Obesity is an epidemic. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one-in-five elementary school children is obese . The isolation imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic made matters worse. Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools did real harm to children’s mental and physical health with draconian shutdowns and masking requirements that made for good politics but contravened both science and data regarding risks to school-age children. Let us call it what it was: public policy child abuse conducted in the name of political virtue signaling.

Top line: the pandemic encouraged bureaucrats inside and outside school systems to act as petty authoritarians.

Unfortunately, the end of the pandemic has not ended that tendency. I recently received a notice via a weekly newsletter from the public elementary school my two kids attend: "Last week the administration met with the students and shared that contact games are not allowed. These include games such as piling on top of each other, hitting challenges, and tag."

Much of the school day is regimented, all the more so given the size of the school district , the growth of its central office, and the headquarters’ propensity to demonstrate power by treating teachers as automatons to deliver scripts or centrally-imposed lesson plans rather than allow creativity in the classroom.

Children also need unstructured time to burn off energy, develop socially, and bolster physical and emotional development. While discouraging "hitting challenges" may be a good idea, prohibiting freeze tag seems both cruel and inane. Students also report that the game four square is out after the ball banged into players' knees. Soccer, the source of the visits to the nurse that sparked the administrative ban, is also out. It is unclear what classmates can do that might be fun once they outgrow hopscotch and the playground equipment. Such bans are always counterproductive: the school’s previous principal banned football, including touch football, leading boys to create and play tackle kickball.

Nor is recess the only problem. The elementary school still assigns seats at lunch, polices distance between peers, in many cases prohibits conversation, and even tries to regulate when students can throw out their garbage. Rather than encouraging joy, Montgomery County Public Schools appears to be doing its best to reproduce the atmosphere of an East German coal mine cafeteria.

Draconian overreaction harmed a generation of schoolchildren. Some in Montgomery County defend closures and mandatory masking based on the uncertainties of the time, never mind that there was plenty of data from other states and countries to show fears to be misplaced and the psychological and educational costs to be immense.

While most across Maryland, northern Virginia, and the District of Columbia have moved on, it is time for Montgomery County Public Schools, principals, and vice principals to understand that sometimes the best leadership is to stand back and stop regulating every second of childrens' lives and time in school. Students should be able to socialize at lunch and play at recess. If there is a scraped knee or jammed finger from time to time, that is called childhood.

Teaching a generation of children to be fat, idle, anti-social, and neurotic is not the standard to which Montgomery County’s elementary school principals should aspire.

Michael Rubin ( @mrubin1971 ) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.