When Kids Collide

Weather permitting, a group of kids plays freeze tag outside the church after dinner on Wednesday nights. Ian and I have time to kill before our respective catechism class and choir rehearsal, so we usually join them on the playground.

It’s not old equipment, but it’s aging. There are plenty of gaps to fall through, and raised planks to stumble across. The grass is slick, and there are filthy, splintery railroad ties bordering the playground.

In a logical world, you’d think the itless would scatter and hide; instead, we cluster around the playground equipment, taunting the It and daring ourselves to get closer and closer. It’s chaos compressed into a few hundred square feet of wood and plastic and steel. A dozen atoms spinning through the air, limitless in energy and disastrously drawn to each other. One atom is so full of energy and exuberance that it spins by itself in an excited orbit, around and around and around.

Sometimes the atoms collide in a tangle of pony tails and sneakers. They stagger and try to stand, rubbing their foreheads. And then they run in the opposite direction, because the It is merciless, and unmoved by excuses or bruises.

This happens in Sunday School, too, and in nursery, where the goal isn’t survival but simply to get from this toy to that. They run, they hit, they fall. Sometimes they cry, but more often they laugh. More often than that, they ignore the crash completely and move on with their lives.

An elementary school in Attleboro, Massachusetts has banned tag. And touch football. And ‘any…unsupervised chase game during recess’. Students may get hurt.

Who decided that children shouldn’t hurt? What idealistic parenting book is telling new mothers and fathers that it’s their children’s right to live without scraped knees, bloody noses, or even broken bones? If that were the case, our bodies wouldn’t heal.

Through pain we learn about cause and effect, about consequences, about boundaries. We learn about physics. We learn caution, and how to help others who’ve fallen. We learn that that was a really dumb thing to do. We learn that we can be hurt.

We learn forgiveness.

Celeste D’Elia says ‘her son feels safer because of the rule’. He may feel that way, but, if so, it’s an illusion. No one is safe, not really, not completely. Protecting children from what may happen doesn’t prepare them for what does happen. What will happen.

This weekend, four-year-old Canon passed away after a month-long struggle with complications which arose from a heart transplant. It’s a situation far-removed from tag or flag football, and extreme, but the lesson for parents is the same. We can try fooling ourselves, with rules and padded corners, into believing that we can protect our children. But if Christ died for something as great as our salvation, why should I worry about something as little as a bruised forehead?

(Thanks, Child’s Play!)