Are children today too uncoordinated to play tag?
Timothy P. Carney
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It’s now a classic headline in the genre of “kids these days!”
“Local School District Bans Tag” headlines have been appearing for at least a decade, and recently, these stories are appearing overseas. Here’s a headline from the United Kingdom this spring: “A headteacher introduced a policy temporarily banning games such as tag after noticing an increase in ‘minor injuries’ on the playground.”
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The obvious explanation is that schools have forgotten that children need challenge, hardship, and play; that parents have no tolerance for risk at school; or that lawyers have made schools too risk-averse. We see the tag bans, like the dodgeball bans, as examples of schools turning children into snowflakes.
That’s not wrong, necessarily. But there’s another explanation, and it’s no more uplifting: What if tag is more dangerous today because children basically get no strenuous exercise? That is, maybe the human race is losing the instincts required to play this nearly preternatural game.
That’s the implication in this article, which free-range parenting guru Lenore Skenazy posted on social media on Thursday.
The article is from the athletics/fitness website Stack. Here’s the key passage:
“The real problem actually goes much deeper than schools being overcautious. The truth is that modern kids are lacking some fundamental skills needed to safely play tag. … Pediatric occupational therapist Angela Hanscom outlines why tag today doesn’t resemble the game most parents recall from their own childhood.”
“‘What was once considered a simple and honest game of good fun has become a nightmare on the playground. Children are starting to hit with such force that they often end up whacking their opponent across the back with a monstrous slap,’ Hanscom writes.”
“Modern kids often lack the innate ability to judge how much pressure to apply during games that require human contact such as tag, largely due to a underdeveloped proprioceptive sense.”
Specifically, children aren’t forced to use their strength enough, so they don’t have what athletes would call “touch,” the muscle memory that teaches you how much force to use.
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What is causing this lack of “proprioceptive sense”? All sorts of things: video games, aversion to manual labor, unavailability of a parent for wrestling (day care workers are much less likely to wrestle with a child than the mother or father is, I would imagine).
So, yes, schools should allow tag. But parents and schools should also make sure their children wrestle and play with large rocks more.