Children need exposure to risk to learn to be careful.

No-one wants any child to be hurt. The safety of our children is critically important. However, by eliminating risks from the environments in which children learn, play and grow, we may be making them less safe, while also predisposing them to be more fearful, anxious, and less able to successfully manage risks. A child who grows up without exposure to risks may be deprived of the opportunity to develop their true sense of self.

Why play is important

Declining opportunities for free play in our modern culture are a huge concern among the health community (van Rooijen and Newstead, 2017; Brussoni et al, 2012; Gray, 2011; Little, 2015). Play is critical in the development of gross motor skills, cognitive skills, language, social skills, self-regulation, and physical health, but also has a critical function in the development of a sense of the self, and a lack of play experiences in childhood may threaten healthy development (O’Connor and Stagnitti, 2011; Gray, 2011; Stagnitti and Unsworth, 2000).

Gray (2011) argues that the decline in play is a causal factor of the rise in childhood and adolescent anxiety, depression, and narcissism. He argues that play is the primary way in which children develop five key aspects of children’s sense of self, and that without opportunities for play children may develop deficits in these areas, leading to poor mental health outcomes:

1. Through play, children develop intrinsic interests and competencies.

2. Children learn and practice how to make decisions, solve problems, exert self-control, and follow rules through playing.

3. Play is essential for children to learn how to regulate their emotions.

4. Through play, children learn to make friends and learn to get along with others.

5. Play is the primary means for children to experience joy.

Risk-taking in play.

An important function of play is for children to learn about their capacities to master their environment and the challenges it offers. Risky play exposes children to situations they have previously feared, motivated by the sense of exhilaration which risk-taking brings. It is argued that risky play in childhood may have an important function in the development of self-concept and confidence, mitigating the development of phobias, and mediating factors which may contribute to anxiety (Sandseter and Kennair, 2011).

Risk itself is a necessary part of learning to be safe and careful. Without the presence of risks in children’s play, they are unable to learn to assess risk, make choices to manage risks, and exercise care to remain safe where hazards exist. Brussoni et al (2012) propose that, instead of keeping children “as safe as possible”, which may limit their development and ability to learn to keep themselves safe, we should instead aim for childhood experiences to be “as safe as necessary” (p.3140).

The dignity of risk.

When we do not trust individuals to make choices about risks, we prevent them from becoming competent in doing so. The concept of "dignity of risk" comes from disability theory, and describes the opportunity to make choices and take action that involves an element of risk as a necessary part of human development that, prior to the 1970's, was typically denied to people with disabilities and mental illness. Wolfensberger and his colleagues (1972) described the denial of the dignity of risk as deleterious to of the rights of people with disabilities and mental illness to develop to their full potential and as one of the ways in which full participation in society was denied to a population forced to live a permanently infantalized existence.

When I first learned about the dignity of risk, I instantly thought of this as one of the important features of my childhood. My mother was a single, working mum who actively participated in politics and social justice issues and my brother and I spent many, many hours playing unsupervised in the bush. We built things using actual tools, we went on exploratory expeditions far from home, we tested our physical capacities and the properties of the objects in our environment. We fell off trampolines, were bitten by stinging insects, got lost, and fell when tree branches proved not strong enough to support a rope swing. We climbed on the roof of our house, and Mum would yell up to us, "Walk on the bolts!". We grew up tough, independent, and learned to make better choices. We could have broken bones, but we didn't. We could have been bitten by snakes, but we weren't. I started to wonder why more things didn't go catastrophically wrong for us.

The conclusion I have come to is that we learned to make good choices. We avoided going into places that looked very likely to conceal snakes, and made a lot of noise. We learned to test our constructions before expecting them to support our body weight. We would still put the hose and a bottle of dishwashing liquid on the trampoline, but we didn't go as close to the edge, remembering that time one of us had had a leg disappear between the springs.

Children, as they grow, deserve the opportunity to develop the faith in themselves as makers of good choices. They need to be trusted to take care of their own safety to learn to take responsibility for their decisions, and can only do this if we allow the possibility for a poor choice to be present. Because they are children, of course, they need some boundaries within which they make their choices; we need to compensate, assist them and scaffold their emerging capacities for predictive thinking, inductive reasoning and impulse control, but we can also watch these capacities thrive when they are given the opportunities to exercise, strengthen and practice them.

Safety culture.