The Atlantic The classic kids’ game teaches a lesson about public health that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has failed to learn. A sudden and mysterious outbreak of communicable disease began recently in my apartment building in Manhattan. Three 7-year-olds, a boy and two girls, were sharing the elevator one day with a caretaker and a random adult (me). The boy was leaning against the back of the elevator, between the two girls. “Help! I’m in a girl sandwich,” he said. “If I’m not careful, I’m going to get cooties!”
“Kids still play Cooties?” I asked, surprised that cooties were not a relic of my Boomer childhood but had endured into the 21st century, still sparking alarm, feigned or real, among the young. “Yeah-huh,” the boy said. One of the girls piped up: “I know how to give a cootie shot.” She demonstrated on her own shoulder, her technique a bit of a blur.
he kids and their caretaker got off on their floor, leaving me to ponder the cootie phenomenon for the first time in many decades. Beyond being amused, I was struck by the morbid salience of a children’s game that mimics infection at a time when vaccine skepticism is on the rise and an outbreak of a non-pretend disease, measles, is threatening the lives of children in the Southwest. I learned that there is a vibrant if slender slice of academic literature on “preadolescent cootie lore,” as one scholar puts it, and that this goofy grade-school fixation is more closely tied to real public-health concerns than you might think if your cootie expertise derives only from the playground.
What exactly are cooties? Since at least the 1960s, field researchers have collected definitions of varying specificity from grammar-school respondents: “boys’ germs,” “girls’ germs,” “something that kills you,” “like germs, it has germs on it,” “where somebody licks the bottom of the chair or eats paper.” Other experts speak of cooties in more anthropological terms. The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee folklorist Simon J. Bronner has characterized cooties as a “ritualized affliction.” In their seminal 1976 book, One Potato, Two Potato: The Folklore of American Children, Herbert and Mary Knapp described cooties as a kind of sport. “There are no supervised Cootie leagues, but more people in the United States have played Cooties than have played baseball, basketball, and football combined,” they wrote. “It’s our unofficial national game.”