Why Letting Your Kids Take Risks Is One of the Best Things You Can Do for Them
Has your child ever done something that made you gasp and want to cover your eyes? Climbing out of the high chair before they could even walk. Scaling a tree so high you can barely spot them. Swimming out further than you'd like. Wrestling their sibling like it's a WWF match.
Good news. They're doing exactly what they're designed to do.
Let's start with a quote that shaped how we think about this
One of our mentors, psychologist Peter Gray, put it best. He says the story is both ironic and tragic: we deprive children of free, risky play, ostensibly to protect them from danger, but in the process we set them up for mental breakdowns. Children are designed by nature to teach themselves emotional resilience by playing in risky, emotion-inducing ways. In the long run, we endanger them far more by preventing that kind of play than by allowing it, and we deprive them of fun along the way.
So what actually counts as "risky play"?
Risky play is defined as a thrilling and exciting activity that involves a risk of physical injury, and play that gives kids the opportunity for challenge, testing limits, exploring boundaries, and learning about injury risk.
Here's the thing, kids are going to seek this out whether we allow it or not. So really we want them to be able to explore those boundaries and find out where they actually sit.
So believe it or not, there are real benefits to risky play
In this time of helicopter parents and cotton wool kids, it's easy to forget that if children aren't given opportunities for risky play, they'll go and seek it out themselves anyway. From an evolutionary perspective, kids are wired to only seek out the things that are actually going to benefit them and help them develop appropriately. Some of the benefits include:
Increasing confidence, competence and self-esteem
Building self-awareness and a sense of autonomy
Motor skill development and physical development
Practising social skills and playing cooperatively
Learning safety for themselves. When we try to manage the risk for our kids, we take away their opportunity to learn it firsthand, and to be aware of the risks from their own perspective instead of just waiting for an adult to swoop in and save the day
Developing executive function, which is the part of the brain in charge of decision making. The only way we learn to make good decisions is by practising making decisions. Along the way we won't always get it right, but we'll absolutely learn from it
As Roald Dahl put it, the more risk you allow your children to take, the better they learn to look after themselves.
The six pillars of risky play
These categories were identified by researcher Ellen Sandseter, and once you know them, you'll start noticing them everywhere.
1. Play at heights
Climbing out of high chairs. Climbing stairs before they can even walk. Kids at the top of trees. Climbing the outside of the slide instead of going down it.
The risk: falling and subsequent injury.
The benefits: core strength and flexibility, hand eye coordination, focus and concentration. The soft skills are the ones we love most though: boosted self-confidence, problem solving, connecting with nature, spatial reasoning, and a growing sense of proprioception and balance as they climb higher and higher. Then there's the awe and wonder of being up high, the kind of view you'd otherwise only get hiking a mountain or flying in a plane. It's something we simply can't replicate in a classroom.
2. Play at high speed
Games of chasey. Mudslides. Rolling down hills. Building a go kart and zooming down the hill trying to dodge a tree.
The risk: falling, collision and injury.
The benefits: hand eye coordination and focus and concentration, since it takes real focus to stay upright at speed. It also boosts confidence, because kids are mastering their own fear, something a lot of us never get much practice at. That lack of practice managing fear can actually be part of why some kids struggle with anxiety.
3. Playing with dangerous tools
Hand saws, hammers, whittling knives, hand drills, wood planes, even a knife in the kitchen.
The risk: physical injury.
The benefits: gross and fine motor skills, concentration, and genuinely creative thinking, since using a tool usually means working toward a plan or an end result. At Forest School we run on a policy of process over product, so a child might come along for a bow and arrows workshop and end up spending two hours just mastering the handsaw instead, and that's a win, because that's an important life skill. There's also real confidence that comes from being trusted with something that's often seen as an adult tool. Using dangerous tools is one of the best ways for kids to learn to risk assess for themselves. Before a child picks up a saw at Forest Kindy, we ask them what they need. Closed shoes? A glove on the hand holding the wood? How are they holding the saw? Eventually they start asking themselves.
4. Playing with dangerous elements
Fire, water, and animals.
The risk: burns, drowning, bites, and stings.
The benefits: most of us already teach kids to swim, but we tend to underinvest in the other elements. In Australia especially, a bushfire nation, learning to manage and extinguish a fire safely deserves the same priority as swimming lessons. Realistically, kids are less likely to hurt themselves with fire than they are in water, once they've actually been taught how to use it properly. We wouldn't throw a child into the surf without teaching them about rips, and fire deserves the same approach. The same goes for dangerous wildlife, like venomous snakes or spiders here in Australia. Once a child knows how to manage that risk and has the right gear on, the actual risk becomes very, very minimal.
