062: Why we need to let our kids need to take more risks

We should protect our children from risks, right?  Isn’t that our job as parents? This episode comes mid-way in an extended series on the importance of play for children.  The first episode in the series was an interview with Dr. Stuart Brown of the National Institute for Play on the value of play, both for children and for adults.  Then we followed with a look at the research on the benefits of outdoor play, followed by an interview with Dr. Scott Sampson who wrote the book How to Raise a Wild Child, which had tons of practical advice for getting kids outside more, as well as getting outside more with your kids. Today we move on to the topic of risky play.  We’ll define it, and discuss its benefits and drawbacks, as well as things we as parents can do to encourage more risky play if we decide we want to do that. Because it turns out that insulating our children from risk may not be such a good thing after all.     Other episodes referenced in this show What is the value of play? The benefits of outdoor play How to Raise a Wild Child Free to Learn Grit   References Brackett-Milburn, K., & Harden, J. (2004). How children and their families construct and negotiate risk, safety, and danger. Childhood 11(4), 429-447. Brussoni, M., Brunelle, S., Pike, I., Sandseter, E.B.H., Herrington, S., Turner, H., Belair, S., Logan, L., Fuselli, P., & Ball, D.J. (2015). Can child injury prevention include healthy risk promotion? Injury Prevention 21, 344-347. Brussoni, M., Ishikawa, T., Brunelle, S., & Herrington, S. (2017). Landscapes for play: Effects of an intervention to promote nature-based risky play in early childhood centres. Journal of Environmental Psychology 54, 139-150. Christensen, P., & Mikkelsen, M.R. (2008). Jumping off and being careful: Children’s strategies of risk management in everyday life. Sociology of Health & Illness 30(1), 112-130. Hill, A., & Bundy, A.C. (2012). Reliability and validity of a new instrument to measure tolerance of everyday risk for children. Child: Care, Health, and Development 40(1), 68-76. Leviton, M. (2016, February). The kids are all right: David Lancy questions our assumptions about parenting. The Sun. Retrieved from https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/482/the-kids-are-all-right Little, H., Wyver, S., & Gibson, F. (2011). The influence of play context and adult attitudes on young children’s physical risk-taking during outdoor play. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal 19(1), 113-131. Niehues, A.N., Bundy, A., Broom, A., Tranter, P., Ragen, J., & Engelen, L. (2013). Everyday uncertainties: Reframing perceptions of risk in outdoor free play. Journal of Adventure Education & Outdoor Learning 13(3), 223-237. Norton, C., Nixon, J., & Sibert, J.R. (2004). Playground injuries to children. Archives of Disease in Childhood 89(2), 103-108. Plumert, J.M., & Schwebel, D.C. (1997). Social and temperamental influences on children’s overestimation of their physical abilities: Links to accidental injuries. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 67, 317-337. Poultona, R., Menziesb, R.G., Craskec, M.G., Langleyd, J.D., & Silvaa, P.Aa. (1999). Water trauma and swimming experiences up to age 9 and fear of water at age 18: A longitudinal study. Behavior Research and Therapy 37(1), 39-48. Sandseter, E.B.H. (2007). Categorizing risky play – how can we identify risk-taking in children’s play? European Early Childhood Education Research Journal 15(2), 237-252. Sandseter, E.B.H. (2009). Characteristics of risky play. Journal of Adventure Education & Outdoor Learning 9(1), 3-21. Sandseter, E.B.H. (2009). Children’s expressions of exhilaration and fear in risky play. Contemporary issues in early childhood 10(2), 92-106. Sandseter, E.B.H. (2010). “It tickles my tummy!”: Understanding children’s risk-taking in play through reversal theory. Journal of Early Childhood Research 8(1), 67-88. Sandseter, E.B.H. (2011). Children’s risky play from an evolutionary perspective: The anti-phobic effects of thrilling experiences. Evolutionary Psychology 9(2), 257-284. Sandseter, E.B.H., & Sando, O.J. (2016). “We don’t allow children to climb trees”: How a focus on safety affects Norwegian children’s play in early childhood education and care settings. American Journal of Play 8(2), 178-200. Storili, R., & Sandseter, E.B.H. (2015). Preschool teachers perceptions of children’s rough-and-tumble play (R&T) in indoor and outdoor environments. Early Child Development and Care 185(11-12), 1995-2009. Wyver, S., Tranter, P., Naughton, G., Little, H., Sandseter, E.B.H., & Bundy, A. (2010). Ten ways to restrict children’s freedom to play: The problem of surplus safety. Contemporary Issues in Eaerly Childhood 11(3), 263-277.   Other episodes mentioned in this show What is the value of play? The benefits of outdoor play How to Raise a Wild Child Free to Learn Can Growth Mindset live up to the hype? Grit: The unique factor in your child’s success?   Read Full Transcript Transcript Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast.  We’re mid-way through an extended series of episodes on play at the moment.  The first in the series was an interview with Dr. Stuart Brown of the National Institute for Play on the value of play, both for children and for adults.  Then we followed with a look at the research on the benefits of outdoor play, followed by an interview with Dr. Scott Sampson who wrote the book How to Raise a Wild Child, which had tons of practical advice for getting kids outside more, as well as getting outside more with your kids. Today we move on to the topic of risky play.  We’ll define it, and discuss its benefits and drawbacks, as well as things we as parents can do to encourage more risky play if we decide we want to. Before we get going, I want to acknowledge that this episode rests heavily on the work of Professor Ellen Beate Hansen Sandseter (I hope I’m pronouncing that somewhat accurately) at the Queen Maud University College of Early Childhood Education in Norway.  We’ve discussed quite a bit of research lately which relies on a single researcher’s work – I’m thinking of the Mindset and Grit episodes, and I’m also familiar with the take-down of the Power Poses research by Dr. Amy Cuddy, which is the idea that if you stand up straight and spread your arms out wide in a really physically open position before you do something scary like going to a job interview or giving a presentation, your performance will measurably improve.  After another study failed to replicate the findings of the original one, Dr. Cuddy’s own co-author ended up publishing a statement saying she didn’t believe that Power Poses were real and had any benefit.  What those researchers all had in common was a single paper or very few papers which formed the foundation for their work, and an incredible amount of exposure which, these days, is often measured in TED talk views.  Dr. Dweck of the Mindset research is the laggard in this group considering that her work has been around the longest, with only 7 million views; Dr. Cuddy leads the pack with 45 ½ million views. On the other hand, Dr. Sandseter has not given a TED talk.  The majority of her sample sizes are pretty small; she also almost exclusively works in Norway except where she occasionally collaborates with researchers from other countries so her findings may not be applicable to people in other countries where risk is viewed differently than it is there.  She has a blog but honestly it’s pretty dry reading, with most of the updates consisting of notifications about papers she’s published, which non-academics can’t access anyway because the actual papers are behind the publishing journal’s paywall.  I also haven’t found any papers criticizing her methodology or her results.  My overall impression is that she is a scholar who has slowly and patiently built up a body of research over the last decade and a half, and she’s interested in being a resource to educators in Norway rather than being a celebrity – all of which is to say that I generally trust her work. So how do we define risky play?  Dr. Sandseter tried to do exactly this in a 2007 paper, for which she followed 38 children aged 3-5 from two Norwegian preschools and also interviewed the teachers at those schools.  She selected the schools because of the variety of outdoor experiences available to the children in each of them – one of the preschools had a playground had what she calls a “typical”...