The children were rowdily queuing up to take turns jumping from the impromptu "diving board" they had created from a plank of wood that they had rigged up. The distance from springboard to the ground was less than two feet. A few leapt fearlessly, hurling their bodies into the air with abandon, but most were more cautious, some exceedingly cautious, and many remained on the sidelines, watching.
This was, in the eyes of most of the children, risky business. They didn't need adults hanging around cautioning them. They most definitely didn't need anyone commanding them to
"be careful." They were all, clearly, approaching this self-created, self-selected challenge with the knowledge that pain was a possible consequence and were taking due measures.
One of my wife's relatives, a man who had made pediatric orthopedic devices for a living, was famous within the family for having regularly joked that "Kids are always trying to kill themselves" which was in large measure, he claimed, why he remained in business. It was an edgy joke, one I'm sure he rarely made in front of the families he served, but it echoes an attitude that many of us carry with us about young children: they may not be trying to get hurt, but they are certainly too ignorant, innocent, careless, and foolhardy to be trusted with their own assessment of risk.
Our first responsibility as adults working with young children is safety. We tend to define a "safe environment" for children as one in which injuries are rare. All preschools and child care centers have safety protocols. Hazards are identified and removed. Rules are made to prevent children from engaging in activities the adults deem too risky. Educators are often called to the carpet, fired, or even sued when a child is injured on their watch. Yet we all know, just as did the children lining up for this diving board (which would likely be banned in many settings), that complete certainty and safety in life is impossible.
And I think most of us also know, or at least we should know, that if we ever managed to create a completely certain and safe environment, it would be a kind of hell on earth. Novels of dystopia are written about futures in which the only freedom is the freedom from risk.
Recent Teacher Tom's Podcast guest Lenore Skenazy's
Free Range Kids movement emerged from the recognition that in our extreme efforts to keep children safe we are inadvertently teaching our children (and parents) to be incompetent and fearful.
Gever Tulley's book
Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do) is a stark reminder of how our culture's anxious embrace of safety at all costs is a very recent phenomenon, one that robs children of an authentic childhood.
In another recent conversation on the podast with Australian parent educator Maggie Dent, we discuss how this cultural fear of risk and independence has become a kind of self-perpetuating spiral for both children and their parents. "The fundamental needs of children haven't changed," she tells us, "but the world has," in both real and imaginary ways. We're not likely to go back to a world in which one parent stayed home with the kids, for instance, but we can do something about the over-abundance of scripted toys which Maggie says tend to limit creative thinking and problem solving. But more importantly, we can do something about these untethered fears of children "killing themselves" through their own ignorance or being harmed by skulking strangers that has lead to a generation of children (and parents) that is more passive and anxious than children in the past. They are less resilient, have poorer self-regulation, and are struggling with both fine and gross motor skills. Independent play, including risky play, Maggie tells us, is the cure.
At least once a day, someone writes or says to me that they genuinely want to offer their kids more independence and the opportunity for risk, but say they are stopped by their own fears. What I want to share here is some of the thinking that helped me both as a parent and early childhood educator to get my mind around the more philosophical and psychological side of risk and especially how it promotes the often forgotten virtue of courage.
Not only is life without risk impossible, but a life without it is no life at all, which is to say the only absolute certainty and safety is death itself. The great American psychologist William James wrote: "It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all." One of the great problems, according to James, is that life is full of decisions and most of the time we're forced to decide even when the evidence is less than fully persuasive either way. In other words, no matter how scientifically we approach our decisions, no matter how carefully we analyze the data, no matter how orderly our row of ducks, at the end of the day every important decision we make first requires us to make a decision about what to believe.
In our scientific age, however, deciding what to believe is a kind of sacrilege. It calls into question the very concept of truth. It requires faith that takes us outside of the realm of evidence. When those children edged out to the end of the diving board, contemplated, then leapt, they were not thinking about educating their vestibular systems or developing their pre-frontal cortexes, they were choosing to believe that they would land safely. And those who turned around and edged back to the security of the solid ground were choosing to believe that they would not . . . At least not today.
We worry about the kid who leaps, but we should be at least equally worried, perhaps more so, about the child who never chooses to leap.
Courage is the ancient virtue that is called forth when we choose to believe, then act. And courage only comes to those who practice. Indeed, the more we practice behaving courageously, as these children were doing, the more courageous we become. This is how we reverse the spiral of fear, by creating a counter-spiral of courage.
As I stood watching the children, I saw them grow, before my eyes, more courageous with each effort. Before long, those who chose to believe, were believing more and more courageous things about themselves: leaping higher, farther, and faster until they had played the risk out of this game and were ready for another. And, as the game went on, many of those who at first chose not to believe began to.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that "action is character" an assertion that is supported by both neuroscience and social research. The more people engage in day-to-day acts of courage, which is choosing to believe that they will stick their landings, the more courageous they become. Having the courage to act in the face of uncertainty is the very definition of human freedom.
It takes courage to step back and watch our children step off into the unknown based on nothing more than faith, but when we as adults find the courage within ourselves to let go, we find, one small step a time that we can reverse the spiral of fear into which we have, as a culture, fallen. At the end of the day, practicing courage is not just the antidote to fear, but it is also the only path to freedom.
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We live in a world of fear around allowing children even a modicum of independence and risk in their play. This 6-week course will help you develop the tools, knowledge, and mindset to overcome a fearful world and offer the children in your life an authentic childhood, in which they learn resilience and courage through their independent play. If this sounds like something you want for the children in your life, get on the waitlist for the 2024 cohort for Teacher Tom's Risky Play. Together, we will explore how we can, even in today's fearful world, offer children the kind of playfully risky childhood's they need and deserve. To learn more and to get on the waitlist, click here. 
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