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Children Need Risky Play to Thrive

Children Need Risky Play
Photo by Mariana Brussoni Are you a parent trying to help your child navigate the complexity of a world that seems designed to undermine their faith and character? If so, I recommend the blog called AfterBabel. For example, check out excerpts from an essay on the importance of risky play by Ma…
By sethbarnes

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Photo by Mariana Brussoni

Are you a parent trying to help your child navigate the complexity of a world that seems designed to undermine their faith and character? If so, I recommend the blog called AfterBabel. For example, check out excerpts from an essay on the importance of risky play by Marianna Brussoni.

We parents desperately want to keep our children safe and ensure their success. We are also often terrified that they will get hurt and that they will fail—so we do everything we can to prevent that from happening. Yet many of those very efforts to manage our fears have paradoxically reduced our children’s safety.

When we prioritize children’s play, we help create environments where children and youth thrive. When we don’t, the consequences can be dire.

Every successive generation of children since the 1970s has seen their outdoor play and freedom shrink. In the U.S., only 16% of children in 1997 played outdoors every day. By 2003—just six years later—that dropped even further to 10%.

What Is Risky Play and Why Does It Matter?

When children have the time, space, and freedom to play the way they choose, it’s not long before they start taking risks in their play, such as climbing higher than they usually do, building secret dens, or racing on their bikes. This is no accident. Children are wired for risky playin which they take physical risks, seek excitement, and satisfy curiosity.

Examples of risky play: climbing, sledding, using hammers, knives, rough-and-tumble play, playing in their neighborhood with no adult supervision. This kind of play involves children pushing themselves beyond their previous limits and not knowing how things will turn out. As a result, they simultaneously experience thrill and fright. All children need risky play.

Girl jumping into a lake
Photo by Mariana Brussoni

Risky play provides children with low-cost opportunities to develop the physical and cognitive skills to master the challenges that they will face as they grow older. Cognitively, it helps them overcome their fears, build their critical thinking skills, and become accustomed to coping independently with difficult situations.

Risky play can help children overcome anxiety disorders and the cognitive distortions that go along with them. Anxious children have difficulty tolerating uncertainty. Through risky play, children practice dealing with strong ambiguous emotions. It can also show them that they are resilient and capable of coping when things go wrong. Research shows that children with more opportunities for risky play have lower internalizing symptoms that are characteristic of anxiety disorders.

Why is risky play disappearing from children’s lives?

Parents, particularly mothers, have been encouraged to micro-manage their children’s lives, curate their experiences, remove any barriers, and enroll them in diverse structured activities with the intention of enhancing their development and giving them an edge in the race to succeed. This approach to parenting has become like the air we breathe—widely accepted in North America—with parents of all backgrounds held to its unrealistic standard regardless of whether they can afford the necessary time, money, and energy.

This costly parenting strategy has negligible benefits at best, and can even be harmful. Research shows that enrollment in structured activities is not associated with improved developmental outcomes, and the loss of free time can be detrimental to developing basic executive function skills. When positive effects of intensive parenting have been shown, they’ve been modest and insufficient to offset the substantial costs to parents.

Parents today receive constant messaging  that in order to be “good parents”, they must always keep their children safe. And it is widely believed that the world is no longer a safe place for children to play in. Yet statistics show that it has never been a safer time to be a child. Injury-related deaths are at an all-time low in most Western nations. In the US, deaths from unintentional injuries fell by 73% for boys and 85% for girls between 1973 and 2010. This misperception of risk creates the parental paradox.

The very strategies that parents use to try to keep their children safe – driving them around, maximizing supervision, and minimizing freedom – are unintentionally increasing the likelihood of injuries and even death. 

Three ingredients to bring back risky play and childhood freedom 

The three key ingredients necessary for thriving play environments are Time, Space, and Freedom.

Time: Make daily outdoor playtime a priority.

Space: Children need easy access to stimulating spaces for play; flexible spaces where they can use their imagination and explore risks, rather than spaces dominated by rules.

Freedom: Children need freedom to be able to play the way they choose. The biggest barrier to children’s freedom is us – the adults in their lives – and our need to manage our own fears. Our lab developed the OutsidePlay.org parent tool to help them work through their challenges, figure out what works best for them and develop a plan for change. We’ve tested it rigorously and it works.

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