Wild Animals In The Playground

Recently a game of “Kiss Tag” started after school each day. Kiss tag involves three or more girls ritually hunting and chasing down a boy and then threatening him by making a duck face.

While watching this happen I am taken back to my own childhood on Sunday nights  and can almost hear Marlin Perkins voice narrating a Mutual of Ohama’s Wild Kingdom. “Here we see a group of ravenous female kindergarteners stalking their prey. The colourful plumage adorned with Hana Montana stickers alert us that this is indeed a pack of females. Uh-oh, here comes an unlucky male, identified by its Transformer backpack and Spider-Man baseball cap. Off they go... Well fellow, it looks like you were at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Here is where it ends though. The girls surround the boy, makes the kissy face while circling them and then runs off. I asked why they ran off before kissing the boy in “Kiss Tag”. The answer I got was that they spot a slower boy and chase after them at that moment. Like any good predator they go after the slowest and weakest of the group. If a boy ever shows up with a lame leg he’s a goner.

This kid is fucked

I asked what they would do if they ever caught a boy. They said they would kiss him. I asked where they would kiss him. The answer anywhere, like the hand. One girl, in a kindergarten whisper (megaphone), asked my daughter if she would kiss a boy on the lips. She replied in such a way as the first girl had suggested she kiss a working sewer pipe.

This game of Kiss Tag went on for a few days with little issue, but then slowly things got more intense. The girls talked nonstop about the game of tag after school. They started strategising by pretending not to play and pouncing on the boys, or “sneaking” which entails crouching down about two inches so they would be invisible to the naked eye. I half expected to walk into my daughter’s room to find a model of the playground like models of the battleground you see in every war movie, except covered in ribbons and hair barrettes.

...but with a slide in the middle

One day while I was watching the game I saw a swarm of girls grab a boy by his shirt and start swinging him around. He lost his balance and went down. Like jackals the girls pounced on him being very careful to only make a kissing face and never actually coming close enough to kiss him. At this point I used my dad voice and screamed to knock it off. My daughter and her friends gave me an “awwww...” while the kids who didn’t know me looked horrified. For a kid there is nothing as scary as an adult you don’t know yelling at you to scare the Hello Kitty underpants off your butt. I wasn’t so worried about the boy as I was paying for his shirt. Hell, we are a one income family now.