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In this episode, we're talking about risky play. What it is, the six pillars of risky play, why children will seek out risk, why it's important, and how to incorporate it into your outdoor play. Welcome to Raising Wildlings, a podcast about parenting, alternative education, stepping into the wilderness, however that looks, with your family.

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Each week, we'll be interviewing experts that truly inspire us to answer your parenting and education questions. We'll also be sharing stories from some incredible families that took the leap and are taking the road less travelled.

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We're your hosts, Vicki and Nikki from Wildlings Forest School. Pop in your headphones, settle in, and join us on this next adventure.

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This episode of the Raising Wildlings podcast is sponsored by our friends at the Fun Fables podcast. Fun Fables is a great little podcast for kids with stories like The Three Little Pigs, Jack and the Beanstalk and The Gingerbread Man retold in fun, entertaining ways. Just search Fun Fables Stories for Kids on your favourite podcast app or click the link in the show description.

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Hello and welcome to episode 10 of the Raising Wildlings podcast. We're your hosts, Vicki Oliver

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and Nikki Farrell. Has your child ever done something that has made you gasp and want to cover your eyes? Early climbers climbing out of their high chairs, children scaling trails, so high you can barely spot them or swimming beyond their depth or teens wrestling like they're in a WWF match? Well, good. We hope you may find some relief in the fact that your child is doing exactly what they are designed to do. And that is take risks. And that is exactly what we're going to be talking about today. Risky play. The six pillars that incorporate risky play, why children seek it out, why it's imperative and how to manage it.

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Before we start, we'd like to invite you to share this episode on social media so that we can help more children outdoors reaping the benefits of nature. And if you have any questions about risky play, then shoot us a DM on Instagram.

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We thought we would start this episode with a quote from one of our mentors. It goes something like this. The story is both ironic and tragic. We deprive children of free, risky play, ostensibly to protect them from danger. But in the process, we set them up for mental breakdowns. Children are designed by nature to teach themselves emotional resilience by playing in risky, emotion-inducing ways. In the long run, we endanger them far more by preventing such play than by allowing it. and we deprive them of fun. That quote's by Peter Gray. If you'd like to learn more about the importance of play, head to the first episode that we ever recorded on the Raising Wildlings podcast to hear more about it.

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All right, so let's start by talking about what the definition of risky play actually is. So it's defined as a thrilling and exciting activity that involves a risk of physical injury, yes, and play that provides opportunity for challenge, testing limits, exploring boundaries, and learning about injury risk. Risky play is something that all children will engage in, whether we try and prevent it or not, and we really do want them to be able to explore those boundaries and find out where they really sit in situ that are a little bit scary. induce a little bit of fear?

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So believe it or not, there are benefits to risky play. And in this time of helicopter parents and cotton woolen kids, we sometimes forget that if children aren't given opportunities for risky play, they'll seek it out themselves. From an evolutionary perspective, children are designed to only seek out the things that are going to benefit them, the things that they need to develop appropriately. So some of the benefits include increasing confidence, competence and self-esteem. Risky play builds self-awareness and a sense of autonomy. It's fantastic for motor skill development and physical development. They get to practice their social skills and playing cooperatively.

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Really importantly, though, the thing about risky play is that they're learning safety. Unfortunately, when we try to manage the risk for our children, we deprive them of an opportunity to learn it for themselves and to actually be aware of the risks from their own perspective instead of waiting for an adult to come in and save the day. So they really are exploring those boundaries. what their own boundaries are of their safety and comfort, and that of others as well that are involved in their play. Because the boundaries of their friends, their peers, or perhaps even the adults that are caring for them will be different. And so they do need to adjust their behavior and their activities to account for their own boundaries and for others. And lastly, of course, their executive function, which is the parts of your brain that is in charge of decision making. Now, the only way we can learn to make good decisions is by putting practicing making decisions. And in the process, we might not make some good decisions, but we will absolutely learn from those.

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Yeah, absolutely. And I think, again, in this time of cotton wooling children and this time of overscheduling children and filling their days with extracurricular activities, children actually don't have a lot of chance to practice making their own decisions?

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You know, we've absolutely taken the ability for children to make their own decisions away from them. We're so busy that sometimes we don't allow ourselves the time to allow them to make their own decisions in lots of different aspects of our life. And so we really are not setting them up for, particularly when we get into the teenage years, where they might start taking some risks in areas that are actually really scary Because they haven't had an opportunity to take risks at any stage during their life as kids, because we don't allow that anymore, we're so fearful for them, then they will actually take that into their own hands in much scarier, much more serious situations.

