The new wimpification: Youngsters are being overprotected from activities requiring imagination

By Charles Sykes

One of the classic books on college pranks is memorably titled "If at All Possible, Involve a Cow." Now, we probably need to add "And Bring a Lawyer."

The Christian Science Monitor reports that colleges across the country are requiring permits or permission slips for undergraduate pranks.

This was perhaps inevitable. First they came for dodge ball. Then tag. So how long could something as spontaneous, something so like fun, as the prank escape the long arm of bureaucratic wimpification?

Administrators justify the new prank rules by invoking Sept. 11 even though most college pranks have as much to do with terrorism as a greased pig in the hallway has to do with the invasion of Poland.

But the war on spontaneity continues unabated:

In Cincinnati, the nannies who run the Little League have decided to ban chatter on the diamond. The league president explained:

"If you're saying, 'Swing, batter,' and this poor little kid is swinging at everything, he feels bad and maybe he turns to the catcher and gets mad. Honest to gosh, I didn't have any trouble doing this."

To which one critic from the Internet peanut gallery responded: "Good idea! Chatter should be banned! I can still remember the sting of being accused of being more of a belly-itcher than a pitcher!"

Said another: "What are they going to do next? When little Timmy strikes out are they going to give him an ice cream cone for trying, or maybe just let him keep swinging until he gets a hit?"

You shouldn't even joke about such things these days.

A Colorado Springs elementary school is one of the latest school to ban tag on its playground. Running will still be allowed as long as there is no chasing. The twist here is that the ban wasn't the idea of overprotective educrats. It was the result of complaints from children and their parents who "complained that they'd been chased or harassed against their will."

Other schools have already banned swings, merry-go-rounds, teeter-totters, crawl tubes, sandboxes and even hugs. One California school district worried about "bullying, violence, self-esteem and lawsuits" also banned tag, cops and robbers, touch football and every other activity that involved "bodily contact."

In some schools free play has been replaced by organized relay races and adult-supervised activities, in order to protect children from spontaneous outbreaks of creativity.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 or disappointment.

The Duke of Wellington once said (perhaps apocryphally) that "the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton," reflecting his view that competitive sports shape a nation's character.

At this point we had better hope that's not true about America unless we plan on going to war against an enemy who also values noncompetitive, risk-free, self-esteem-building play activities for its young.

Childhood -- or at least the fun part -- is falling victim to a potent stew of psychobabble, litigation and overwrought overprotectiveness. In North Carolina principals in at least eight schools worried about how schoolchildren will cope with scorching summer heat want to raise thousands of dollars to erect large canopies and shelters over playgrounds.

If that's not enough reason to keep kids inside, ABC News recently reported that there are germs in playgrounds. Out of 60 playgrounds tests, ABC's expose discovered, "59 had evidence of bacteria or mold that could make children sick, tests showed."

News flash for ABC: Check out your own lunchroom or any place kids play. Where there are children, there are also germs. That's why our moms made us wash our hands before dinner.

But if we are already setting up canopies on playgrounds and swabbing junglegyms for bacteria, can actual bubble wrap be far behind? The modern bubble wrap mentality assumes that children are so frail and easily bruised that they have to be insulated from life.

We're already paying the price for the epidemic of overprotectiveness. Congress has appropriated more than $600 million to encourage kids to walk or bike to school. An entire generation of kids now rides in minivans to schools where they aren't allowed to chase one another, swing on swings, play dodge ball or learn the inestimable pleasures of cow-tipping without a permit.

And we wonder why we have an obesity problem.

Charles Sykes is the author of "50 Rules Kids Won't Learn in School."