Jamie Bruce- Risky Business

I’m happy to admit that watching children go down a slide makes me anxious. I don’t like tunnels because I imagine collisions happening inside them. When children run wildly through puddles in the playground, I want them to slow down. Sandpits are where children go to get sand in their eyes, footballs are designed to knock people over, and absolutely everything can and will be a trip hazard. From my innate hatred of risky physical play, you might assume I was a timid and careful child myself. I was, however, quite the opposite. I spent more time up trees than on solid ground. I liked hanging from the branches and watching my feet swing, disembodied and heavy in the abyss below. In my childhood home, we had a shed under the house full of electric and manual tools, broken furniture, all manner of nails, screws, shards of glass and plugs. And I was allowed to use them all, and I did, all the time! I had scabby knees, splinters in not just my fingers, but my elbows, too. I was sunburnt and exhausted at the end of every day, but never cautioned about any of it. Some days, and this is truly a luxury of being young in the 90s, I would leave the garden without telling anybody, and walk down to the beach. There, I would walk barefoot through the mysteriously inhabited rockpools, dipping to sift my hand through seaweed and pick up strange and sometimes dangerous things. When I arrived home, nobody minded that I’d been on an adventure alone..in fact, it was celebrated.

Look at me now! What went wrong!? I could link my distrust of risk-taking to the fact that I broke my leg at school when I was nine, or that my sister fell off a bike and split her elbow open on the exhaust pipe of a car. Or there was that time my little brother ran headlong into a glass door… I’ve seen things go wrong. Maybe, it is my own understanding of the risks I see children take that makes them so hard to watch. I have an uncanny ability to see the future, anticipate the disaster, predict which arm that child will extend to catch themselves and what injury that will cause. I see the corner of a table and can hear the sound it will make if somebody falls into it. Letting children risk-take, like I was allowed to do, is, I know, essential. Every day, I try to put my mind at rest, see myself in those children, monitor from a distance, trusting they know what they are doing.

Risk-taking builds confidence, fluidity in gross motor skills, an understanding of the way things move or fall. Risk-taking means children better understand their own capabilities and boundaries. It also shows children that they will be ok, even if they become injured or scare themselves with a jump from something a little too high. They make links between previous attempts at risky tasks, and learn to change their behaviour or process to better achieve things. When I watch children attempting the climbing frame over and over, falling off it, and tripping on their laces, I try to remind myself of all bruised nails I endured in that shed, unsupervised, hitting nails with an adult-sized hammer. I try to let children be, just as I was left to be. I try to imagine their success rather than assume those risky attempts might go wrong, and remind myself that “going wrong” most likely just means a grazed knee or some temporary tears. This is a work in progress.