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As Roald Dahl says, the more risk you allow your children to make, the better they learn to look after themselves.

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Absolutely. And independence is obviously something that we're striving for long term with our children. Okay, so let's talk about this six categories of risky play that all children will be attracted to at some point. Now, you'll start to notice these with your own children or the children in your care once we talk about them. But these have been categorized by Ellen Sandsetter from the Queen Morn University in Norway. And the first one is play at heights.

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So play at heights includes things such as the children climbing out of their high chairs or the babies climbing stairs before they can even walk. It's the kids we see at the top of the trees or climbing Climbing on the outside of the slide rather than going

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down it. And obviously there is always going to be a risk associated with these activities. So for playing at heights, falling and subsequent injury is the risk associated with this particular activity.

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However, the benefits, let's talk about the benefits of climbing and being at great heights. There's core strength and flexibility. There's hand-eye coordination. There's focus, concentration. The ones that we love the most, though, are those quote unquote soft skills. So they help boost self-confidence and problem solving. They get to connect with nature when they're climbing trees. They get spatial reasoning skills and the proprioception and vestibular system just grows and grows as they climb higher and higher.

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Exactly. And then there's that awe and wonder that comes from being at the top of the tree, which is there's nothing that beats that. And the only other way you're going to get that is if you're hiking up a mountain or in an aeroplane. Seeing the world from a bird's eye view, there's something about that that you can understand why children are trying to see the world from a greater height.

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Something we can't replicate in classrooms.

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Not at all. The second category is playing at high speed.

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So these are games like chasey or sliding down mudslides or rolling down hills and tires, which how long has it been since you've seen a child do

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that? Or building a go-kart and zooming down the hill at 100 miles an hour and trying to dodge a collision with a tree.

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We've all done

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this

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as children.

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But

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again, these opportunities are becoming fewer.

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Now, obviously, again, there's risks of falling and collision and injury, but there are so many benefits, including that hand-eye coordination and focus and concentration, because it does take a lot of focus to make sure that you stay upright when you're traveling at a very high speed. It will also boost their confidence because they're mastering their fear, which is something that a lot of us don't get a lot of practice in. It

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can be one of the reasons why children feel anxiety is because they haven't had practice at managing those fears. The third category of risky play is playing with dangerous tools. Now the lucky wildlings at Forest School that are attending our holiday programs over the next two weeks will get plenty of practice playing with and working with hand saws, hammers, whittling knives, hand drills and wood planes. Now really the the risk is physical injury however the benefits include much the same as the previous categories is your gross and fine motor skills, concentration and I love the creative thinking that we see. I

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was just going to say creative thinking is a really important one when we're working with tools because tools are something that help us to create something else or to achieve an end result so you're there's obviously a plan some imagination that's come into the reason why we're using those tools sometimes it's just for the sake of using the tools let's be honest but

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and i don't but i don't also want to downplay that because at forest school we really we have a policy of process over product so children might come for a bow and arrows workshop for example but they might spend two hours just sawing and mastering the handsaw because that's an important life skill for them.

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And the confidence that comes from being allowed to use something that is often deemed an adult skill. tool or an adult toy, something that adults use and giving them the opportunity and trusting them with something that could potentially cause them an injury really helps to boost their confidence. And that way they can master their own safety. They can be aware of their own boundaries and making sure that they keep themselves and other people safe, which is absolutely imperative if they are going to be able to use these things in the future and to help you

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in the future as well. Absolutely. Using dangerous tools is one of the best ways for children to learn to risk assess. So when a child approaches the hand saw at Forest Kindy, we ask them, okay, what do you need to use? Have you got clothes and shoes? Yes. Do you have a glove on the hand that's holding the wood? Yes. How are you holding your saw? But they do that themselves. So they're learning to risk assess before they undertake an activity without us telling them you need to do this and you have to do this.

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And then when we do need to give them a little bit of help with that or to identify things We're giving them reasons why. So it's not arbitrary rules for the sake of rules. It's rules because we want to make sure we keep you safe. That way we can continue doing this activity and be able to expand on that because we know how to do it in a way that's going to make sure that everyone stays safe.

