Risky Play and Children’s Safety: Balancing Priorities for Optimal Child Development
Free, unstructured, cheeky, loud, reflective, spontaneous, crazy, attentive, wild play is vital to the health of our children, and also to our ability to reimagine the world. Without it, we are all the poorer, our streets fall silent and our imagination begins to dessicate.
Rob Hopkins • From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want
In only three generations, children in the British Isles as well as the United States have lost their freedom to roam, their independently explorable territories shrinking from hundreds of acres to the dimensions of each child’s own back yard. This is not an accusation toward parents; their decisions reflect their judgments about their children’s s
... See moreSimplicio • The Last of the Monsters with Iron Teeth
Kids are antifragile and therefore they benefit from risky play, along with a secure base, which helps to shift them over toward discover mode. A play-based childhood is more likely to do that than a phone-based childhood.
Jonathan Haidt • The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
Crashing Into Something or Someone, Perhaps Repeatedly and Only for Fun
Étienne Fortier-Duboisopen.substack.com
Better design is warranted, but it is not enough if the goal is risk reduction. Risk reduction requires socialization, education, and enough agency to build experience. Moreover, if we think that people will still get hurt, we should be creating digital patrols who are there to pick people up when they are hurt.