We’re working hard to shift the conversation regarding child safety to include risk as a conduit for learning, rather than a situation that must be avoided. When adults who design childhood play spaces have the ability to assess risk and see risk as a benefit, children become competent risk takers and better understand through experience how to keep themselves safe. For more discussion on the topic of risk assessment see Tim Gill’s thought provoking blog Playgrounds that rip up the safety rules.
A safe person is not someone who abstains from risk, but rather a person who can assess risk and decide what they are physically and emotionally capable of. Risk is not synonymous with danger, although a person who does not have the opportunity to experience risk, and internalize that experience, will not have the tools they need when they do encounter real danger.
Whenever I travel I make a point of visiting parks and open spaces. I’m always curious how playgrounds and parks are developed, and what chances, if any, are there for local residents to have some good risky play.
Swedish Climbing Tree
It is equally interesting how individual homes use design and landscaping in order to provide good risk, or completely risk-free, play spaces.
Everyone involved in the lives of young children agrees on the importance of keeping children safe; however, few know how to provide real assessments of potential risk or constructive ways to manage it. Other parts of the world are way ahead of the U.S. in creating dialogue, instituting policy and truly considering ways to assess risk in children’s play spaces. They focus much more on how to provide optimal benefits for children, instead of how to take all the risk out in order to try to minimize every possible litigation scenario. The organization PlayEngland has worked with the British government to shape policy regarding children’s public play spaces. With the help of Tim Gill of Rethinking Childhood, PlayEngland provides an implementation guide for managing risk for professionals who manage and create many different kinds of play spaces. You can see from the table below that many factors are considered. How different would our American play spaces be if we too thought more carefully and completely about benefits versus risk?
Risk-Benefit Assessment
Flying
Post by Jonathan Iris-Wilbanks, with Susan Caruso
© Sunflower Creative Arts, 2012
Jonathan – thanks very much for picking up on my post. Your extract of our play safety guide is pretty much the head, heart and guts of that document. Some may find it a scary list. So much easier to tick boxes, or pay someone else to! But of then weighing up pros and cons, risks and benefits, outcomes and side-effects, is complicated. Because children are complicated. And the way we grown-ups interact with children is complicated. And by the way: I think the “completely risk-free play space” is an impossibility. Children are too creative!
Keep flying the flag for a balanced, thoughtful approach to risk.
I feel that the entire conversation and movement celebrates the complexity of children.
To really honor their complexity we have to provide them with these challenging spaces for growth. It’s such a benefit to reference your work, it helps us send the clear message we are not respecting children by taking the easy “check-list safety” approach.
I’m always saddened when I find a play space where a risk-free design is the goal.
Thank you so much for visiting and commenting! We’ll keep the flag high, you keep providing the wind!
Risk has recently been a topic between me and my husband at supper time. My husband, 30 years of age, complained to me about the lack of sport facilities in the public parks.
My husband’s childhood was spent growing up in Uzbekistan. He spoke fondly of the military style training apparatus available for teenagers & adults to utilise when in the local parks. In fact every park had it’s own apparatus, to which he and many other teenagers/young adults spent many hours practicing on them.
When my husband came to England at 17yrs, he was shocked to see no parks had any exercising equipment. Only twice has he came across such apparatus, one in Primrose Hill (London) and one in Gloucestershire, which has since been dismantled due to high risk?
I thought about this, and remembered many military style apparatus in local parks near to where i grew up in Gloucestershire, but coming to think about it now, they have all been removed.
So, where to go for more advanced and challenging action as a teenager/young adult? Local parks certainly can’t offer this due strict health and safety regulations.
What is out there to keep the younger generation occupied? Computer games? A few skate parks? Even the skate parks are limited to the size of jumps.
Risk is needed in order to grow and experience body boundaries and our spacial awareness.
Restrictions feel prominent in todays society.
Where can we go from here?