Chase Tag: Why Kids Love Tag
How to read our work
We know you know how to read! But life is busy, you're busy and this might not be what you're looking for. Skim it first, read it later.
Each Risky Kids Article can be read:
- In it's entirety (just read it all), or
- Skim read. To skim read it, just read The FOCUS, SUMMARY and then all of the DOT POINTS and you're done!
Focus
We see it every time kids gather in the world. Tag rules! But why do they love it so much? It’s not just kids goofing around, it serves a purpose! More importantly, we can harness this to create a new way to encourage young people to be active.
Summary
Tag is a naturally engaging activity that promotes physical and mental resilience in young people, making it an ideal sport.
- Tag encourages risk-taking, building confidence and resilience in young participants.
- The simplicity and accessibility of tag make it appealing to all young people.
- Chase Tag provides a safe environment for young people to navigate tough emotions.
- The physical and emotional challenges of tag prepare young people for real-life adversity.
- Tag promotes inclusivity and community, making it a powerful tool for overall well-being.
You See It All The Time
Focusing on fun, challenge, and personal growth can significantly improve young people’s health and well-being.
- Tag is a natural, enjoyable activity that promotes essential physical and mental skills.
- Kids inherently enjoy tag, highlighting its value as a beneficial, instinctive practice.
- Participation in tag fosters important life skills like handling fear and quick decision-making.
When it comes to helping improve the activity levels, health and wellbeing for young people, we can often overthink things. Young people have strong ideas about what’s important to them. Fun, challenge and personal growth are top of the list.
They also show us all the time that there’s ways of moving and challenging themselves that they love. Tag is something that all kids (and most animals) will participate in, and we should pay attention to that! Tag is something which is coded into us growing up to help us practise important ways of moving, thinking and feeling which we’ll need throughout our lives.
From fear, to navigating high speeds and direction changes, young bodies benefit from participating in tag in many ways. Most importantly, kids love it and enjoy it, which should be the first sign it’s something we should pay attention to.
How Tag is Risk Taking
Tag is crucial for young people because it naturally encourages risk-taking, which builds resilience and confidence.
- Risk-taking in tag helps young people develop judgement, confidence, and resilience.
- Tag allows quick, repeated risk-taking, fostering risk intelligence in an enjoyable way.
- Lack of risk-taking opportunities can hinder resilience and success-driven behaviour in young people.
One of the reasons that tag is important for young people, and a reason they do it, is because it’s a risk taking activity. Young people are naturally driven to take risks because it helps them build confidence, judgement and expose themselves to fear and uncertainty. This builds a tolerance to it and resilience to face adversity throughout their lives. Young people who don’t get to participate in risk taking, or are constrained by adults, end up worse off with less resilience and success driven behaviour.
Tag lets young people take hundreds of risks in short amounts of time, navigating environments, anticipating another person’s thoughts or movements, speeding up, changing direction, all of it! Tag is a great way to build up risk intelligence and resilience in a way that young people understand and enjoy.
Thrills, Spills and Fear
Tag exposes young people to thrilling anxiety, helping them build resilience and develop coping strategies.
- Tag simulates fear, teaching young people to tolerate and manage stressful emotions.
- Guiding youth through these experiences helps them harness benefits while minimising harm.
- Experiencing both the highs and lows of tag teaches important life lessons about fairness and effort.
When young people are participating in tag, they’re also dealing with the consequences of it. Being chased, or chasing another person exposes us to anxiety in the form of thrilling excitement. This is the same mechanics as fear, and helps us to build up a tolerance to that feeling, as well as strategies to overcome it. There’s a neurological process that happens in our brains when we feel stress and fear which toughens us to future occurrences, and when we experience it when we’re young we become more resilient.
By providing an environment where we can help young people feel those feelings in a non-critical way, and guide them through it and teach them powerful strategies, we can harness all of the benefits of these moments, and avoid the negative side like unnecessary harm.
