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School Bans 'Tag'
GillBates0 writes "CNN is carrying a story about a school in Boston which has have banned kids from playing tag, touch football and any other unsupervised chase game during recess for fear they'll get hurt and hold the school liable. According to the article, some elementary schools in other states have similarly banned "unsupervised contact sports". A parent was quoted as saying that her son feels safer now and that she'd witnessed enough 'near collisions.'" See, it's not just dangerous virtual games that are harmful to children!
..generalizations, I do. But I have a 2.75 yo son and I take him to the playground 3-4 days per week (his mom, the rest of the time). There's a fairly significant divide between how men and women treat their children at the playground. Dads tend to hang back, contributing support and help as kids need them (and to be sure, too many fathers hang on the park bench the whole time and can't be bothered to participate at all). Mom's hover, ensuring the kid never suffers a risky moment.
Those kids tend to have less certain notions of what's possible, what isn't, and what's just plain stupid. Some of those kids certainly got it in the nature-equation - meaning those parents may, in fact, have some reason to be fearful. Plenty of other kids are developing much shallower skills with respect to falling and not falling.
So, to wrap up with another generalization, it's more likely a mother would feel relieved at this ridiculous development than a father.
How the hell can any school know so little about children but have them for so long..
It's much the same in the UK, and I'll bet there's the dank and clammy hand of the insurance industry behind this. To be fair, schools are probably wistfully nostalgic of the days when they could spend money on books and stuff, rather than having to shell out for lawyers every time some chancer with a bruised kid hires a shyster. This sort of initiative is probabably a desperate attempt to reclaim those halcyon days, regardless of how ridiculous it looks. They'll lose, naturally, but democracy seems to involve letting insurance companies dictate the rules of acceptable behaviour. In theory, this should be left to legislators, but they've got less money and don't seem able to hire the talent.
My high-school's superintendent was a "Doctor of Child Psychology" yet his decisions never actually reflected an understanding of a child/adolescent's mind. I can recall several times where he has lied about the motives of a move in school policy to the student body, thinking we weren't smart enough to see through it. These kids will be able to see though this school's stupidity; if not now then very soon. I always find it funny when the same people who praise a classes brains go and do something assuming the ignorance and inability to think of that same class. This kind of thing also is adding to our declining education in America. More and more students are treated as cattle sent to pasture between different fields (classrooms). The students can no longer feel any ownership to the school as there once was and if you can't feel connected to the school you really aren't going to care if your assistant principal wags his finger at you.
Hey, tag is a dangerous game. Just think, CHILDREN ARE TOUCHING EACH OTHER!!11ONE1one1! The next thing you know they will be screwing each other like rabbits in the playgrounds!
Ok, kidding aside, I actually did manage to end up with stitches in my eyebrow from a game of tag when I was young. I went for one of those high speed turns where you grab a pole and whip around, and another pole ran right out in front of me. The last thing I recall was seeing the school upside down, sometime after that I woke up on a couch in the office. I ended up with several stitches in my left eyebrow. (Is it just me or does the needle they use to do that look awfully similar to a fishhook?)
So, would I stop kids from playing tag because they might hurt themselves? HELL NO. It's a ton of fun, it gets kids out and running. Which, when you consider all of the health risks of kids being obese, I'll take the trade off of one or two of them getting knocked cold now and again. Also, any parent who sues over this sort of thing should be taken out and shot. Kids are going to run around and play, they are going to fall and get cuts, bruises, they will require stitches and they will break the occasional bone. This is why you have health insurance, to keep those occurances from breaking the bank. Use it as a teaching opportunity to explain why you need to be careful and GET OVER IT!
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
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I hear that. If I have kids, I'm gonna make sure there tough as nails. "Whats that? You dont like green beans? Well I guess you dont want dinner tonight. Oh you want them now? Timmy wanted them.... there gone now." They'll never complain about anything. Ever.
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
You guys have nothing on California. A local school here has a "peaceful playground," which doesn't allow competitive playing or running of any sort.
new york state parks with pools have diving boards. use 'em all the time. Many private campgrounds I visit also have them. most schools have them, around here at least. the only place I see diving restricted is where the water is shallow, i.e. 4' pool.
If you want a "man's hobby" for your childen, get into historical reenacting. They can learn to shoot a gun, dress in military uniforms, pretend to kill people, cook food over an open fire, and camp under the stars all in the same day. If you join something like a competitive target shooters club, they can fire live rounds at targets too. In fact, there are clubs that fire live artillery rounds. That's a real man's hobby. Forget bowling.
aside from that, my son came home with a paper card game from 1st grade the other day. It was basically "war" just with number cards no face cards, so they could recognize 0 through 10 dots in different configurations on a page, and learn to quickly tell the difference between the numbers. Anyway, he proceeds to divide up the cards equally, 2 number 10s for you, 2 for me, 2 number 9s for you, 2 for me etc. I immediately got angry and lept to the conclusion that the directions make the game attempt to be "fair" rather than "random" as you would expect, and that it was more soft-peddling the games to our kids, and started to blame the teacher... then I read the directions. The directions were war, shuffle the deck, hand out cards randomly etc. Infact he was stacking the deck so he would win, there were actually 5 of each card. He was keeping the extras to ensure victory.
I wasn't sure if I should be proud he had figured out how to stack the deck, or be mad he cheated, thankful our local school district hadn't softened to the point of game-neutrality or what to think. So I thought them all at the same time, and proceeded to kick his ass in cards after shuffling. Only, as any good random card game like war is, he won the 2nd game without difficulty.
Then we went downstairs and played missle command, to teach him that life isn't like random car games, you win a few you lose a few, in fact, you win win until your cities go up in smoke.