Living

On a warm and sunny beach on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia, Alethea Jerebine watched as her daughters quickly climbed onto a pile of rocks. "Is it okay for them to do this?" she wondered anxiously, looking at her two daughters, aged 10 and 13. The rocks were full of cracks and very tall; Jerebine felt dizzy just looking at them. Her instinct told her that she should shout at them to stop.

At the same time, she knew that this anxiety went against her own research. Her daughters were engaged in what's known as "risky play" – activities that range from climbing and jumping from heights to simply being out of an adult's sight. Jerebine is a public health and psychology researcher at Deakin University in Melbourne, and she studies the many benefits of risky play. However, like many parents and caregivers, she also feels the pressure to keep her children from getting hurt.

Over the past 20 years, research has shown that opportunities for risky play are crucial for physical and mental health as well as emotional development. Children need these opportunities to develop their spatial awareness, coordination, tolerance for uncertainty, and self - confidence.

Nevertheless, due to misunderstandings about risk and a general underestimation of its potential benefits, risky play is now more restricted than ever in many countries. Studies show that children know more about their own abilities than adults think, and there are also guidelines for suitable environments for risky play. Many researchers believe that there is still much to learn about the benefits of risky play, but since play is inherently free - form, it is logically difficult to study. Now, scientists are using new methods, including virtual reality, to study the benefits of risky play and how to promote it.

Even safety advocates are supportive. "Most people think I'd be against risky play," says Pamela Fuselli, the president of Parachute, a Canadian non - profit organization focused on injury prevention. "But the benefits for social, physical, and mental development are so great that I don't think we can ignore them."

Exciting and Thrilling

Research on risky play can be traced back to 1996 when Norway passed a safety regulation for playgrounds, requiring the addition of handrails, the rounding of sharp corners, and the use of fall - prevention facilities in play areas. A few years later, psychologist Ellen Sandseter noticed that playground equipment was being removed under this regulation and replaced with less risky alternatives. She was worried. Her research showed that teenagers with few opportunities to seek beneficial thrills (such as climbing mountains) were more likely to seek harmful thrills, like stealing[1]. As a result, Sandseter from the Queen Maud University College of Early Childhood Education in Norway began studying the risk - and thrill - seeking behaviors of 3 - to 5 - year - old children. Since there was no definition of risky play in the literature at the time, she summarized the activities that children considered scary, risky, and exciting based on extensive observations and interviews, and proposed a definition of risky play.

Her definition of risky play is still widely used: play that is stimulating and exciting, involving uncertainty and the risk of physical injury or getting lost – either real or perceived.

Importantly, risk and danger are not the same thing. Danger refers to things that children cannot notice or deal with. For example, a 4 - year - old walking barefoot around broken glass or crossing a busy road without practice is dangerous, not risky. Risk can vary with age and sometimes does not include things that seem risky to adults. For a 1 - year - old who can't walk yet, every step might be an adventure.

Supporters say that promoting risky play is not about turning cautious children into thrill - seekers but simply allowing them to gradually adapt to risk at their own pace. "What one child considers risky play might not seem risky at all to another," says Helen Dodd, a child psychologist at the University of Exeter in the UK.

Opportunities for risk are just as important for naturally cautious children as they are for naturally bold ones. "Every child should push their limits, and all kids want these opportunities," says Sandseter.

Risk Management

Research by Sandseter and others has shown that risky play is associated with greater resilience, self - confidence, problem - solving skills, and social skills (such as cooperation, negotiation, and empathy). A study in Leuven, Belgium, gave 4 - to 6 - year - old children two hours of risky play time per week for three months. The children's risk - assessment abilities improved compared to the control group[2]. In this study, risky play took place in schools, physical education classes, and classrooms.

Outdoor risky play may have other benefits. It is associated with lower levels of stress and anxiety. Dodd hypothesizes that risky play makes children experience the physical arousal, adrenaline rush, and increased heart rate associated with anxiety and excitement, thus reducing their risk of anxiety. Her theory is that if children have the opportunity to repeatedly experience the cycle of challenge, arousal, and coping, over time, it can help them manage anxiety and understand that physical stress is not a disaster and does not last forever.

Dodd designed an observational study[3] to test this theory. The study started in April 2020 and collected data during the first month of the COVID - 19 lockdown in the UK. Dodd found that children who spent more time in risky play showed fewer signs of anxiety and depression (as reported by their parents) than those who rarely engaged in such play. Children with more opportunities for risk seemed happier. The effect of risky play as a preventive factor for mental health problems was more significant in low - income families than in high - income families.

Overall, the quality of research on risky play varies, but there are good reasons for this, says Mariana Brussoni, a child development researcher at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Many studies are not gold - standard randomized controlled trials, she says, but these trials are expensive and sometimes not suitable for answering research questions.

This evidence is not telling parents to order their children to take more risks, Dodd says, because that won't induce active learning. "Play should be led by the children and what they want to do," she says. The role of adults is to provide a beneficial play environment and then step back – at most, offer gentle encouragement. This makes it difficult to study risky play through experiments. "When an adult tells a child to play, it's no longer play," Dodd says.

