Risk-taking

Play is great for children's well-being and development. When planning and providing play opportunities, the goal is not to eliminate risk, but to weigh up the risks and benefits. No child will learn about risk if they are wrapped in cotton wool.

Children's Play and Leisure, UK Health and Safety Executive, 2012

We believe children should learn to approach all the world has to offer in a safe, competent way. They need to learn to “manage danger”, in the words of American educational reformer Caroline Pratt. As educators, we have a duty of care to ensure that they are not exposed to unnecessary levels of risk. However, there's evidence that in recent years we have allowed concerns about risk to deprive children of important and enriching play experiences, leaving them ill equipped to manage risk in their adult lives. Climbing, for example, is a basic need for children. Climbing is important for overall physical development, and contributes to building motor skills and self-reliance. While climbing, children experience, independently, their own motor abilities and skills, and learn how to overcome fear.

Assessing, managing and taking risks are all part of life. Risky play helps children build resilience and persistence, balance and coordination, but these important skills are often denied to them. It is our firm belief that learning to assess the limits of our bodies and to manage risk is an invaluable tool for life, and this skill needs to be developed in the early years. Play, and particularly play outdoors, teaches young people how to deal with risk.

At Kaleide International School, there are elements of risk in our environments –particularly in the Woodwork workshop, the Psychomotor Play area, and the gardens– which challenge and engage the children and give them an opportunity to experience and judge and manage risk. Evidence suggests that introducing these kind of play opportunities actually reduces the number of serious playground accidents. Our role as educators is to weigh up risks and benefits when designing and providing play opportunities and activities, and controlling the most serious risks, and those that are not beneficial to the play activity or foreseeable by children.

Upholding Physical Safety

As facilitator you must ensure that the choices made by the children are physically safe, legal, and respectful.

Physical safety includes making sure that tools are used appropriately, people are accounted for, and no one’s body is in harm’s way, minimising risk of serious injury or bodily harm. Confining options to those legally permissible helps ensure that the school can continue to exist and operate.

Children with the freedom to make choices will inevitably engage in risky play. This is how they learn emotional regulation –you can read more about this on Dr. Peter Gray’s insightful Psychology Today blog. If you feel unsafe with something going on in front of you, check in with yourself to see what’s going on. Usually it’s one of two scenarios:

1. You have been trained in your life to view the particular situation as dangerous (for example, kids using power tools). Your inclination is stop what is going on or do the task for the child.

2. You notice a hazard or risk in the situation that the child is unaware of that they should be alerted to.

If you feel like what is going on is legitimately dangerous, it is your job to intervene. However, there is a way to point out risk without using your authority to undermine the child’s autonomy: reflecting risk or hazard you observe, summarising why it is dangerous, and offering an alternative.

Here’s an example: you walk into a room where a group of a kids are climbing a wobbly bookshelf. What do you do?

Your knee-jerk response is probably something along the lines of, “Stop! What are you thinking? That’s dangerous, get down from there!”. While this response comes from a valid place of concern about the children’s physical safety, the language implies that either the children are not capable of recognising danger or, recognising it, are choosing to ignore the danger because they are irresponsible and reckless. This puts the children in a defensive position, and in doing so you forfeit the opportunity to collaborate with them to create a definition of a non-dangerous climbing space.

When mitigating physical hazards, it’s important to use language that opens the door to a more grounded conversation: why is this particular activity dangerous, which parts of it are risky, and how can that risk be reduced or eliminated? Offering a redirect can be much more effective than asking a child to stop something altogether. In the bookshelf scenario, that might sound something like: “I notice the bookshelf is wobbling when you climb it. I don’t think it’s made of wood sturdy enough to hold the weight of human bodies and I’m worried it’s going to collapse and hurt one of you. The climbing tree outside is a lot sturdier –what do you think about moving your game out there?”

As adults we should be aware that there is inherent authority in our relationships with the children. Don’t abdicate your authority. Own your authority while supporting their autonomy.