With increased urbanisation, we see kids over the years spending less time in free play and even lesser in the open amidst nature, and more in structured settings in somewhat protected environments. This might be one of the factors of rising mental health issues as this research shows kids with exposure to risky play grow up to handle anxiety better. Psychologist Ellen Sandseter is at Queen Maud University College of Early Childhood Education in Trondheim, Norway. “Her research had shown that adolescents who had fewer opportunities for positive types of thrill-seeking — such as mountain climbing — were more likely to take negative risks, such as shoplifting.”
But what do we mean by risky play?
“Her definition of risky play is still widely used: thrilling and exciting play that involves uncertainty and a risk — either real or perceived — of physical injury or getting lost.
Importantly, risk is not the same as danger. Danger is something a child isn’t equipped to notice or deal with. For example, it’s dangerous, not risky, for four-year-olds to go barefoot around broken glass or to cross a busy street with no practice. Risk changes with age and doesn’t always include things that look risky to adults. For a one-year-old who has never walked before, taking a single step is probably risky enough.
The goal of promoting risky play isn’t to turn cautious children into thrill-seekers, it’s simply to allow them to take incremental risks at whatever pace they choose, say proponents. “What risky play looks like for one child will be totally different to what it looks like for another,” says child psychologist Helen Dodd at the University of Exeter, UK.
And getting chances to take risks is as important for children with naturally cautious personalities as it is for those who are born daredevils. “All children need to be able to stretch their own limits, and all children want that,” says Sandseter.”
Not just mental health, risky play is associated with a host of benefits around mental and emotional development:
“Risky play is associated with greater resilience, self-confidence, problem-solving and social skills such as cooperation, negotiation and empathy, according to studies by Sandseter and others.
Outdoor risky play might have extra benefits. It is linked to having low levels of stress and anxiety. Dodd hypothesizes that risky play lowers children’s risk of anxiety by teaching them about physiological arousal, the adrenaline and racing heartbeat that accompanies anxiety and excitement. Over time, her theory posits, when children have a chance to repeatedly experience the cycle of challenge, arousal and coping, this helps them learn to manage anxiety and understand that physiological stress isn’t a disaster and doesn’t last forever.”
The research is hard to test without putting kids in real danger. So child-development researcher Mariana Brussoni at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, conducted trials using virtual reality:
“One of Brussoni’s hypotheses about risky play is that it can help to build risk-management skills that transfer to other situations, such as crossing a busy street, she says. That’s hard to test. “Ethically speaking, you can’t really throw kids in traffic environments, because they could actually get hurt,” she says. So Brussoni, Sandseter and their colleagues created a virtual setting in which they could convincingly test children’s risk-management skills, without the danger.
First, they gave children aged seven to ten eye-tracking virtual-reality headsets and fitted motion sensors on their joints. The kids were able to explore three scenarios: crossing a street, leaping from rock to rock to cross a river and roaming a virtual playground to balance on the equipment.
Sandseter and Brussoni also asked parents to answer questionnaires about how often their kids engaged in risky play and their tendency towards sensation-seeking.
It took the researchers almost two years to get the technology working and to develop the virtual scenarios to be challenging enough, says Sandseter. Now they have collected data from about 500 children in Norway and Canada. Unpublished data from the Norwegian participants so far suggest that parents are not risk averse, and that children handle risks well.”
If you want to read our other published material, please visit https://marcellus.in/blog/
Note: The above material is neither investment research, nor financial advice. Marcellus does not seek payment for or business from this publication in any shape or form. The information provided is intended for educational purposes only. Marcellus Investment Managers is regulated by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and is also an FME (Non-Retail) with the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA) as a provider of Portfolio Management Services. Additionally, Marcellus is also registered with US Securities and Exchange Commission (“US SEC”) as an Investment Advisor.
