Making rules up as you go along doesn't work at all in the adult world. We're too tied-up in our social, business, religious, political restrictions that we never give the fly-by-night rules, guidelines, regulations or laws a chance to get an airing. The critics, including media, pounce on the weaknesses before the rules-makers get a chance to fix them.
But such is not so in the land of children.
Kids get to make up rules, if given free rein from over indulgent adults, to just play for the sake of playing.
Boys, if given the chance to play football, really only need a half-inflated ball to work with and it can be game on. No pads? Well, you make up rules about tackling so that hardly anybody gets hurt and if they do nobody gets charged with a criminal offence or sued by a distraught parent. I recall doing a lot of football playing sans protective equipment, and our rules were made on the run and were adhered to because we made them!
Girls danced and played with dolls and created their own fantasy world.
As kids, we played with a baseball and bat and a few gloves. Depending on the number of participants we could play games we called 500 or double-up or, if the Saturday winds were light and the sun was out, we got 14 to 20 kids out on any old local diamond during the summer vacation period, to play an actual game. We called the balls, strikes and outs on ourselves, and one bad call would be followed by another bad call going the other way, to even things up. The game ended when either the sun went down, six kids got hungry, the kid who owned the bat had to go babysit or the cover on the ball got cut too badly.
I loved my early hockey-playing experiences, mainly because the kids in my age group for about four years, never really had a coach. We got ice-time because we were told we had ice-time. So we played shinny for 50 minutes and then took shots on goal with the losers having to scrape the ice for the next batch. When we had to actually play a scheduled game, somebody's dad, or Max, everybody's coach, showed up to call out the line changes. It was pretty simple. We knew who the best players were out of the 14 of us, so we assigned ourselves according to our self-diagnosed and evaluated talents. No coach had to inform me I was a second-shift defensive stalwart or a third-line left-winger. It was self-evident.
I always felt coaching gigs were over-blown, until I did it one year. I learned in the process that I couldn't even pass along the knowledge I had accumulated until I had completed some courses, passed exams and got certified for Level I or II, or something.
Naturally, I dropped out. My commitment wasn't that fanatic.
So leaving a little unstructured time for kids, especially in the summer, is probably a good thing. Take away the remotes and cell phones for two days. Let them devise their own strategies and refuse to respond when they tell you they are bored. They aren't. Kids are never bored for more than five minutes and 32 seconds. Their minds are active and so will their bodies be, once they figure out the rules you know, those rules they can make up on the fly rules that can be changed in a flash, when circumstances call for change.
