Far too often, parents eagerly enlist in the Total Safety Police, joining school administrators and their quivering lawyers in heaping ever-escalating restrictions on children who dare to act like kids.

So it was a joy and relief earlier this month to see parents pack a PTA meeting at Woodlin Elementary School in Silver Spring, Md., ready to fight for their kids’ right to engage in the latest Crimes Against Absolute Safety — tag, dodge ball and soccer.

The school had been cracking down on those games at recess because, as Principal Doris Jennings explained, “Body contact is inappropriate for recess activities.”

Parent after parent protested that their children need time to exhale, to run around, to create their own activities.

“Isn’t there space for the kids to be spontaneous, just for a few minutes each day?” one mother asked.

On their e-mail list, Woodlin parents reminded each other that they all played on their own as children, and as best they could recall, no one died. “Recess should be fairly unstructured,” Clare Dell’Olio wrote. “We as parents should expect and accept a certain amount of risk; i.e., skinned knees, bruises and even an occasional broken bone.”

Physical education teacher Bob George agreed that recess “is the kids’ chance to explore. It’s the only 20 minutes where they get to decide.” But he said he had stopped kids from playing wall ball (players standing in the way of a thrown ball have to catch it cleanly or get out of the way) because, “How do we explain to any parent that your child was standing there and his head got driven into the wall?”

George reminded parents that dodge ball is banned in Montgomery County, Md., schools. He suggested that wall ball could be played with a soft Nerf ball. That prompted a chorus of groans.

Alas, if Woodlin parents want their children to enjoy the freedoms Mom and Dad had, they face a rough road.

Egged on by fearmongers such as the Connecticut professor who invented the “Physical Education Hall of Shame,” a nationwide network of nervous Nellies has been stripping already-overcautious and over-regulated children of their right to play the games of their choice.

The hit list grows every year, as schools ban dodge ball (dangerous and demeaning); tag (involves touching); musical chairs (elimination invites ridicule); and even Simon Says (based on deceit).

Despite mountains of journal articles by academics desperate to publish, despite hand-wringing in one anti-dodge ball article about “coeducational inequity, high risk for injury, and wounded psyches,” the fact is that the games children choose to play are not nearly as dangerous as the games their teachers choose for them.

According to the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System — another marvelous frippery paid for by your federal tax dollars — dodge ball accounts for vastly fewer injuries than football, baseball or even golf.

None of this matters to advocates of Wuss P.E. “They don’t like elimination games, they don’t like human targets,” says Bill DePue, director of the National Amateur Dodgeball Assn. and coach of successful and safe dodge-ball tourneys in Illinois. “But every ‘target’ is an opportunity to catch a ball.”

DePue knows he is fighting a losing battle. Even though he uses a rubber-coated foam ball rather than the good old red rubber playground ball, even though he prohibits hits above the shoulders, he is denounced by the anti-contact crowd.

But he knows what the Woodlin parents understood: “The magic word is fun. I don’t know one kid who doesn’t like dodge ball. Even in the schools where it is discouraged, coaches still use it because the kids really like it.”