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So on this one, if you can enable the children in your centre or school or home to use simple hand tools such as hammers and hand saws, you're going to take so many of those soft skills

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off. Or even in cooking, using a knife to cut up things in the kitchen. That comes under that banner as well. And whilst we're talking about things that may seem quite dangerous, there's also this fourth category which is playing with dangerous elements like fire, water or even animals. Now there's obviously lots of risk that comes with this. There's risks even with water and drowning and what we do with children is we teach them to swim. But there are these other ones like learning to work with fire or to be outside and understand the risk of dangerous animals that we don't tend to invest as much time time in, which is something we're trying to remedy with our programs. So we are trying to encourage children to learn how to use and manage fire safely, how to be in our environment and cohabitate with animals that may cause us physical injury or may pose a threat to our safety as well.

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It's so important, particularly in Australia. You know, we teach our kids to swim, they go to nippers, they go to swimming lessons as part of their primary school education, and yet we live in a bushfire nation. So for us, teaching children to manage and extinguish and be around fire is as important as water safety in Australia.

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And realistically, they're less chance of hurting themselves with fire than they have by being in the water. Yet we just seem to have this perception that fire is a really, really risky thing to allow children to experiment with. And it can be, but that's only if we don't allow children to actually understand and know how to use it, just like... We wouldn't throw a child into the surf without teaching them about rips. Exactly. And the same goes with dangerous animals. So in Australia, obviously the big one is venomous snakes or even venomous insects like spiders. And quite frankly, once we know how to manage that, once we know how to be in the space and to keep ourselves safe in that regards and have all the right equipment on, the risk of that is actually very, very minimal. The fifth risky

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play category is playing in secret spaces. I don't know about you, Vicky, but I had a favourite tree when I was growing up. It was a peppercorn tree behind the backyard and because it was just outside our fence, it felt like it was, not that it was out of bounds, but it was out of that circle of security. Yeah,

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and it was out of sight.

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Yes, it was out of sight and it was not as easy for my siblings to get to because I was the oldest, I could climb higher. So that was where I used to retreat and feel like I was hidden and where I could get some space.

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Yeah, it's been really interesting actually because I was outside the other day down at your tree house that you're building for the boys and we were talking about how they were going to continue building upon what they that what was already created there and for me I liked the fact that at the moment it's actually looking out over the rest of your property but the boys do want it closed in and they do it's like that secret spot where they can hide and feel like they're sheltered from the rest of the world and that's why cubby building and fort building you see remnants of these around the place and it's starting to research more and more is because children really do seek out those secrets spaces where their eyes of the world aren't on them anymore where the supervision the adult

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gaze

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is isn't on them and they can actually feel like they can be themselves and just have a little bit of that time because this generation is the most supervised generation of children that has ever come before us. And although this doesn't specifically pertain to secret spaces, there was a study that was done that looked at roaming distance for four generations. So looking at great-grandparent in 1919 as opposed to, sorry, great-great-grandparent in 1919, grandparent in 1950, parent in 1979 and current child and looking at their roaming distance now back in 1919 children were able to roam up to 9.6 kilometers away from their home base which then reduced within one generation down to 1.6 kilometers and then within that third generation children were able to roam just under a kilometer so 800 meters away from their home on average to now I think that this would be even less when this study was conducted it was down to 270 meters so this might have been the end of the street. I would say now that most children under the age of 12 are probably not able to leave their front yard or even play in their front yard unsupervised. So within four generations, we have gone from being allowed to roam up to 10 kilometers away. The children aren't able to leave the safety of their own home. And this actually is something that children are seeking out is that secret play space, somewhere where they can be where They don't have adults watching them, a teacher, a parent, a caregiver of some sort. And interestingly, since 1919, the world has actually become a safer place. Now, that might sound counterintuitive. It may feel like the world is a much scarier place now, but it actually isn't when it comes to the statistics of children and their safety in terms of stranger danger or any of those sorts of statistics. Children are actually safer now than what they were in 1919. Now we've got a 24-7 global news cycle where any news that's about something scary or horrible makes the headlines. So we know about things that we otherwise would never have known about. And I'm not saying that we shouldn't be aware of those risks, and obviously we are, and our whole society has been shaped around this, but it is something to consider and to remember that our children actually are living in one of the safest generations that we've ever had.

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And another question for us as parents, I think, particularly when we're looking at supervising children at play playgrounds, and Vicky and I get this all the time, is that are we standing next to our children at the playground because we actually think something's going to happen or are we standing next to them because we're worried people are going to think that we're bad parents? And if it's because we're worried about what people think, what we need to remember is that it's actually more damaging to our children for us to be overly supervising them. Vicky and I went for a hike the other day with four kids and they're eight and six years and the children run up ahead of us because they're mountain goats and they know the track and we trust them. But the amount of comments I got, particularly at the top while they were rock scrambling about, oh, I don't like how your children are climbing those rocks. Are you sure they're safe? Are they going to be okay? And I just had to say to them, I completely trust these children to be able to navigate these rocks and But people still didn't believe us and definitely got the look of, you crappy parent, you.