However there will always be spills alongside the thrills! You have to “pay to play” so they say! From the physical discomfort of putting your body on the line in a sport to the emotional experience of losing, there’s always a downside to getting into sport. But this is not only a price worth paying, but part of the lesson. Life isn’t always easy or fair, we can lose for reasons out of our control, and others can win when they don’t work as hard! Exploring all of this is just as important as the fun side of things.
Simple, Powerful, Accessible
Tag is an inclusive and accessible sport, easily engaging young people of all abilities.
- Tag’s simplicity and clear rules make it accessible to all, including those with disabilities.
- It fosters inclusivity by reducing barriers to participation and avoiding segregated leagues.
- Chase Tag promotes a community focused on health, resilience, and personal growth for everyone.
Tag is also highly accessible. The very youngest of kids will participate in it quickly and easily, and that’s true for all young people even if disabled or with neurodiversity. It’s accessible because it’s simple, easy to understand and has very few arbitrary rules. It’s not open to interpretation or judgement, because when you’re tagged you’re tagged!
When you combine this with a community, and guidance you can create a powerful new way of doing sport which is easy to access, has few barriers to participation and can really create an inclusive environment, rather than simply creating “special” leagues where those who struggle with a sports many rules and requirements have to play away from others.
This is what Chase Tag seeks to do as a sport, be a place for everyone to challenge themselves, explore different ways of thinking and moving and promote a community of health, wellbeing, resilience and excellence.
Face Tough Emotions
Chase Tag helps young people develop resilience by navigating the challenging emotions of winning and losing.
- Chase Tag teaches strategies for handling emotions and building resilience through guided experiences.
- It emphasises life skills like managing failure, understanding success, and avoiding burnout.
- Facing tough emotions in the game fosters personal growth and stronger character in real life.
Chase Tag lets us navigate the tough emotions around winning and losing. Powered by Risky Kids programming and science, we use the sport of Chase Tag to create opportunities to do just this, and teach young people different ways of thinking and feeling and help them build personal strategies around these moments.
Whether navigating the feeling of losing, understanding the nature of winning, avoiding washout and burnout and all of the emotions that come with setting and getting goals, at Chase Tag we build an important set of skills that won’t just help a young person be better at their sport, but better at life.
When we face tough emotions, we have the opportunity to develop tough skills. To become better, stronger versions of ourselves and then make our worlds a better place, as well as the lives of others. What more could we want from a sport?
Conclusion
Kids love tag, and we should pay attention to that. Besides now being a world wide sport, it’s something that deserves investment and energy. It promotes and creates better health in young people, both physically and mentally, and also reduces barriers to participation.
Richard Williams
Risky Kids Founder, Director of Programming
Richard Williams is a fitness industry consultant, gym owner, business coach and professional stunt actor with more than a decade of experience in the health and fitness industry. With an education in psychology and criminology, Richard blended life experience as a fitness industry consultant with Spartan Race, gym owner, elite-obstacle racer, ultra-runner and professional stunt actor to create the Risky Kids program.
Richard has a passion for enacting meaningful social change through all avenues of health and wellbeing and believes that obstacles are the way. Some of Richard’s key achievements include:
- Key consultant/coordinator Spartan Race/Tough Mudder/Extreme Endurance
(Australia/NZ/Global) - OCR World Championship Finalist – Team & Solo (2015)
- OCR World Championship Silver Medallist – Team Endurance (2018)
- Professional film and television stunt performer for 15 years
Considered one of Australia’s foremost experts in the fields of fitness, wellbeing and behavioural science, Richard is frequently in demand as a guest speaker for relevant government and non-
government bodies and organisations. Speaking engagements centred on the success of the Risky Kids program, philosophy and approach have included:
- Expert speaker/panellist Sports & Camp; Recreation Victoria and Outdoors Victoria forums
- Closing expert speaker at the Australian Camps Association National Conference
- Expert speaker at the National Fitness Expo, FILEX