Brussoni – risk and hazard

The difference between risk and hazard, it’s actually, if you dig into it, it’s not as clear cut as one might think. But the way that we’ve been talking about it to help people kind of get their mind around it is that risks, they can have positive or negative outcomes. Risk is a neutral term. But we can think of risks as something that we want to maintain. So, for the child to be able to make a decision for themselves whether to engage in that activity, in that risk. With a hazard, we want to try and think about it around things that we think are too complex or too hazardous or dangerous for kids to manage. So, for example, broken equipment or things like that where the adult has to kind of look at the environment and see, let me manage some of the things that are going to be leading to more serious injury or death. We’re talking very serious injury or death. But I would also add caveats that there’s a lot of ways that you can involve kids in hazard management that can be really rich learning for them around, developing their risk management skills that they can take into all sorts of contexts. So even with risks, we want, even while our heart is in our throat, we’re like, oh, and you want to say, be careful. 

But it’s kind of stepping back and providing empowering support and scaffolding for that child. So that you’re helping them identify rather than just this is the way it’s going to be, then I don’t know how we expect kids to develop risk management skills when we don’t give them the opportunities to develop those skills. And in the context of play, we know from the injury research and data that it’s pretty much the safest context for them to be able to explore these skills. And so, what we’re really worried about and what we’re seeing in the data is that kids aren’t having the opportunities to develop these skills. They’re growing and then they’re adults and they’re, you know, they have to figure things out for themselves and they don’t have the skills to do so.