American Touch Tag Day

What the day is

American Touch Tag Day is observed on October 8. The game is tag: one player is it, chases the others, and transfers the role by touching someone.

The American in the name is hard to justify. Tag is played essentially everywhere, under a long list of names, and nothing about the version described is particular to the United States.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented.

The game itself has no origin in any useful sense. Chasing games appear independently across cultures and centuries, which is what you would expect of an activity requiring nothing but two children and some space. It goes by tig, tick, chasey, it, catch and dozens of regional names, and the variants are where the local character lives: freeze tag, shadow tag, chain tag, British bulldog, octopus, and versions with safe zones negotiated on the spot.

Play researchers take it more seriously than adults generally do. Unstructured chasing games are vigorous exercise, but they also teach rule negotiation without a referee, turn-taking, and the constant recalibration that keeps a game going when players are unevenly matched. Children adjust the rules to keep it fun, which is a genuine social skill practiced nowhere else so intensively.

The game has come under pressure in some schools over injury and exclusion concerns, and a number have restricted it. Play advocates have generally pushed back, arguing that supervised risk is the point rather than the problem.

How to take part

• Go outside and play a round. The day is not complicated.
• Set the boundaries out loud before starting, which is what prevents most arguments.
• Use a variant if the group is mismatched in age or speed: freeze tag and chain tag both even things out.
• Agree a safe zone and a no-tag-backs rule at the start.
• Let the children run it. Adult refereeing removes most of what the game teaches.