. We buy cellphones – some equipped with GPS to keep tabs on them. Kids, meanwhile, lose a little freedom, trust and the ability to cope with the world.
“There are not just individual effects, there are cultural effects,” Marano goes on. “There was a time when kids had to manage their own behavior. Now they call parents on the cellphone. When you experience something and immediately you have a negative reaction to it and sit with it for a while, you sit with it and manage it.”
If our children can’t mange the emotional trauma of playing a game of tag once in a while, we’re in for trouble.
David Harsanyi’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 303-954-1255 or dharsanyi@denverpost.com.