5. Playing in secret spaces
The favourite backyard tree. The blanket fort. The cubby that's just a little bit hidden, a little bit out of sight.
The risk: feeling lost or out of reach of help.
The benefits: a break from the adult gaze, somewhere kids can just be themselves without a teacher, parent or caregiver watching their every move.
This one matters more than it might seem. A study looking at roaming distance across four generations found that in 1919, kids could roam up to 9.6 kilometres from home. By 1950 that had dropped to 1.6 kilometres. By 1979 it was down to 800 metres. Today it's estimated at roughly 270 metres, often just the end of the street. Most kids under 12 today would struggle to even leave their own front yard unsupervised.
Here's the interesting twist. Since 1919, the world has actually become a safer place for children, statistically speaking. It doesn't feel that way, because we've now got a 24/7 global news cycle telling us about every scary thing that happens anywhere. But by the numbers, this is genuinely one of the safest generations of children we've ever had.
Which raises a real question for parents standing at the playground. Are you standing right next to your child because you actually think something's going to happen, or because you're worried other people are going to think you're a bad parent? More often than not, it's the fear of judgment doing the driving, and over-supervising can end up being more damaging to kids than the risk it's meant to prevent.
6. Rough and tumble play
Wrestling. Play fighting. The kind of game that looks like it might tip into someone getting hurt, and sometimes briefly does.
The risk: injury, hurt feelings, conflict.
The benefits: this is one of the best ways for kids to learn about personal boundaries, their own and everyone else's. It's a live, ongoing lesson in consent. Sometimes a child flat out doesn't want to play, and that's consent. Sometimes they set specific rules and limits, and that's consent too. Sometimes someone starts crying and that's the end of it, also consent. It builds compassion, self correction, problem solving (kids constantly change the rules of the game the moment something stops being fun for someone), and self regulation. It's genuinely one of the hardest categories for parents to sit back and allow, but that discomfort is usually a sign it's doing exactly what it should.
The bigger purpose behind all of it: emotional regulation
Underneath all six categories sits one core function, helping kids learn to regulate fear and anger. When we intentionally put ourselves in a slightly hazardous, slightly scary situation, we're practising feeling those emotions and practising our way back out of them. If a child never gets to feel real, self induced fear, they never get the practice of learning to regulate it.
Sandseter, who created these categories, puts it plainly: we may see an increase in neuroticism or psychopathology in society if children are hindered from partaking in age adequate risky play. That's how important this is.
How to actually manage risky play (without losing your mind)
You don't need to overhaul everything overnight. Just take it a little bit at a time, and start with your language.
Our go to response, most of the time, when our kids are doing something that makes us nervous, is "be careful." It's understandable, but honestly it's an unhelpful statement. It doesn't give kids any real information about how to move forward, what to problem solve, or what they're actually able to do.
Some alternatives that give kids something to actually work with:
"What's your next move?"
"Do you feel safe there?"
"Does that branch feel strong and stable?"
"I'm here if you need me."
"Are you still having fun? Do you need more space?"
"Did you notice these rocks are slippery?"
"Where are you going to put that rock?" or "Where are you going to dig that hole?"
Notice what all of these have in common. They hand the risk assessment back to the child instead of doing it for them. If you do spot a genuine hazard, like a dead branch that won't hold their weight, or a hole being dug into an already eroding bank, it's still fine to point it out directly. Just give them the reason why, rather than a flat "stop."
And if "be careful" slips out anyway, that's completely fine. It's a deeply ingrained habit and it'll happen even after years of practice. Don't beat yourself up over it, just keep steering back toward language that actually helps.
Maybe it's time for a rename
We think risky play deserves a rebrand. The word "risky" sets off alarm bells in the minds of parents, teachers, principals and directors. What if instead we called it adventurous play? Because that's really what it is, a rite of passage that we need to encourage. A childhood without bumps or bruises, and heaven forbid even the occasional broken bone, really isn't a childhood at all. We can even reframe the language around the outcomes. Instead of calling them injuries, what if we called them learning experiences? Kids who go through these experiences will be better off in the long run.
One of the mantras we have at Forest School is to keep our programs as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible. That means we do whatever we can to reduce the hazards, but we can't, and shouldn't, try to eliminate all of them.
As we like to say, a ship in a harbour is safe, but that's not what ships are built for.