Sue Palmer | Modern Childhood | Info & links

Modern Childhood > Info & links > Out To Play

Remember your first ever risk assessment?

Perhaps it was something like: ‘If I try to jump over this puddle, will I get myself wet through and be hammered by my mum…?’
Or ‘If I climb this tree, will I fall out and damage myself…?’
Or perhaps: ‘If I go with the other kids beyond the boundaries decreed by my parents, will I regret it…?’

All real children’s play involves an element of risk, and the more real play children are allowed the better they become at analyzing and managing those risks. If, on the other hand, adults try to eliminate risk from their lives they’re likely to grow up either unduly wreckless or hopelessly timid.

A 13 year-old boy expressed the problem pretty well on a BBC website: ‘To be honest, adults can be very stupid at times. They ban everything for health and safety reasons. If they’re going to ban very simple stuff like [tag] they might as well lock all kids in empty rooms to keep them safe. Kids should be allowed to experiment and try things. Otherwise, when they grow up, they’ll make very stupid mistakes from not getting enough experience in childhood.’

From a personal point of view, I vividly remember learning lessons through play, including:

running on icy surfaces is dangerous [broken arm]
acting against deep instincts, such as jumping my pretend horse (Pheidippides) over a ridiculously high fence, is stupid [broken leg]
you have to know the other kids pretty well before you trust their judgement [severely bruised ego].

And other adults I chat to agree that many lessons learned are through sometimes bitter experience, including:

you can never get petal perfume to smell the way you hope it will
nettle stings can be soothed with dock leaves
sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me.

It’s in play that we learn social skills – how to make friends, sort out disputes, get along in a group, agree rules, collaborate and (when necessary) avoid enemies. It’s also where we acquire commonsense understanding of the world – we learn about gravity when we fall out of a tree; about friction when we roll down a hill; about material science when we mix a mud pie or work on our forty-fifth version of petal perfume. And we develop physical coordination and control through play, so we can sit in a classroom and listen when the teacher converts these lessons into scientific knowledge.

Perhaps most important of all, free outdoor play is where we acquire the emotional skills to see us through the rest of our lives. The self-confidence that grows from solving our own problems. The self-esteem that swells when, having feared you’re lost, you still find the way home. Or when you see blood globules forming on a grazed knee but still hobble back to safety.

These experiences develop the quality psychologists now reckon most important of all – resilience. The capacity to bounce back from adversity, to learn from mistakes and build on failure. So even if that forty-fifth batch of petal perfume smells ghastly, or the den collapses, or the go-kart falls apart leaving you battered and bruised, there’s always another day...

Seems to me that denying children the opportunity to learn all these lessons and acquire all these skills is a risk not worth taking. In the words of the children’s campaigner Lady Allen of Hurtwood: ‘Better a broken bone than a broken spirit.’