No roughhousing. No superhero games. No turning your fingers — or your Pop-Tart — into a make-believe gun. No tag. And certainly no dodgeball.
Stories of zero-tolerance play-policing are a well-established news genre. Most recently, parents in Washington state mounted a successful campaign to force the Mercer Island school district to reverse its ban on playing tag during what used to be called recess.
In his backpedaling, superintendent Gary Plano puzzlingly insisted that “asking students to keep their hands and feet to themselves at all times, including recess,” wasn’t a ban on tag. Perhaps he envisions tag by telepathy.
Mercer Island isn’t the first school district to prohibit tag and won’t be the last. Bans on physical contact and pretend violence are the norm on US school playgrounds.
“The majority of school districts in the US have ‘zero- tolerance’ policies on ‘any form of violence,’ ” says Jennifer Hart, who has published research on “playful aggression.” Kids who wrestle, pretend to fight or play superheroes face punishment, as do teachers who tolerate such old-fashioned antics.
Behind these policies is the superstitious belief that vigorous physical contact and make-believe violence will beget immediate and future real physical harms — magical thinking that fundamentally misunderstands how children play and learn.
Prohibiting rough-and-tumble play doesn’t make recess safer or kids less apt to hurt others. To the contrary, the bans deprive children of the very experiences they need to master peaceful social interactions.
Roughhousing is more than good exercise. Research shows it’s essential to childhood development. Rowdy, physical play teaches kids to communicate verbally and nonverbally; to take turns; to negotiate rules; and to understand when they can use their full strength and when they need to hold back. It may sometimes look like fighting but it isn’t.
In a chasing game like tag, children “learn how their bodies move, how their playmates will respond when a change to the game is made, how to negotiate these changes to games, what to do when one of the children falls,” writes Michelle Tannock in the Journal of Early Childhood Education.
When she interviewed kids at two child care centers in British Columbia, Tannock found that they all said rough-and-tumble play was prohibited — yet they engaged in it anyway. “To simply forbid it is like telling children, ‘We’re not going to let you eat today, because the food might be contaminated,’ ” says Frances Carlson, author of Big Body Play, a guide published by the National Association for the Education of Young Children.
Over the past three decades, as research into its importance has mounted, the NAEYC has gone from hostile to supportive of full-body play. Unfortunately, laws and schools haven’t kept up.
Contrary to what squeamish authorities seem to think, it’s the kids who don’t engage in rough-and-tumble play who actually tend to be more violent later on in life. So, says Carlson, forbidding playful physical contact “stokes the fire as opposed to diminishing it.”
Some kids are indeed prone to hurt others. “If you’ve ever watched a group of 4- or 5-year-olds play Duck, Duck, Goose,” says Carlson, “there’s always one child who, when it’s his turn or her turn, will not tag. They’ll slap.” Socially and developmentally behind, the offending children are those who most need the lessons big-body play can teach.
Keeping them from playing tag, says Carlson, “is not the way they learn how to tag more gently.” Good teachers will coach rather than punish kids who play rough.
The law in Carlson’s home state of Georgia prohibits such good pedagogy, at least in child-care centers. It dictates “staff shall not . . . allow children or other adults to engage in activities that could be detrimental to a child’s health or well-being, such as, but not limited to, horse play, rough play, wrestling.” This assumes ill effects contradicted by psychological research.
The zero-tolerance approach not only hampers education. It treats teachers not as educational professionals but as passive bystanders unable — or forbidden — to make judgment calls, even in ridiculous cases.
Take what happened to Drew Johnson, now a high-school freshman, when he was a child at Cumberland Elementary School in Fishers, Ind. One fall recess he bent over and picked some dandelions. For that offense, he served several days of lunchtime detention.
When his shocked parents asked the principal what was wrong with such innocuous behavior, she explained that some kids had been throwing rocks at recess. To make things easy on recess monitors, the school had simply banned picking anything up from the ground — flowers included.
© 2015, Bloomberg View