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And that's hard. And that is one of the big barriers to allowing our children to take risks is that we are worried about being judged by other people.

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Exactly. I wouldn't have trusted my children to do that four years ago, but they've had so much practice that I completely trust them. I trust them

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over some teenagers out there. Even adults, like they can navigate those mountains like most adults couldn't.

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Yeah. Yeah.

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And the sixth category of risky play is rough and tumble play. Now, I... probably don't engage in this as much as you do, Nikki. Nikki's often saying to me that her boys are really keen to wrestle all the time.

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All the time. I

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think we have to remember that rough and tumble play is important for all children. It will be particularly important for boys because they will gravitate towards that, but it's really important for girls to engage in rough and tumble play as well. We spent a lot of time together yesterday. We were at the beach with some friends and there was a large group engaged in a rough and tumble game. It was really hard as parents to stay out of this one. This is probably one of the hardest ones for us to sit back on and it was challenging for us to let them go because this is where it's really brilliant for children to learn those boundaries of their personal boundaries and that of other children. And we were all worried as parents about it escalating in a way like one child might have actually felt victimised or ganged up upon. And we had to just stop ourselves from intervening, yeah, because they had it under control and they were good at listening to each other's boundaries and we just had to trust that it was part of their game and let them explore that as much as we possibly could without feeling like we had to buffer it in some ways this one is a really tough one

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yeah that game went on for two hours and it got talked about in the car on the way home and they're already planning that the next time they see them that game is going to continue so if you're looking for a way for children to learn about socialization about consent and boundaries rough and tumble play is it and for me uh as as a mother and but as a woman i'm so concerned raising my boys about consent it's that for me rough and tumble play is a really great way for me to teach them about it so sometimes it is just flat out i don't want to play and that's consent and other times it is okay but here are the rules and and these are the boundaries about it and other times it's okay one of them's crying and that's the end of it that's the boundary on that day but at every moment within rough and tumble play, it is consent. And if we can't teach our boys about that.

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Absolutely. A hundred percent right about that. It is, it's about the compassion that you have for other people. It's about that self-correction and that.

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It's also that problem solving, you know, he doesn't want to play this anymore because that hurt. So they constantly change the rules of those games. Like you said,

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that self-handicap. And that self-regulation as well, which is really brilliant. And that brings us to the at bringing all those benefits together, there is a purpose of risky play. One of the main purposes is that emotional regulation. It is about helping to regulate that feeling of fear and anger because a lot of the time when we put ourselves in situations that do present a hazard, that's scary and that can also make us feel angry. How do we regulate those feelings? If we haven't had an opportunity to feel that, if we've never felt true fear I've never felt Fear that has been induced by ourselves, we can actually learn how to regulate that because we're putting ourselves intentionally in that situation and we can actually get ourselves out of it as well, problem-solving ourselves out of it.

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Yeah, I think to surmise that, Sandsetter says, so Sandsetter who created these categories, she says, we may observe an increased neuroticism or psychopathology in society if children are hindered from partaking in age-adequate risky play. That is how important it is to let our children So you

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might be wondering how you can actually manage risky play with your own children or the children in your care. And it can be a little bit daunting because maybe you have children prevented your children from engaging in certain activities for fear of them hurting themselves. So just take it a little bit at a time. And some of the first things that you can do is that you can start to replace your language. Our response most of the time when our children are doing something that makes us feel nervous is be careful. It is the go-to response of most parents. Unfortunately, it really is an unhelpful statement. It doesn't actually give our children any information about how they can move forward, what they can do to problem solve or what they are actually able to do.

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Yeah, so some of the other phrases that we use instead of saying be careful, and I want to caveat that, that it still slips out of our mouths even after years of wild schooling our children. So don't beat yourself up about letting it slip out because it will. It's part of our culture. But what we want to do is try and move away from that. So one of the things we might do, say, for example, if a child's in a tree and we might be having heart palpitations about how high they are and worried that they're not going to be able to come down is instead of saying, be careful, we might ask them, what is your next

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move? And then also, if you're feeling like they're not safe, you can throw that back at them to see if they are feeling unsafe. So do you feel safe there? Yes. Then that might give them an actual opportunity to stop and think, well, hang on a minute. Do I feel safe?

