One of the best lessons in getting children to evaluate risk that I have seen occurred during a hike up a mountain in the rugged North West of Scotland. We were following a stream bed that snaked up the flanks of a mountain in the direction of the summit. The peak itself kept rolling away from view, no matter what small rise we reached.
At some point in the hike, we came to an impasse: a three-metre-high wall of rock that, in rainy weather, turned into a small waterfall. The children, aged 11-12, just scampered up the rock face without a care in the world. Each child took their cue from the one in front of them. As we sat at the top of the small falls, sipping water, exhilarated and a little out of breath, our instructor went through what we had just done and examined all the risks, as well as the actions we had taken to minimise them.
The truth is that the process had not been done consciously. We hadn’t really stopped to think about anything, just scrambled up the rock face and encouraged our teammates. Of course, the site and the exercise had been chosen in advance and would serve as a lesson for future exercises on our residential, but it was the first time the children had to take a back seat and examine the risks of what they had just done and what could have happened if something had gone wrong.
At that moment, it struck me how much risk was being removed from the activities that we plan for children, and the extent to which they are now mostly stripped of any responsibility for managing risk. So much so, in fact, that in this situation, because no adult had voiced any concern about the activity, they assumed it was completely free from risk. What followed was a discussion on self-reliance: how to grade risks from an injury or consequence point of view, and how to approach things as a team. It was the first step in encouraging these children to evaluate the risks they took.
There are four steps to developing children’s abilities to make decisions: encountering risk; accepting fear; feeling empowered; and learning to trust, all of which are set out below.
Adventurer and broadcaster Bear Grylls might not be the first name that springs to mind when you consider role models for encouraging risky play among children, but he does make the point that “if you try to negate risk in children’s lives, you do them a disservice because you teach them not to be afraid of risk”. Outdoor play has enormous psychological and physical benefits, but it has even more to offer. Children, when engaging in risky play, are able to explore boundaries, test limits and find opportunities to challenge themselves, as well as learn about risk.
In a 2009 paper entitled The risk is that there is ‘no risk’: a simple, innovative intervention to increase children’s activity levels, Anita Bundy and her colleagues echo the sentiment held by Grylls that, by overzealously reducing risk, we are in fact removing opportunities for children and stripping away curiosity, as well as an element of excitement and challenge in what they can do. The study, as well as several others, points to an overall positive effect of children being exposed to risk. Many of the elements that we now highlight in curricula, such as social interaction, creativity and resilience, are to be found in outdoor play.
It is also right that, as teachers, we look to minimise some risks, such as those that can cause serious injury, and there are guidelines that we must follow. But the question of injury prevention is not a straightforward one. Some studies have found that children are far more likely to become injured through adult-led activities, such as organised sport, than child-led risky play. What underlines these findings is that, when engaging with free and self-directed play, children are more likely to manage the risks themselves. Educators routinely agree that children are different when out of the classroom, and challenging behaviour patterns that occur in class often aren’t found in these children when they are outdoors. The same goes for children exposed to risk: they become more careful, more circumspect and more likely to avoid unnecessary risks.
Embracing fear
As educators, we need to let children encounter risks and empower them to make decisions, to challenge themselves and explore their boundaries. At the same time, we need to mitigate serious hazards. Letting children encounter some risks and make decisions about how to handle such situations ensures that they get a richer spectrum of educational opportunities, as well as experiences that will shape who they will later become.
Risky outdoor play encourages the development of social and emotional competencies, as it gives rise to a host of emotions in young children. The thrill that children experience when trying something new - an experience that is at the limit of, or just beyond, their abilities - is a mixture of freedom and fear. And fear is the emotion that we, as parents and educators appear to want children to experience the least. Understandably, it is seen as a negative emotion, though we forget it has played a significant role in our evolution, and it is important that children learn how to deal with it. Risky play does just that. It allows children to work out their boundaries and it is at that very edge of their comfort zone where fear rises up. That is where they learn to start making decisions for themselves.
A wonderful example of this presented itself on a visit to a nursery school: its policy was that if a child had the ability to climb up a tree, they were welcome to. And children who weren’t able to do so weren’t helped up, as they still had the practical learning to do themselves. The ability to overcome fear and manage risk is as important as the physical skill of climbing up.
Our job is to pass on, whether directly or indirectly, ways in which children can manage risk and be safe. Safety is not about removing risk; it is about making decisions that actively reduce risk. One way to empower children to manage risk is to include them in the assessment of risk. Just as we reflected following the climb up the waterfall, asking children to consider activities beforehand is an excellent way of preparing them for such situations.
Another useful activity is to include them in the risk assessment for a particular trip. It is extremely useful for pupils to discuss the benefits of the activity and the potential hazards, as well as how those risks might be mitigated. This encourages self-reliance because, suddenly, not everything has been assessed for them, and the mistake of assuming that all risk has been removed - dangerous in itself - is understood.
We are not teaching children anything by removing all risk. Children need to feel that we trust them to make decisions for their own wellbeing. In this way, they become agents of their own safety and they have experiences, which essentially become tools to learn how to self-regulate and become self-reliant.
The goal is not for the children in our care to become reckless risk takers. There is a theory in psychology that links a child’s ability to learn self-regulation with that of self-directed play. It has to do with the emotions of fear and freedom mentioned earlier, but also with emotions such as anger and jealousy. When children are given the opportunity to experience free play, they have the opportunity to experience these feelings in varying degrees and are able to find ways to manage them successfully by themselves. When play happens with other children, they naturally learn how to manage these emotions; through feedback from their playmates, they are rewarded with continued play or exclusion from play. This is how children first learn to self-regulate.
Self-regulation is one of the most important skills that our children can possess. How they learn to deal with frustration and challenges, both big and small, is a skill that will serve them throughout their lifetime. By allowing children to engage with the inherent risks found in nature, we are offering them far more than is first apparent. Play, with all of its social interactions and opportunities for failure, builds resilience. Taking away these experiences erodes the development of crucial life skills.
Overcoming outdoor challenges, such as a tough climb or camping overnight for the first time, makes you more resourceful and might even change how you view yourself. So it is important that we, as educators, do all we can to allow the children in our care to encounter risk, to feel it out sensibly and then, finally, to trust them to make decisions.
Education needs to be as rich an experience as it can be - because it’s about preparing children for life.
Duncan Barrable is head of outdoor learning at St Leonards School in St Andrews
This article originally appeared in the 15 March 2019 issue under the headline “Do go chasing waterfalls”
