The Prevalence of Risky Play in Young Children’s Indoor and Outdoor Free Play

Abstract

Research on children’s risky play and young children’s risk taking is a relatively new research area that has drawn the attention of many researchers in the last decades. Nevertheless, to our knowledge, no earlier studies have measured the prevalence of risky play when children can freely choose what to play, with whom, and where. Most research on risky play has also exclusively focused on outdoor play. This study aims at examining the occurrence and characteristics of children’s risky play, indoors and outdoors, in early childhood education and care (ECEC) institutions. Children (N = 80) were observed in two-minute sequences during periods of the day when they were free to choose what to do. The data consists of 1878 randomly recorded two-minute videos, which were coded second by second for the occurrence of several categories of risky play. Results revealed that risky play was registered in 10.3% of the total data material. The data is further analysed to explore distribution among different types of risky play, as well as differences between gender, age and environment (indoors vs. outdoors).

Associations between Children’s Risky Play and ECEC Outdoor Play Spaces and Materials

“…The descriptive results in this study ( Table 1 ) show that children engage in risky play on average 13% of the outdoor free play time in ECEC. As already reported from other parts of this project, the amount of risky play is equal to other common types of play such as symbolic/dramatic play, and almost all children seem to engage in risky play to some level [ 71 ]. The present results show that the risky play mostly consisted of play with high speed and play in great heights, and some rough-and-tumble play.…”

Outdoor Playground Design Criteria Development for Early Childhood Development: A Delphi Study from the Perspective of Fundamental Movement Skills and Perceptual-Motor Skills

“…Furthermore, allowing risky play in outdoor playgrounds is one of the essential factors for the development of children. This generates fresh insight into outdoor playground design, which tends to limit risky action and movements from happening to protect children from danger [ 21 , 54 ].…”

Adventurous Play as a Mechanism for Reducing Risk for Childhood Anxiety: A Conceptual Model

“…1–3 years of age; Kleppe et al 2017 ), and across early and middle childhood (e.g. 4–13 years of age; Coster and Gleave 2008 ; Sandseter 2007 ; Sandseter et al 2020 ), there is some evidence that the prevalence of engagement in adventurous play activities increases with child age (Kleppe et al 2017 ; Sandseter et al 2020 ). This is likely to be because with increasing age most children develop the more advanced gross and fine motor, cognitive and social-emotional skills necessary to support healthy risk-taking during adventurous play activities such as climbing trees, riding a bike at speed and play fighting with peers.…”