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Oh, do I? Let me listen to my instinct. which is another really important thing we haven't even covered is risky play enables children to be able to follow their instincts and trust their gut instinct, which we actually kill out of them by taking away their decision-making. So tree climbing is one of those activities that parents and institutions quite often prevent children from being allowed to do. So another way that we can check that a child is feeling safe is we can say, does that branch feel strong and or stable? And that's, you know, if we're looking at them about to grab a dead branch, instead of saying, be careful,

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oh, does that branch feel strong to you? And maybe you can even be very obvious about it. Like that branch looks like it's a dead branch that might not hold your weight. Do you want to choose a different one? Depending on the age, like you can be very specific. If they're a little bit older, you might actually be prefer to let them figure things out for themselves. But if you can see an obvious hazard, you can point that out to them and be really specific instead of just be careful.

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Yeah. The reason we suggest not saying be careful is that even when I say the words, it immediately puts my body on alarm. We don't want to put their bodies on alarm. We want them to feel alarmed when they feel they should be alarmed. So instead of saying be careful, it's I'm here if you need me. Are you still having fun? Do you need more space you know it's just ways to rephrase that just stop what you're doing and have a check around

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yeah what can you use to get across there or to help you down it's about giving them the directions of like how do we actually risk assess for ourselves what sort of things go through our brains that we can transfer to them so that they can start to develop that skill for themselves because we can't expect them to know what to look out for if we're not explicit about that as well so from a very young age from little even little babies who are starting to to climb up onto little logs and things like that, we can start to use that language with them.

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Some examples of pointing out the hazard without saying be careful might be, did you notice that these rocks are slippery? Or so we teach kids to look for the black algae at the rock pools. Or, you know, we ask the question, where are you going to put that rock? Where are you going to dig that hole? Instead of saying, don't dig that there. where are you going to dig that here so we're instigating a conversation rather than directing them and manage them

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yeah and also from stopping them so it might be uh i've just noticed that where you're digging that hole is on the side of the bank that's already eroding maybe we could find a different place that won't cause as much damage and so that you're giving them that holistic perspective of why we're redirecting them instead of just saying stop uh we want to give them still the opportunity to do what they're doing but in a way that's maybe less damaging to themselves or their environment

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so to finish up we think that risky play has so many benefits that it deserves a rename so instead of saying risky play because it does it sets the alarm bells off in the minds of parents and teachers and principals and directors that maybe if as a culture and a society we change risky play to adventurous play that maybe

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people will see it for what it is which is a rite of passage that we need to encourage and you know a childhood without bumps or bruises and heaven forbid even a broken bone really isn't a childhood at all. And we can actually reframe the language we use even here. And instead of calling them injuries, we can call them learning experiences. Because children that go through these experiences, we'll be better off in the long run.

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One of the mantras we have at Forest School is to keep our programs as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible. So that means that we do whatever we can to reduce the hazards, but we can't, nor should we, eliminate

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all hazards. Now, to help you get started, we've actually created a what to say guide. So some of the things that we've mentioned before, we've created a resource for you so that you can encourage that problem solving and personal risk assessment in our children instead of that usual go-to response of be careful. So to download our Risky Play cheat sheet, you can head to www.wildlingsforestschool.com forward slash free dash downloadables. And if you have any questions or comments at all about Risky Play, make sure you DM us on Instagram and following us at wildlings underscore forest school. In next week's episode, Nikki chats with author and principal John Marsden. If you're anything like me and you grew up on the series that John wrote, Tomorrow When The War Began, this is sort of another way for children to experiment with fear and also to experience a healthy dose of fear in a safe space.

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I had an absolute ball chatting to John. We spoke about how children are not just all sweet and innocent, how society tends to idealize children and how this can damage children. We talk about how adolescents then have this fall from grace because we all set them up to not want to be adults and to not want to grow up. We chat to him about how teenagers need to metaphorically kill their parents. We talk about common ineffectual approaches to parenting. And can I just say that John doesn't mince his words here. And we talk about his first school, Candlebark, set on 850 acres in the Macedon Ranges in Victoria. I have to say that he started this school right when I was about finishing year 12 and he killed school for me. When I heard what the kids got to do at Candlebark. I couldn't believe that all schools weren't doing that and I still feel like that today. So I hope you can join us for that one next week.

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And just remember, a ship in a harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are built for. As always, we absolutely love doing this adventure with you. So until next time, stay wild. Music

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