The teacher’s voice is gentle, a carefully modulated hum designed to soften the blow. She pushes the laminated report across the small table, her finger tapping a box under a column heading you can’t quite focus on. The fluorescent lights of the classroom buzz, and the air smells faintly of chalk dust and disinfectant. You’re nodding, smiling a thin, papery smile, while a cold dread, swift and absolute, washes over you. Your child, your vibrant, chaotic, endlessly moving child, is ‘developing’ in the ‘locomotor skills’ domain.
He is officially behind… in running.
The drive home is silent. The report card sits on the passenger seat, a judgment printed on 126-gram cardstock. How can a child be bad at running? He runs everywhere. He runs from the car to the house, he runs through the grocery store, he runs in frantic, joyful circles when he’s excited. His entire existence is a blur of movement. But apparently, it’s the wrong kind of movement. The report hints at an improper gait, a lack of arm swing, a failure to achieve optimal propulsion. It’s the language of a mechanical engineering audit applied to a six-year-old.
The Medicalization of Play
We’ve done this, haven’t we? We’ve taken the last wild, unquantifiable part of childhood and pinned it to a spreadsheet. We’ve medicalized play. It’s no longer enough to chase a ball; one must demonstrate proficiency in an ‘overhand throw pattern.’ It’s not enough to climb a tree; one must exhibit ‘upper body strength and bilateral coordination.’ We’ve taken the beautiful, messy, intuitive process of learning to inhabit a body and turned it into the final frontier of Taylorism, applying industrial efficiency models to the playground. It pathologizes normal developmental variation and, worst of all, it creates a new and exquisitely sharp vector for parental anxiety.
My friend Dakota H. is a building code inspector. Her world is one of absolute metrics. A stair riser must be this high, a support beam must handle this much load, a wiring installation must have exactly this clearance. Her job is to apply a rigid, unforgiving rubric to a structure to ensure it doesn’t collapse and kill people. Her assessments are pass or fail. There is no ‘developing’ when it comes to a load-bearing wall. Last month, over coffee, I tried to explain the physical literacy report to her. She looked at me, blinked, and said, “So, you’re saying the kid’s not built to code?” She meant it as a joke, but it wasn’t. That’s exactly what the report was saying.
She later clarified, “The code is there to prevent the worst-case scenario, not to define the perfect house. We just want to make sure it won’t fall down. We don’t specify the color of the paint.” We are obsessing over the paint color while convincing our kids they’re about to fall down.
The Disastrous Coaching Experiment
I confess, I fell for it. I took that report card as a personal failing. My son’s ‘developing’ overhand throw became my weekend project. I watched 26 minutes of YouTube tutorials on baseball pitching mechanics, filmed my son throwing a tennis ball in slow-motion, and drew diagrams on a whiteboard in the kitchen. I talked about elbow angles and torso rotation. I turned our backyard into a crucible of proper form. Over the course of 6 miserable sessions, I successfully coached the joy right out of him. His wild, happy, chaotic fling transformed into a stiff, robotic, self-conscious gesture. He got worse. We were fixing a problem that didn’t exist, and in the process, we broke the very thing we were trying to improve. I felt like an idiot. I still do.
Natural movement
Forced technique
I’m not exactly a model of physical perfection myself. I’m 46 years old. Last Tuesday, I walked face-first into a freshly cleaned glass door at the office. Not because I have a depth perception deficiency, but because I was mentally composing an email. My own proprioception is, according to some charts, highly suspect. Yet, society grants me the grace of a momentary lapse. For a child, that same mental distraction, the same disconnect between mind and body that is a fundamental part of being a thinking human, is diagnosed as a developmental delay. We’ve created a system that has no tolerance for the beautiful sloppiness of being a person.
The Toxic Feedback Loop
Here’s the strange contradiction: I hate this system of measurement. I resent its intrusion into the sanctity of play. And yet… two months ago, I found myself on a website, late at night, ordering a set of brightly colored agility cones and a small speed ladder. I told myself it was for making fun obstacle courses in the yard. And it is. But a quiet, shameful voice in the back of my head whispered,
I bought the tools of the very system I despise. I was hedging my bets against the next report card.
This impulse, this obsession with measurement, didn’t come from nowhere. It leaked out from the classroom. For decades, we have been told that the only way to ensure our children are learning is to test, score, and rank them relentlessly. We measured reading by the word, math by the correct answer, and we created a generation of students who feared mistakes more than they loved learning. That same logic has now escaped the school building and is chasing our kids across the playground with a clipboard and a stopwatch.
The Toxic Feedback Loop: Anxiety, Drills, No Joy
It’s a toxic feedback loop: the report creates anxiety, which leads parents to drill their kids, which sucks the joy out of movement, which potentially makes them even more hesitant and awkward, which leads to another bad report. It’s madness.
The Solution: Less Focus, More Play
The solution, I realized after the disastrous throwing-coach experiment, wasn’t more focus. It was less. The solution wasn’t going to be more drills, more coaching, more measurement. It had to be the opposite. It had to be about making movement casual, pressure-free, and just… there. Part of the background noise of our house. We cleared out a corner of the garage, not for a training facility, but for a play space. We looked into getting the best home gym to just make climbing and hanging a normal, un-coached part of the day, something you do while waiting for the kettle to boil.
The equipment sat there for a week, untouched. Then one afternoon, my son was just hanging from the pull-up bar. Upside down. He wasn’t doing a “scapular retraction” or an “active hang.” He was a bat. He was a sloth. He was an astronaut in zero gravity. He was just a boy, in a garage, exploring what his body could do when no one was watching with a checklist. That piece of equipment cost us $676, and the best thing about it is that it came with no instructions on how a child should use it.
Dakota called me a few weeks later. She’d been thinking about our conversation. “You know,” she said, “the building code specifies the minimum height for a guardrail at 96 centimeters. It prevents people from falling off a balcony. It doesn’t say anything about making them enjoy the view.”
We are so obsessed with the guardrails of childhood development, with preventing the fall, that we are forgetting to show them the magnificent view. We are teaching them to measure their steps instead of lifting their eyes to the horizon.
The truth is that the developmental window for learning to skip, or throw, or run “correctly” is massive. The variation in how and when children acquire these skills is as wide and beautiful as the variation in their personalities. Forcing them all to meet a standardized benchmark in the same school term is an act of statistical violence. It’s a fantasy of control, born from our own anxieties about a future we can’t predict. We want to give them every advantage, so we sand down their edges and try to fit them into a bell curve, forgetting that the most extraordinary people are often the outliers.
Triumph of Joy
Last night, from the kitchen window, I saw my son in the fading light of the backyard. He was throwing a small rock against the back fence. His form was, by any measure, terrible. His elbow was too low, he wasn’t leading with his hip, he was completely off-balance. He missed the fence entirely 6 times in a row. On the seventh throw, he connected with the metal post with a loud, satisfying *PING*. He turned around, saw me watching, and gave me a grin that was pure, unadulterated triumph. It was a grin that contained zero technical proficiency, and 100 percent joy. Then he dropped the rock and ran inside, his ‘developing’ locomotor skills carrying him perfectly well, the throw and the report card and all of it completely, blessedly, forgotten.