Risk-taking during play may strengthen children’s real-world safety skills

Children who take more risks on the playground make safe decisions more quickly when crossing a busy street. 

That's the central finding of a new study by researchers from the University of British Columbia and Queen Maud University College in Norway, and it may give parents a reason to let kids climb a little higher or roam a little further. 

The study put 424 children aged seven to 11 from Norway and Canada through two virtual-reality tasks-essentially video game-style simulations they experienced through a headset while moving around a real gym. In one, children explored a virtual balancing structure with different height levels. In the other, they had to decide when it was safe to cross a street with oncoming traffic. The researchers tracked how willing each child was to take risks during play, then looked at how those same children performed when the 'stakes' were higher. 

What they found challenges the common assumption that it's reckless to let children take risks. Kids who were bolder in the playground task-moving faster, spending more time on the higher sections, venturing onto tricky pillars-were quicker and more efficient at deciding when to cross the street. They didn't make more dangerous choices, they were just faster at reading the situation and acting on it. 

Why risky play matters 

Keeping children safe means letting them take risks. This risky play is a fundamental way that children learn about the world, about themselves and how to keep themselves safe in diverse situations." 

Dr. Mariana Brussoni, professor at UBC's department of pediatrics and school of population and public health, director of the Human Early Learning Partnership, and researcher at BC Children's Hospital Research Institute

Parents, schools and policymakers have spent decades trying to make childhood safer by removing risk. But if children never get to practice assessing and confronting small, manageable dangers, they may not develop the judgment they need for bigger ones. These findings suggest that the playgrounds we design-and the freedoms we grant or withhold-may be shaping children's ability to navigate a complex world long after they leave the swings behind. 

A tale of two playgrounds 

Norwegian children in the study showed significantly greater willingness to take risks than their Canadian peers. Norway has outdoor activity and children's independence baked into its national education policy, and Norwegian parents and teachers tend to be far more comfortable with physical risk than those in many other countries. Canada, by contrast, tends toward more restricted, supervised childhoods. 

Testing the hypothesis safely 

The virtual-reality technology that was so key to the experiment has been developed by researchers with the ViRMa project at Queen Maud University College. You can't test how children navigate real traffic, but a convincing virtual street lets researchers gather real behavioural data safely. An impressive 85 per cent of the children said the VR environments felt realistic to them. 

"I don't think there's any ethics board in the world that would allow you to throw children into traffic to see how they did," said Dr. Brussoni, a world-leading researcher in the field along with co-author Dr. Ellen Beate Hansen Sandseter of Queen Maud University College. "We really haven't been able to properly test this hypothesis before we had access to these kinds of technologies." 

The children who took more risks during play also fell more often in the virtual playground, highlighting the point: falling, stumbling and trying again teaches children what they're capable of, where their limits are and how to adjust. Those lessons, the researchers argue, carry over into a variety of situations. 

What parents and communities can do 

Dr. Brussoni points to three key ingredients that support children's risky outdoor play: time, space and freedom. For parents, that means carving out real unstructured time every day, finding interesting places to play with other children-not just the boring, cookie-cutter equipment many kids quickly outgrow-and then stepping back enough to let children actually play, including taking the kinds of small physical risks that feel scary to watch. For parents who struggle to resist jumping in, Dr. Brussoni offers a simple trick: count to 17 before saying "be careful." It's just long enough to shift from a fear response to a more considered one. 

For communities, it means cultivating collective understanding around the importance of risky play and independent mobility for children, and ensuring there are natural and creative spaces for play that are as safe as necessary, rather than as safe as possible. 

The study was published earlier this month in the Journal of Environmental Psychology.