Risky Play: What It Is, Why Kids Need It, and Why We Stopped Letting Them

The teenagers I taught would not take a healthy risk to save their lives, and they took unhealthy ones constantly.

They wouldn’t raise a hand with an answer they weren’t sure of. They wouldn’t start an essay without knowing exactly what I wanted. They wouldn’t try the harder book, the harder problem, the club they might not be good at. And then the same kids took the risks that actually hurt them, the kind that end up in a principal’s office or an emergency room, because the part of a person that learns to size up a risk and decide had never been built. It gets built in childhood, on playgrounds and in trees and at the edges of creeks, and we’d spent their whole childhoods making sure it never was.

What is risky play?

Risky play is play in which a child deliberately seeks out uncertainty and the possibility of getting hurt, and manages it herself. The Norwegian researcher Ellen Beate Hansen Sandseter, who has spent her career studying it, sorted it into six kinds in 2007, and the list is useful because it names the exact things most modern parents stop: play at height (climbing trees, rocks, tall structures), play at speed (bikes, sleds, swings, running down hills), play with dangerous tools (real knives, saws, hammers), play near dangerous elements (water, fire, cliffs), rough-and-tumble play (wrestling, chasing, play-fighting), and play where a child can disappear or get lost (exploring alone, hiding, wandering out of sight).

Every one of those is something children have done for as long as there have been children, and every one has become, in about one generation, something a good parent is expected to prevent. That is the problem.

Why risky play matters (the research, briefly)

In 2015 Mariana Brussoni and her colleagues at the University of British Columbia reviewed every study they could find on risky outdoor play and children’s health, and the pattern was consistent. Children who get to play riskily are more physically active, more socially capable, more creative, and more resilient, and they spend more time playing and more time with other kids. The review also looked at the thing every parent is worried about, injury, and found that the risk of serious injury from this kind of play is low and that the overwhelming barrier to it isn’t danger; it’s adult fear. Brussoni’s line, which I’d put on a playground sign, is that these spaces give children a chance to learn about risk and learn about their own limits.

That’s the mechanism. A child who climbs learns, in her body, how high is too high. A child who wrestles learns where the line between play and hurting is, because she crosses it and her friend tells her. A child who wanders out of sight learns that she can find her way back. None of that can be taught. It’s calibrated, one small scare at a time, and a child who never gets the small scares arrives at fifteen with no calibration at all, which is exactly what I watched happen.

What it looks like at each age

Since a lot of you are searching for examples, here they are. For a toddler: climbing on and off furniture and low structures, walking on a curb or a low wall, being allowed to fall on grass, carrying something heavy, going down the big slide. For a three- to five-year-old: climbing trees and playground equipment to the height she can manage herself, riding a bike or scooter fast, using a real (small, sharp) knife to cut soft food with an adult nearby, digging and building with real tools, wrestling with a sibling, playing out of your direct sight in the yard. For a six- to ten-year-old: climbing higher, biking to a friend’s house, whittling with a pocketknife, tending a campfire, swimming in open water with an adult on shore, exploring a park or a block without you, and rough-and-tumble games that occasionally end in tears and start again five minutes later.

The rule underneath all of it is that the child sets the height. You don’t lift her onto the branch she can’t reach; if she can’t get up on her own, she isn’t ready for that branch. You don’t push her to go faster; you let her find fast. The risk has to be hers to choose or it isn’t doing the work.

Why we stopped

Nobody decided to raise a generation that can’t assess a risk. It happened one reasonable decision at a time. A playground got sued and every playground got shorter. A story about a lost child went around and every child stopped being allowed out of sight. Two working parents needed the afternoon covered, so the afternoon became an adult-run activity with rules. A phone made it possible to know where your kid was every minute, so knowing became the standard. And the fear of being the parent whose kid got hurt became stronger than the fear of being the parent whose kid never learned anything, because one of those shows up in the ER and the other shows up at fifteen, where nobody connects it back.

Here’s the part that’s hard to hear. Watching your kid on the high branch is worse than watching her on the couch. Every instinct says get her down. But the instinct is about your discomfort, not her safety, and a kid who is lifted down every time she climbs learns two things: that she can’t judge her own body, and that the world is more dangerous than it is. Those are the two beliefs I watched paralyze a classroom of sixteen-year-olds. The unhealthy risks came later, once the healthy outlets were closed and the judgment was never built.

What we did in our house

Our yard was where most of it happened. The mud kitchen meant real dirt, real water, and real filth, which is a small risk that most parents shut down for laundry reasons. Bikes meant speed. Being sent outside with the rule that when you’re bored you know the options meant unsupervised time, which is the one kind of risky play that costs nothing and that almost nobody allows anymore. And my kids take healthy risks as a matter of routine: they climb high trees, roll down hills, jump off rocks, balance along branches. None of it is an event. Nobody plans a risky-play afternoon. It’s woven into an ordinary day, which is the only way it works, because a child who is allowed to climb every day learns her limits in a way that a child taken to a climbing gym once a month never will.

What to do this week

Pick one thing from the list for your kid’s age that you’ve been stopping, and stop stopping it. Just one. Stand far enough away that you’d have to take three steps to intervene, put your hands in your pockets, and let her set the height. If she falls, and she might, don’t rush in and don’t tell her she’s okay. Ask her. “Are you hurt?” lets her check her own body and answer honestly, which is the skill you’re there for, and then let her decide whether to go back up. She almost always does.

One thing

The next time you feel the words “be careful” coming, wait. Watch what she does with the two seconds you didn’t fill.

I write every week about what childhood is for and how to protect it. You can find me on Instagram or join the list.

Sources

• Sandseter EBH, “Categorising risky play: How can we identify risk-taking in children’s play?” European Early Childhood Education Research Journal 15(2), 2007.
• Brussoni M, Gibbons R, Gray C, et al., “What is the Relationship between Risky Outdoor Play and Health in Children? A Systematic Review,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 12(6), 2015. Link