Whatever happened to hopscotch?

Traditional games teach problem-solving, social skills-and fun

Everyone over thirty has some version of this childhood memory: you're out playing with the neighborhood kids-kickball, stickball, tag-and evening is coming on. You've been outside since you came home from school, several hours ago. It's getting dark. The porch lights come on, the temperature drops, but you are too absorbed in your play to go get a sweater. Just when it gets too dark to see the ball and your arms and legs are thoroughly chilled, you hear your mother calling you in for dinner.

"Aw mom, five more minutes!" you beg.

You may not have realized it at the time, but when you played hopscotch, jump rope, or dodge ball, you were taking part in a children's culture that had been passed on from kid to kid for generations. In fact, many of the games American children played in the fifties, sixties, or seventies are thousands of years old, according to Dr. Rhonda Clements, Professor of Education at Hofstra University and president of the American Association for the Child's Right to Play.

"Jacks date back to ancient Rome, when they were carved from ivory or bone," she says. "The Romans also played marbles to develop hand-eye coordination, using dried peas, nuts, or pebbles."

Jumping rope began in ancient Greece, where it was practiced by the entire family, and Hippocrates recommended hoop rolling as physical conditioning for both adults and children.

Clements' personal favorite is the most venerable game of all: tag. "It's been around since earliest man and woman," she says. "It is a chase and flee game, inherent in us. When children play something as simple as tag, they learn to dodge, dart, negotiate, find out how close you can come."

Kids have come up with endless variations on this primal game through the years: freeze tag, flashlight tag, partner tag, broom tag, and more. But age-old pastimes like tag and jump rope are now on childhood's endangered species list, being driven out by television, computer games, and parents' fears about letting their children play outside.

Jean D'Agostino, a 61 year-old grandmother from Wakefield, Rhode Island, fondly recalls playing kickball, kick the can, hide and seek, and tag with her brother, cousins, and neighbors on the dead-end dirt road where she lived in the 1950s. "As long as weather permitted, we were outside, and I don't remember a time that we weren't busy and engaged," she says. But when D'Agostino tried to get her grandchildren to play some of the games she remembered, they weren't interested. She notes that they seem more comfortable with adult-led activities like softball and cheer leading, as well as media-inspired role playing, "with play weapons."

D'Agostino's experience is borne out by research Clements has done under the auspices of Wisk detergent's "America Needs Dirt" campaign, an effort to bring play back into children's lives. "Seventy percent of the mothers I've surveyed reported playing outdoors every day as children. Only about 30 percent of their children do," she says. "Childhood as we know it is disappearing."

It was the lack of unstructured traditional play in his children's lives that led New York native Mick Greene to found the website Streetplay.com in 1999. Greene recalls playing stickball and stoop ball with his friends growing up, and believes that such games still offer important lessons-and perhaps more crucially, fun-to today's kids.

"We made up rules, adapted to the situation," he says. "If you didn't have enough players you changed the rules. That is very valuable, to be out playing without supervision. You learn about group dynamics, negotiation, dealing with conflict. It's much more complex than team sports. There's value in that too, but all that social stuff doesn't happen."

Rhonda Clements agrees that traditional games offer opportunities for child-directed social interaction that kids sorely need in these highly structured and adult-centered times. "With earlier traditional games children were charged with forming teams, with understanding others' different physical abilities," she says. "Children had to make up their own rules. This is the whole basis of problem solving. It was exciting for them to be in charge of their own play."

Clements and Greene encourage parents to bring traditional games back into their children's lives, to "seed" them into kids' play so that they can take hold and spread again. "Explore the local parks departments, the Police Department Athletic Leagues," Clements suggests. "Call up and say we have a group of six or seven kids, can you offer a traditional games activity on Saturday? Traditional games are cultural. You teach them, then let them take it to school and teach their best friend."

Clements also points out that since traditional games don't require uniforms or expensive equipment, they are very cost-effective compared to organized team sports and commercial children's activities. "Birthday parties don't have to cost $250! Go to the toy store, get some jump ropes, contact other parents and ask them, 'Do you want to teach a jump rope game at the party?'"

Greene recommends hula-hoops, rubber balls, jump ropes, and chalk as essential outdoor play equipment, but says that children's native ingenuity lets them invent games out of whatever is available. "If you let them outside, kids will still make up goofy games, and if your kids start doing it, other kids will come around," he says. "My son and his friends play a game where they throw a rubber ball and hit it with a whiffle ball bat. A kid picks up the ball and just makes the motion of throwing it to third base-he doesn't really throw it. That's as good as any game I would teach them, and they made it up."

The Games

If you grew up in a big city, you may have played stickball or one of its variants, or perhaps skully, a marbles-like game played with painstakingly customized bottle caps. Suburbanites get nostalgic about Red Light-Green Light or foursquare, and former farm kids remember playing king of the mountain atop hay bales. Here are a few simple games to get started with. Many more games and rules can be found online at Streetplay.com and Gameskidsplay.net.

Box ball: An ingeniously simple urban game that transforms two sidewalk squares into a miniature tennis court. (If you don't have a sidewalk, just draw chalk squares on the driveway.) The sidewalk cracks define the court and net. Two players use open hands, handball-style, to bat a small rubber ball back and forth into each other's squares. When one misses, the other scores a point. Players can negotiate details like how many points are needed to win, what the margin must be, and whether only the server can score.

Jump rope: Jumping rope is an inexpensive and highly efficient form of exercise for both children and adults. But it's a lot more fun if you chant a traditional rhythmic jump rope rhyme as you pant and sweat! Remember "A my name is Alice, my husband's name is Al, I live in Alabama and I bring back Apples"? You can find this and other jump rope rhymes at Gameskidsplay.net.

Hopscotch: According to Streetplay.com, hopscotch began as a military training exercise in Britain during the Roman Empire, and the original hopscotch boards were 100 feet long. Now almost every country from the Netherlands to Vietnam has its own version of the game. To play, draw the board on the sidewalk with chalk, alternating double with single squares and giving each a number. Toss a pebble onto square one. Hop over square one and on through to the end. Turn around and hop back, pausing in square two to pick up your pebble. Keep going until you get to the end of the board.

Red Light Green Light: A classic backyard game. One person is the "stop light," and stands with her back to the other players, who line up at the other end of the yard. When she calls out "Green Light," the others may move toward her. When she calls out "Red Light" and turns around, they have to freeze-if you're caught moving, you're out (for younger children, you can just have them go back to the starting line). The goal is to tag the stoplight, and the strategy element is to avoid running so fast that you can't stop when she turns around.

Jacks: Scatter the jacks on the sidewalk or floor, toss the small rubber ball in the air, pick up the proper number of jacks (onesies, twosies, etc.) and catch the ball on the first bounce-all with the same hand. Keep going until you miss. This is great for hand-eye coordination practice.

Kick-the-can: An exciting game, like tag and hide-and-seek combined. A can is placed in a central location to serve as base (sometimes called "jail"). Everyone except "It" hides. "It" doesn't have to tag people-if he sees someone, he calls out her name ("I see Anna next to the garage!") and she must come to base and stay there. The rest of the players must try to get to base and kick the can, which frees all the captives. If this happens, "It" must count to 100 while everyone hides again. The first one to be captured is "It" for the next game.

-©2008 Juliette Guilbert

Juliette Guilbert is a freelance writer whose articles have appeared in Parenting, Brain, Child, and Seattle Metropolitan magazine, among others. She lives in Bothell with her husband and two daughters.