Banning Hugs at School
By Lisa Belkin
We teach our children “Good Touch/Bad Touch.” Now preteens in Milford, Conn. are learning “No Touch.”
Local news there reported this weekend that parents at the East Shore Middle School received a letter from Principal Catherine Williams, which said that any touching at all on school grounds — including “hugging” and “horseplay” — could result in “parent conferences, detention, suspension and/or a request for expulsion from school.”
Students have said that they have even been prohibited from “high fiving” classmates in the halls.
The catalyst for the policy — which the school insists has been on the books all along, but which parents and students say is certainly a stricter interpretation than ever before — was an incident earlier this month when a student required treatment in the emergency room after a kick to the groin.
While some parents say they are supportive, others are outraged at what they call an overly broad response to a real problem.
“As a parent, I just don’t agree with it,” Edward Abbazia, whose son Patrick is a 14-year-old eighth grader told the News-Times. “This is going to happen — they’re going to touch each other. My son’s going to physically touch his friend, you know, shake his hand or pat him on the back, and he’s going to get detention and he knows it, but he’s going to do it anyway…the high fives, the hugging.”
In fact Patrick’s parents gave him permission to protest the policy — by going to school on Friday with his arms taped to his sides at the elbows with bright blue duct tape.
Lenore Skenazy is the creator of the blog Free-Range Kids, where she tracks what she sees as the growing tendency of parents (and schools) to swathe children in bubble-wrap. This policy, she wrote yesterday, is the latest example of aiming an elephant gun at a flea.
You can understand the administration’s frustration. A kid was seriously hurt by a kick to the groin — that’s just awful. But why is the response to criminalize all physical contact? Why not criminalize, say, kicks to the groin?
What happened here seems to be the knee-jerk response to any problem these days: Overkill, just like when schools ban tag because a kid could trip, or cupcakes, because a kid could get fat.
(And let’s not talk about the fact that my own son’s own grammar school has banned the word “dice,” lest simply hearing that word encourage kids to take up a life of gambling. The term they have to use now is “number cube.” Ugh! But that’s another story. I think. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s all part of this weird, “Protect children from everything, at any cost, no matter how small the threat and no matter how ridiculous the imposition” society we’re in.)
Which reminds me of a summer camp a friend’s daughter went to, where the lake is formed by a man-made structure which holds the water in. During swim instruction, the campers were told to “swim out to the ‘darn’ and back,” because counselors were not allowed to say the homonym for “dam.”
It also reminds me that I have spent the better part of the past decade telling my sons to “keep your hands to yourselves” because, between these two brothers at least, touches have a way of escalating into thunks. School hallways, and my TV room, would be much more civilized with a “no touching” rule. But then how would any child learn to civilize himself, darn it?
Sorry if posting articles without a comment constitues spam, but I really have nothing useful to say about this.
