Colorado School Bans Tag on the Playground

  This is a story I have been sitting on for a couple of days and have finally decided to run with it, pun intended. As you can read here, an elementary school in Colorado has banned tag. You may ask why? Is it because children were tripping and skinning their little knees? As weak of an excuse as that would have been, the answer is no. The answer is even more lame.

“It causes a lot of conflict on the playground,” said Cindy Fesgen, assistant principal of the Discovery Canyon Campus school.

  How did playing tag cause children to be so conflicted?

some children complained they were harassed or chased against their will.

  Okay, it is not fun to be harassed or chased when you are a child but it is part of growing up. We all had to deal with it, unless you were the one doing the chasing. Unfortunetaly, I was one of the chased. I got through it just fine. I was chased alot worse than being forced to play tag on the playground. I got off the bus one day and so did another child, a bully. He found a shitty baby diaper on the side of the road, scooped it up on a stick, and chased me all the way home. After garnering the reaction he had hoped for he chased me home every day. Do you know when he stopped? When I got off the bus, said FUCK YOU, and walked home. He was so perplexed he just walked behind me asking me why I wasn’t running, why wasn’t I afraid of him. The truth is, I was still scared to death of him, but I had grown tired of running. I would rather have him beat me up than run from him any more. That was the last time he bothered trying to chase me.

  The point I am trying to make here is that all children face difficulty while growing up, that is part of the process. In dealing with these difficulties children learn how to react to them and they grow as a person because of it. So while banning tag in order to save the feelings of a child may seem like a good idea, you are actually taking away from a learning experience that may help the child later in life when the child, now grown, could have drawn on the experience.

  No one likes to see children pick on other children, and when I see it, I stop it. But this goes to the extreme. By over-protecting these children you are actually doing them a dis-service in the long run. These children will never see any kind of conflict if they are always over-protected and will not learn how to deal with conflict or be prepared for conflict if they don’t even know it exists.