Risky Play and Children’s Safety: Balancing Priorities for Optimal Child Development
we want to nurture young people who are resilient, self-reliant, entrepreneurial and adventurous – and I argue that we need to – we have to let them take risks. Risk-aversion is the last quality we need to be building in our children. As Stephen Moss put it in a report on play for the National Trust, ‘A potential risk is that children who don’t tak
... See moreRob Hopkins • From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want
Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. That’s the way children naturally develop social skills, overcome anxiety, and become self-governing young adults.
Jonathan Haidt • The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
free play began to decline in the 1980s, and the decline accelerated in the 1990s. Adults in the United States, the U.K., and Canada increasingly began to assume that if they ever let a child walk outside unsupervised, the child would attract kidnappers and sex offenders.
Jonathan Haidt • The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
The benefits of play are immense across all ages, research shows
hechingerreport.orgPart of the license to play freely comes from being in an environment that is structured enough to provide a feeling of safety, so that the child is confident that nothing bad is going to happen.
Stuart Brown M.D., Christopher Vaughan • Play
