Recent research published in Journal of Environmental Psychology Our findings suggest that children who engage in risky play tend to develop better risk management skills for real-world situations. This study provides evidence that physical opportunities during playtime can help children learn to more effectively avoid serious hazards, such as crossing a busy street. Children who took more risks on the playground were able to make safer decisions faster when passing through a simulated busy intersection.
Risky play refers to activities that involve uncertainty and physical thrills. Examples include climbing tall buildings, traveling at high speeds, and exploring the neighborhood without adult supervision. Adults often view these activities as dangerous. But letting kids test their bodies’ limits tends to promote resilience, physical conditioning, and emotional growth.
When children encounter physical risks, they engage in a behavioral framework known as a dynamic risk management model. The first step in this model is an emotional process called risk appetite, which includes a child’s natural interest in taking on physical challenges. You will also practice risk assessment, which is the cognitive process of assessing danger before acting. Finally, they address risk response. This refers to the actual physical movements needed to get through a situation.
Over time, this repeated cycle of recognizing a task and taking physical action helps children build a mental map of their abilities. This continuous learning cycle is known as the perception-action loop. Through trial and error, children learn to interpret cues in their environment and adjust their body movements accordingly. Environmental psychologists refer to these environmental cues as affordances. Affordances are the physical opportunities for action that a particular space provides, depending on the child’s unique abilities.
Past research supports the idea that risky play builds general competence in traditional play environments. However, it remained unclear whether these skills transfer to entirely different, non-play scenarios. The current study aimed to test whether the benefits of risk-taking during childhood actually translate into practical safety skills such as pedestrian navigation.
Parents, schools, and policy makers have spent decades trying to make childhood safer by eliminating risk. But researchers theorize that if children don’t practice assessing and confronting small, manageable risks, they may not be able to develop the judgment needed for larger risks.
Mariana Brussoni, a professor in the Department of Pediatrics and Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia, director of the Human Early Learning Partnership, and research associate at the Children’s Hospital Research Institute of British Columbia, helped lead the study. “This dangerous play is a fundamental way for children to learn about the world, about themselves and how to keep themselves safe in different situations,” Brussoni said.
The authors also wanted to explore how different cultural environments shape children’s willingness to take advantage of physical opportunities. For example, Norwegian culture and national education policy actively encourage independent and risk-taking play outdoors. In contrast, Canadian settings tend to be characterized by a more restricted and supervised childhood. To investigate this, an international team of scientists from the University of British Columbia, Norway’s Queen Maud University School of Early Childhood Education, and Colorado State University collaborated on the project.
To safely observe children avoiding danger, researchers used immersive virtual reality technology developed by Queen Maud University’s ViRMa project. This allowed scientists to place children in simulated dangerous environments without actually causing physical harm. A remarkable 85% of children reported that the virtual reality environment felt realistic to them.
This technical approach was necessary because of the obvious dangers of testing pedestrian behavior in the real world. “I don’t think there’s an ethics committee in the world that would allow you to throw kids into a driveway to check on them,” Brussoni said. Brussoni co-authored the study with researcher Ellen Beate Hansen Sandsetter from Queen Maud University.
“Until we had access to this type of technology, we weren’t able to properly test this hypothesis,” Brussoni added. The sample consisted of 424 children aged 7 to 11 years. Specifically, this group included 361 Norwegian children and 63 Canadian children.
Each child completed two separate virtual reality tasks while wearing a specialized headset and moving around a real gymnasium. The first task was a playground scenario designed to measure appetite for risk and likelihood of failure. Children explored virtual structures made from balance beams and small freestanding columns. The simulated height varied throughout the structure and reached 1.5 meters at the highest point.
The researchers measured several variables to calculate an overall risk appetite score. They tracked how fast the children moved, how much time they spent at the most dangerous heights, and how often they climbed onto difficult self-supporting poles. Children were given 3 minutes to explore the virtual environment if they wanted. If a child lost their simulated balance and fell, it was recorded as a play failure.
The second task simulated an urban pedestrian traffic environment to measure risk management outside of a play context. Children had to decide when it was safe to cross a virtual bike path and a simulated road with oncoming traffic. The virtual vehicle moved at a constant speed of 5 meters per second. Traffic density was initially high and gradually decreased over time, making the crossing easier the longer children waited.