If there were a slogan for advocates of risky play, it might be: "Children's safety should be appropriate, not excessive." But what should parents do? A child's facial expressions and body language are good signals to observe. A study[4] led by Brussoni has a table that the team uses to distinguish between risky play and dangerous play when observing children. When children are playing in a beneficial risk - taking area and trying to do things beyond their current abilities, they may have a determined look on their faces, seem to have control over their bodies, and understand trial and error. If so, Dodd suggests that adults around them wait patiently and count to 10 before saying "no." See if the children can solve the problem on their own instead of intervening immediately.

Research[4] shows that the terrain of a playground can also encourage risky play. Brussoni's analysis[4] of a play area at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History in the US in 2023 showed that playing on uneven surfaces such as gravel paths or steep slopes is more likely to stimulate beneficial risk - taking behavior than playing on flat ground.

Virtual "Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones"

One of Brussoni's hypotheses about risky play is that it helps develop risk - management skills that can be transferred to other situations, such as crossing a busy road. But it's difficult to verify this. "Ethically, you can't just throw a child into traffic because they might really get hurt," she says. So, Brussoni, Sandseter, and their colleagues created a virtual scenario that can reliably test children's risk - management abilities without any danger.

First, they had 7 - to 10 - year - old children wear virtual reality helmets with eye - tracking devices and motion sensors on their joints. The children could explore three scenarios: crossing the road, crossing a river by stepping on stones, and practicing balance on the equipment in a virtual playground.

Sandseter and Brussoni also had parents fill out questionnaires about how often their children participated in risky play and their tendency to seek thrills.

It took the research team almost two years to prepare this technology and make the virtual scenarios challenging enough, Sandseter says. Now, they have collected data from 500 children in Norway and Canada. Currently, unpublished data from Norwegian subjects show that parents are not risk - averse and that children have good risk - coping abilities.

Overall, research on risky play has mainly been conducted in urban and suburban areas, which has drawn some criticism. Audrey Giles, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Ottawa, believes that recommendations based on such research are often promoted across the country without considering that rural or Indigenous children in some areas face greater risks. "Who needs risky play? Usually, it's middle - to high - income urban children who are over - protected," Giles says. In rural and remote areas, she says, "we see very different injury trends," such as a higher proportion of child injuries involving farm animals.

Some researchers are conducting studies on risky play among rural and Indigenous children. Sheila Grieve, a developmental psychologist at Vancouver Island University in Canada, is collaborating with Brussoni and nine childcare centers in British Columbia, four of which are Indigenous childcare centers. Some of these centers are so remote that the research team has to fly to a small airport and then drive for several hours to get there. Grieve is a Métis (Indigenous) person in Canada. She grew up in the countryside, where she learned to start fires, fish, climb trees, row boats, and walk in snowshoes. "We always had mixed - age groups, so I could learn from the older kids," she says. For the Indigenous partners in this project, she says that everything should be centered around the children and that they should receive support from their families and communities.

It Takes a Village

Brussoni often thinks about how to apply her research in practice and remove barriers to risky play. She has developed an online training tool to help parents and educators understand the benefits. But the last thing she wants is for research on risky play to become another burden for parents. "We're not telling parents that they're doing something wrong; we're not criticizing their parenting," she says.

Supporters say that while parents' attitudes are important, there is still a lot of room for change, from town planning to school policies to playground design. Jerebine says that emphasizing the importance of risky play involves thinking carefully about how to train educators and school administrators, as well as the goals and views about the purpose of school that are rooted in the education system.

The degree of "recalibration" needed will vary from country to country and culture to culture. Scandinavian countries are more open to risk than most, Sandseter says. She believes this is partly because these countries' universal healthcare covers the treatment of accidental injuries. "The strictest Norwegian parents are on the same level as the most lenient Canadian parents," she says. Japan has a tradition of letting kindergarten children go out shopping on their own, and there's even a popular reality show called "Old Enough" based on this. Dodd found that British parents don't like the word "risky," so she uses "adventurous" instead.

There are also differences in litigation and insurance situations between countries. David Kutcher, the honorary head of donor relations at The Venny, an adventure playground in Melbourne, says that The Venny has repeatedly faced insurance companies reducing their coverage, even though The Venny has never received a claim since it opened.

No matter how complex the message is to convey and how slow the cultural attitude change is, the researchers involved believe it's all worth it and even inspiring. Sandseter often remembers when her son was 4 or 5 years old and wanted to climb a big pine tree next to their cabin but was too scared to reach the top. "He tried for three years," she recalls. "Then one day, he made it to the top and was so proud."

Many adults no longer try things that can bring this kind of feeling, Sandseter says. Maybe promoting risky play can also remind adults that they can have this feeling too. "When I interviewed children, they said it was both scary and fun, that kind of happy feeling with a bit of fear," Sandseter says. "What a great feeling that is."