On a warm, sunny beach near Melbourne, Australia, Alethea Jerebine watched her daughters climb a jumble of rocks. “Can they do this? she was worried about her children aged 10 and 13. The rocks were riddled with cracks and so steep that they made Jérébine dizzy. Instinctively, she wanted to tell them to stop.
At the same time, she knew that her anxieties were incongruous with her own research. What her children were doing was a kind of “risky play” – activities ranging from climbing and jumping from heights to simply leaving adult supervision. Jerebine is a public health and psychology researcher at Deakin University in Melbourne, studying the many benefits of risky gambling. Yet she is not immune to the pressure many parents and guardians feel to protect their children from every possible danger.
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Over the past two decades, research has shown that opportunities for risky play are essential for physical health, mental and emotional development. Children need these opportunities to develop their spatial awareness, coordination, tolerance for uncertainty and confidence.
Despite this, in many countries, risky gambling is now more restricted than ever, thanks to misconceptions about risk and a general undervaluation of its benefits. Research shows that children know more about their own abilities than adults think, and some environments designed for risky play show the way forward. Many researchers believe there is still much to learn about the benefits, but because the game is free-form in nature, it has been logistically difficult to study. Today, scientists are using innovative approaches, including virtual reality, to probe the benefits of risky play and how to promote it.
Even security advocates support it. “Most people assume I would be against risky play,” says Pamela Fuselli, president of Parachute, a nonprofit injury prevention organization based in Toronto, Canada. “But the benefits are so broad in terms of social, physical, mental development and mental health that I don’t think we can underestimate the value of it.”
Exciting and thrilling
The origins of risky play research date back to 1996, when Norway passed playground safety regulations that required features such as handrails, rounded corners, and equipment that minimized the risk of injury due to falls be added to play areas. A few years later, psychologist Ellen Sandseter noticed that play equipment was being removed by law and replaced with items that offered little opportunity for risk-taking. She found this worrying. His research showed that adolescents who had fewer opportunities to seek positive sensations – such as mountain climbing – were more likely to take negative riskslike shoplifting1. So Sandseter, who works at the College of Early Childhood Education at Queen Maud University in Trondheim, Norway, began studying risk-seeking and sensation-seeking in children aged three to five. Unable to find a definition of risky play in the literature of the time, she constructed one based on hours of observation and interviews with young children about the activities they considered scary, risky or exciting.
His definition of risky play is still widely used: an exciting and thrilling game that involves uncertainty and a risk – real or perceived – of physical injury or loss.
Risky play is thought to help develop risk management skills that can be transferred to other situations.Credit: Thomas Barwick/Getty
It is important to note that risk is not the same as danger. Danger is something a child is not equipped to notice or handle. For example, it is dangerous, but not risky, for four-year-olds to walk barefoot around broken glass or cross a busy street without practice. Risk changes with age and doesn’t always include things that seem risky to adults. For a one-year-old who has never walked before, taking just one step is probably quite risky.
The goal of promoting risky play is not to turn cautious children into thrill-seekers, but simply to allow them to take additional risks, whatever pace they choose, proponents say. “What risky play looks like for one child will be totally different from what it looks like for another,” says child psychologist Helen Dodd of the University of Exeter, UK.
And having the chance to take risks is as important for naturally cautious children as it is for those who were born daredevils. “All children should be able to push their own limits, and that’s what all children want,” Sandseter says.
Risk management
Risky play is associated with greater resilience, self-confidence, problem solving and social skills such as cooperation, negotiation and empathy, according to studies by Sandseter and others. When a study in Leuven, Belgium, gave four- and six-year-olds just two hours a week of risky play for three months, their risk assessment skills improved compared to those of children of a control group.2. In this study, risky play took place at school, in a gym class, and in the classroom.
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Risky outdoor play may have additional benefits. This is linked to low levels of stress and anxiety. Dodd hypothesizes that risky play reduces the risk of anxiety in children by teaching them about the physiological arousal, adrenaline, and heartbeat that accompany anxiety and excitement. Over time, according to his theory, when children have the chance to repeatedly experience the cycle of challenge, excitement, and adaptation, it helps them learn to manage anxiety and understand that physiological stress is not a disaster and does not last forever.
Dodd had set up an observational study3 to test this theory. It began in early 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 playing adventurously had fewer signs of anxiety and depression (as reported by parents) than those who spent less time playing adventure games. Children with more risk opportunities seemed happier. This tendency toward risky play as a protective factor against mental health problems was stronger among children from lower-income households than among those from higher-income households.
Overall, the quality of research in the area of risky play is mixed, says Mariana Brussoni, a child development researcher at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, but often for good reasons. Few studies are gold standard randomized controlled trials, but these “are expensive and sometimes inappropriate to the research question,” she says.
None of this means parents should tell their children to take more risks, Dodd says, because that doesn’t lead to positive learning. “Play should always be led by the child and what they want to do,” she says. The role of adults is to provide a supportive environment and then step aside – or at most provide gentle encouragement. This makes risky games difficult to study experimentally. “It stops being a game as soon as an adult tells a child to do it,” says Dodd.
The Venny, an adventure playground in Melbourne, Australia, offers opportunities for risky play.Credit: Le Venny
If proponents of risky play have a rallying cry, it’s probably this: “Children should be as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible.” » But what should a parent do with this injunction? A child’s facial expressions and body language can be good markers to observe. A study4 led by Brussoni contains a chart that the team used to sort positive risk games from dangerous or unsafe games when observing the children. When children are in a zone of productive, risky play and try things beyond their current skill level, they may have a look of determination on their face, appear to be in control of their bodies, and resort to trial and error. If this is the case, Dodd suggests adults nearby “hold back a little more, count to ten before saying ‘no.’ See if they can resolve something on their own rather than always intervening.
Playground topography may also encourage risky play, study finds4. Playing on uneven surfaces – such as rocks – or steep slopes was much more likely to involve positive risk behaviors than playing on flat areas in Brussoni’s 2023 analysis.4 in a play space with natural elements at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History in California.
Virtual Rock Jump
One of Brussoni’s hypotheses about risky play is that it can help develop risk management skills that can transfer to other situations, like crossing a busy street, she says. It’s difficult to test. “Ethically, you can’t really throw kids into traffic environments because they could get hurt,” she says. So Brussoni, Sandseter and their colleagues created a virtual setting in which they could convincingly test children’s risk management skills, without harm.
First, they fitted children aged seven to ten with eye-tracking virtual reality headsets and fitted motion sensors to their joints. The children were able to explore three scenarios: crossing a street, jumping from rock to rock to cross a river and traversing a virtual playground to stay balanced on the equipment.