Scientists recorded children’s assessment times across six pedestrian tasks. This measurement recorded how long children waited before deciding to cross the road. On average, participants took approximately 107 seconds to evaluate the traffic across all trials. The researchers also tracked crashes and near misses, defined as crossings within 0.8 seconds of a moving vehicle. Across the sample, 27% of children were able to cross safely on all six trials.
Researchers found that Norwegian children showed a significantly higher willingness to take risks during playground tasks compared to Canadian children. This pattern holds even after controlling for age and gender differences. Canadian participants were slightly older on average, but still exhibited risk-averse behavior. In both cultural groups, older children and boys generally showed a higher willingness to take risks.
Among all participants, higher risk appetite increased the likelihood of falling from virtual play equipment. Overall, 21% of the children experienced a simulated fall during the playground scenario. Statistical modeling showed that a unit increase in a child’s risk appetite score increased the probability of a simulated fall by 78%. Researchers suggest that falling, stumbling, and trying again teaches children what they are capable of, where their limits are, and how to adjust.
Interestingly, an increased willingness to take risks during play led to more efficient decision-making in high-stakes traffic scenarios. Children who showed higher risk orientation on the playground spent significantly less time assessing the traffic situation before deciding to cross the road. For example, children with the highest risk appetite scores spent about 68 seconds less assessing traffic than children with the lowest scores.
Most importantly, this quick decision-making did not increase pedestrian accidents. The researchers observed that higher risk orientation was not associated with increased risky choices, such as collisions with virtual vehicles or near misses. Children with a higher appetite for risk simply processed environmental information faster, read the situation, and made safer crossing decisions more efficiently.
Although this study provides evidence for the benefits of risky play, readers should avoid interpreting these results as a recommendation to expose children to extreme or unmanageable risks. The concept of risky play revolves around challenges that can be handled to match the child’s growing physical abilities, rather than reckless risk-taking. The findings suggest that the playgrounds we design and the freedoms we give or withhold may shape children’s ability to navigate a complex world long after they leave the swing.
“Keeping children safe means putting them at risk,” Brussoni said. To support children’s risky play outdoors, Brussoni points to three key factors: time, space, and freedom. She suggests parents carve out real, unplanned time each day and find interesting places to play with other kids, rather than relying solely on standard play equipment that kids will quickly outgrow.
In that case, parents should step back enough to let their kids actually play. This includes tolerating small physical risks that you may find scary to watch. For parents who have a hard time resisting intervention, Brussoni suggests a simple trick. She recommends counting to 17 before saying “careful.” This short pause is long enough to transition from a fear response to a more considered response.
For communities, the findings demonstrate the need to develop a collective understanding of the importance of children’s risky play and independent mobility. This means having spaces for natural and creative play that are as safe as possible and as safe as necessary.
The authors note that their study has several limitations. Although the majority of children rated virtual reality environments as highly realistic, computer simulations cannot fully capture the complex physical nuances of the real world. The pedestrian task also used only one trial per difficulty level. Although this design choice reduced test fatigue, it limited the researchers’ ability to analyze how individual children’s behavior changed over multiple identical trials.
Additionally, the virtual reality setup was not designed to accommodate children who use mobility aids such as wheelchairs. This aspect of the methodology limits the ability to generalize the findings to children with a variety of physical disabilities. Scientists will need to adapt these virtual environments to ensure future studies include participants of all physical abilities.
Another notable detail is that the Canadian children were recruited from specific schools known for encouraging risky play outdoors. This school is not completely representative of the standard educational environment in Canada, so the sample may reflect an unusually high risk tolerance in this region. The true cultural gap in risk-taking between typical Norwegian and Canadian children may be even larger than what scientists observed in this particular study.
Future research might examine more diverse cultural populations and physical scenarios to see if these patterns hold true for different populations. Scientists may also develop new technical methods to track children’s behavior in actual, real-world environments to validate results collected from virtual reality simulations.
The study, “The Developmental Significance of Risky Play: A Transnational Virtual Reality Study,” was authored by Mariana Brussoni, Ellen Beate Hansen Sandsetter, Ole Johan Sand, Rasmus Kleppe, Megan Zeni, and Anita Bundy.
