Disturbing Trend: A Focus on Safety to the Detriment of Beneficial Play

05/27/2021

Disturbing Trend: A Focus on Safety to the Detriment of Beneficial Play

Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.
Albert Einstein

A study posted on eric.ed.gov is called “We Don’t Allow Children to Climb Trees: How a Focus on Safety Affects Norwegian Children’s Play in Early-Childhood Education and Care Settings.” The study’s authors, Ellen Beate Hansen Sandseter and Ole Johan Sando explain their results this way:

“Our findings mainly indicate that Norway’s once less risk-averse approach to children’s risk taking…may be changing. The pressure to make children’s safety the main focus of play activities seems to be growing in Norwegian ECEC settings…

Our results argue for a balance between children’s safety in play and their need for stimulating and challenging play to optimize development and learning…The participants in this study worry that the focus on safety has gone too far, resulting in a lack of physical challenges for children…[and a] negative effect on children’s risk-managing competence…Despite a low injury rate…activities that were normal a few years ago among Norwegian children are now restricted or even prohibited in some ECEC settings…It thus seems that Norway, once held up as an example of less restrictive attitudes in encouraging challenging play, has joined the disturbing Australian, American, and UK trend toward overcautiousness, trepidation, and fearfulness in adult attitudes toward children’s play. This study highlights the need for more effective strategies in balancing children’s safety, on one hand, and their need for and right to challenging and risky play, on the other. This is an important issue for ECEC staff, ECEC owners and politicians, parents, and other caretakers."

Rusty Keeler’s popular new book, Adventures in Risky Play, speaks to the issues Sandseter and Sando raise. He offers many strategies educators can use to carefully find the balance between safety and the benefits of risky play. For example, he writes: “We want to say yes more, but children push the limits and we see danger. In split seconds we scan a situation and make decisions whether to allow play or stop play. Even as super-supporters of play we do that and we should be doing that. But how do we make those decisions? What do we take into consideration? What inner guidance are we listening to? ... A great way to get some practice is by going through the risk-benefit analysis process on any given element your child might encounter.”

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