Battle and Walden – introducing risky play

Melinda:  You will work with people who are very uncomfortable with risk but then I always say take baby steps.  Start with something that’s a little bit risky for you and let the children do something that’s a little bit risky for you and then eventually you’re going to see that they’re capable of doing it and then you can add to it.  You can go to the next step.  So as a caregiver, that’s something that you can do to work your way up to something that’s a little bit more risky.  Do what you feel comfortable and once you see that they’re capable, you’re going to want to go to that next step so that they learn more.   

Marc:  And please don’t project your fears and that’s the other thing that we see a lot of is that caregivers are projecting their fears on to children of these sort of risky activities or they’re overthinking these activities and projecting these terrible fears on these children.  And I always tell adults, keep your fear to yourself, you know, and overcome your fear yourself but do not give it now to a child.  And that’s what happens when they say the “oh, you’ll get hurt” or “you’ll do this” and we deny that.   

Melinda:  And usually they say the word ‘no’ a lot, right?  And if you’re overusing the word ‘no’, ‘no’ doesn’t have the same meaning behind it when you actually do mean no because there’s a dangerous thing that’s happening.  So I say instead of saying no, say, “well, how can we do this?” and let’s assess the risk so that everybody feels comfortable.  

Marc:  Taking a chance, a lot of times ECEs, “well, I agree with this.  This is understandable.  I know what it does for development.  I know that a baby is all about taking a chance ‘cause that’s how you learn how to walk.  A preschooler’s all about taking a chance because that’s how you build your self-esteem.  A school-ager’s all about taking a chance ‘cause that’s how they’re creating their whole self-concept around that.  But now we have families who usually try to stop us from doing chancier things or they sort of pipe up when we’re doing some of these activities.  And I would say I feel so bad for parents today, you know.  They are so overwhelmed with so much information, so much caution on the news.  Something can happen in Thailand and everybody assumes that’s going to happen to their child here.  So there’s a tremendous amount of fear.  The media’s doing it, the experts are doing it.  I always tell parents, you know, if you want the real advice about dealing with your children, talk to a grandmother.  Talk to a grandmother because they can put those things together.  But there’s a real fear out there and there’s a real fear about having that risk.  And as we said earlier, one of the ways we did it with that project was we met with families and we talked in a very honest way about risk and what are the consequences of it, what’s the reward.  And we started with them as a child.  What did you gain from the risky activities you did as kid and what did you learn?  And once we focused on those beautiful consequences of taking a chance, that started to open up the ideas about risk for families.  They, again, they started to remember, you know, this is what happens when you take a chance which I think is one of the big places to start. 

Melinda:  The good thing about being an ECE is that you get to have the chance to build a wonderful relationship with the parents and that’s really the foundation of you being able to take risks with children.  Because if you have that relationship where the parent trusts you and you educate them about the benefits of taking risks or taking a chance, they’re more likely to let you try new things and you can ease them over by giving them tidbits of what you’re going to do and how you’re doing to do it safely.   

Marc:  And also showing the pictures.  Again, what we’ve been talking about this – documenting what you do.  Broadcast to parents this is why we took the children down to the river.  It wasn’t because we wanted to test out risk.  We took it down because we wanted to see what was going to happen, what relationships were going to be formed, what are they going to learn?  And we broadcasted that.  So our learning story or our documentation was actually very little about risk, it was more about what happened and what was gained from this opportunity.