Leave the kids alone

Child’s play is dead, and it was we, the parents, who killed it.

Sand lot baseball, neighborhood touch football and pickup basketball games are now the domain of the indigent. In middle class Baton Rouge they’ve all but been banished, replaced by organized teams, leagues, trophies, tournaments and hordes of screaming, meddling parents.

More often than not parents attend not to support their learning, developing child, but to watch the games with the same carnivorous eagerness they watch the NBA, NFL or Ultimate Fighting.

Whatever happened to a bunch of kids gathering spontaneously in a field, sorting themselves out into teams, choosing positions and working out all the fantastic, subtle intricacies of sports themselves?

We’re a country of leagues. We rush all over the city so our 4-year-olds can play league soccer in bright uniforms, yet wonder why a country such as Brazil, where barefoot kids kick oranges on dusty streets, produce the best players on the planet.

Drive by Independence Park on Sundays and you can peek back in time. Latin American-born children play there freely and with child-like abandon. No refs, no uniforms. Just fun.

That’s how it was in Scotland in the 1970s. Outside of school teams, we played pick-up games year-round in a grassy meadow. We threw down a couple of sweaters to mark the posts, we picked sides and then we just played for hours.

Years later, in Thibodaux, I learned how to play baseball in a dusty, vacant lot in our subdivision. I learned the game from the Kitchen brothers, a trio of swift and athletic boys whose towering father was a strong, silent man who never once intervened in our play. He let us sort it all out ourselves.

I remember one day a tiny dust devil whipped up right in the infield of our dusty lot, all of about 3 feet high, whirling around madly. We stopped playing for a moment, laughing and squealing as it danced among us.

I also remember a struck baseball rolling into a deep drainage ditch between us and the sugarcane field, and my friends teasing me that a snake would bite me as I nervously poked through the grass to recover the ball.

I remember my brother and I coming up with our own set of offensive plays for two-on-two touch football games in the street. We even came up with a system of audibles—an even number meant cut right, odd meant cut left.

I wonder what our children today will remember of their childhood games.

Disappointing their parents? The embarrassment of their dad cursing out a referee?

Or will they simply remember all the pressure we put on them to perform for us?