If children won't take risks, how will they learn?
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Friday, January 10, 2025
Islamabad (UrduPoint News International/ Pakistan Point News - DW Urdu - 10 January 2025) You may have seen a child hanging upside down from a swing, sometimes jumping from a high surface or table, or struggling to climb and descend on a rocky surface, or falling and slipping while running. Children are often seen playing seemingly dangerous games. But in a research report published in the scientific journal Nature, researchers say that such games are also necessary for children's development.
According to Alithia Geriben, a researcher in public health and psychology at Deakin University in Melbourne, she was with her ten- and thirteen-year-old daughters on the beach near the city in the hot sun, where the girls were playing on a pile of rocks.
According to Geriben, she was asking herself whether these girls should do this? She says that she was dizzy when she saw the sharp stones and the cracks in them, while the girls were playing happily.
According to Jereben, in such a situation, she also thought of stopping these girls because they could get hurt.
But according to Jereben, stopping these girls would have contradicted her research, because these 'dangerous games' and other activities of this type are necessary for the better development of these children.
According to Jereben, parents are concerned about protecting children from all kinds of dangers, while dangerous play opportunities are also very important for the physical, mental and emotional development of children.
Jereben is currently researching the broader effects and benefits of these dangerous games on children's health.
Risk and child development
Jereben says that in the past two decades, research has come to light that dangerous play opportunities are necessary for healthy physical, mental and emotional development.
According to researchers, children need these opportunities to develop spatial awareness, physical coordination, the ability to cope with uncertainty and self-confidence.
Yet in many countries, risky play is now more restricted than ever, due to misconceptions about “risk” and its benefits. According to researchers, contrary to adults’ assumptions, children are much more aware of their own abilities and that seemingly risky play helps them to predict how they should react in such situations, which also increases the interconnection between their brain and body.
However, many researchers believe that more research is needed on the benefits of such play, but because play is a free-form activity, it has been logistically difficult to study it experimentally.
In this context, scientists are now using new methods, including virtual reality, to assess the benefits of risky play and ways to promote it.
A little risk is necessary
“Most people would assume that because I work on protecting children from injury, I would be against these kinds of games,” says Pamela Fosley, president of Parachute, a non-profit organization based in Toronto, Canada, which works to protect children from injury. But the benefits of these games in terms of social, physical and mental development and health are so extensive that I think we don’t really know their true value.
What is meant by risky play?
According to the research journal Nature, the initial research on risky play was conducted in Norway in 1996 after the implementation of this regulation, in which railings for the safety of children in playgrounds, rounded corners of children’s play equipment and objects that reduce the risk of injury from falls were made part of children’s play areas.
However, according to psychologist Alan Sandseter, he was concerned that there were too few opportunities for children to take risks. According to them, young people who do not face positive risks such as climbing a mountain or jumping from a height were found to be inclined to negative risks such as shoplifting.
Sandseter, a researcher at the College of Early Childhood Education at Queen Maud University in Norway, conducted research on risk-seeking and thrill-seeking in three- to five-year-old children in the same context.
Until then, there was no formal definition of ‘risky play’ in the scientific field, and in this context, he developed a definition based on in-depth observation and interviews with children that is still widely used today. He explained that thrilling and exciting games that are associated with uncertainty and real or imagined risk of physical injury or loss can be called ‘risky play’.
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The difference between danger and risk According to the journal Nature, there is a difference between danger and risk. According to researchers, danger is a situation that a child does not have the ability to deal with, while risk refers to a situation in which something seems dangerous, but the child can deal with it. The researchers explain the difference between these two situations by saying that trying to cross a road with very fast vehicles without realizing it or walking barefoot on broken glass is called a danger, while a child standing on his feet for the first time or taking his first step is a risk.
According to Helen Dowd, a researcher in the Department of Child Psychology at the University of Exeter in the UK, “The aim of promoting risky play is not to push a cautious child towards excitement, but to provide a child with the opportunity to determine and deal with risk in their own way, because the nature of risk may be different for different children.”
Sandsetter also says that children who are naturally cautious should also have the opportunity to choose risks for themselves because children are well aware of their limitations.
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