RULE 11

After you graduate, you won’t be competing against rivals who were raised to be wimps on the playground.

The Duke of Wellington once said that “the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton”—reflecting his view that competitive sports shape a nation’s character. We sure as hell should hope that’s not true about America—unless, that is, we plan on going to war against an enemy who also values noncompetitive, risk-free, self-esteem-building play activities for its young.

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In Broward County, Florida, school officials banned running on the playground. This would not have been controversial, except that they also banned swings, merry-go-rounds, teeter-totters, crawl tubes, and even sandboxes.64

If we can save just one child.

In one California school district, educrats concerned about “bullying, violence, self-esteem and lawsuits” also banned tag, cops-and-robbers, touch football, and every other activity that involved “bodily contact.” They apparently meant that quite literally.

“During lunch recess one recent afternoon,” reported the Sacramento Bee “yard supervisor Janice Hudson spotted a first-grader pushing a girl on the swing.”65

“Do not push,” Hudson told the student. “Let her push herself, please.”

“One person can be a little stronger than the other,” she said as she walked away.

It’s a jungle out there.

One school in Santa Monica, California, announced that it was also banning tag, explaining that “in this game, there is a ‘victim’ or ‘it,’ which creates a self-esteem issue.”66

This is ironic. While kids are sitting around playing Playstation games, or toting Nintendos and Gameboys, and their butts are expanding like mushrooms, professional nannies are hyperventilating about the evils of tag, cops-and-robbers, and most of the other fun stuff that used to take place at recess.

Childhood—or at least the fun part—is falling victim to a potent stew of psychobabble, litigation, and overwrought overprotectiveness. In some schools free play has been replaced by organized relay races and adult-supervised activities in order to protect children from spontaneous outbreaks of creativity. This makes sense to the sort of person who thinks that children must at all costs be protected from the scrapes of life and insulated from the prospect of having to deal with social interactions themselves or having to use their imaginations to make their own kind of play.

Even as playgrounds have become increasingly vanilla, lawsuits have become more common. “You can’t swing a dead cat without being sued,” said one deputy city attorney—as if anybody would swing any kind of cat, dead or alive, anywhere near a playground these days.67

Go out and play in the neighborhood? Build a fort in the woods? Who can risk it?

After all, the nannies have decided that swings and teeter-totters are too dangerous for playgrounds. USA Today reports that slides, swing sets, and merry-go-rounds have been replaced “with all-in-one climbing structures that child-development experts say promote both physical fitness and social skills.”68 Much better than fun.

In the past kids did, indeed, fall and scrape their elbows and yes, it is true, broke some bones. These wounds were regarded as badges of growing up, or, at least, of learning to respect the forces of gravity and its interaction with jungle gyms. Playgrounds were once the place where children were taught the nexus between dumb decisions and bad consequences. Now, apparently, they’ll have to learn it someplace else, like the freeway.

“Play is one of children’s chief vehicles for development,” says Joe Frost, an emeritus professor from the University of Texas who runs something called the Play and Playgrounds Research Project. “Right now it looks like we’re developing a nation of wimps.”69

So, if violent games like dodgeball, and other sports with winners and losers, are too threatening to our bubble-wrapped children, what would be acceptable?

How about juggling? Even here, the fragile psyche faces the prospect of dropped balls.

No problem: try juggling scarves.

“The trick,” the guru of nonjudgmental scarf juggling says, “is first to teach beginners how to juggle neon-colored scarves. Tennis balls fall quickly and can smash into your face. Scarves are soft and nonthreatening and float down slowly.”70

Reports the Los Angeles Times: “As students throw their scarves into the air, [the teacher] has them repeat the fundamental steps of juggling out loud. As they toss and catch, they chant, ‘Toss, catch.’ In minutes, they are juggling.” Well, actually, they are throwing pieces of cloth into the air, but at least no one is dropping anything and feeling bad about himself.

The possibilities are nearly endless. A teacher described as the “Johnny Appleseed of school juggling” tells teachers they should experiment with extreme versions of scarf tossing—by branching out to discarded socks and dried beans. He reports that one teacher came up with the “nifty substitute” of juggling … supermarket produce bags. (Meditate for a moment on the coincidence that obesity, attention-deficit disorder, and extreme sports all began to rise concurrently with the juggling of scarves and grocery bags.)