The Only Way We Will Get There is With Parents as Our Allies

I recently led a workshop on the benefits of risky play for young children. I like to start these sessions off by sharing a story of risk from my own childhood. In this case, it involved an adventure that featured leaving our parents on the beach, climbing a rocky cliff that overlooked the ocean, eating found fruit, exploring a cave, then finding our way back to our parents by walking along a shoulder-less roadway as cars sped past. As far as risks from my own childhood go, it was a fairly middling story, illustrative, but not too hair-raising.

I then invite others to share their risky play stories. One educator told of getting wet in a creek after her mother explicitly warned her not to. She and her friends then went into their barn, poured gasoline into a pan, set it on fire, then used the flames to dry their clothing. Another spoke of jumping bicycles off the garage roof. There were other stories of similar ilk, all told with expressions of giddiness, even pride. This is what I'm accustomed to in these workshops: it gets the ball rolling and, I hope, causes educators to reflect on risky play as it relates to the children in their care.

These stories had been shared by educators who I judged to be older than 40, but this was an unusual workshop for me because there were a number of teenagers and very young adults in the room. I wanted a few more examples and since these young people had so far been silent, I coaxed one of them, a young man of about 20 to open up. He said, "Just last month I went night-camping for the first time because I'm working on my night camping certification. I worried because there are coyotes out there." He wore a similar look of giddiness and pride, but his story hurt my heart. By the time I was his age, I'd camped out on my own dozens of time, all without any sort of certification, and more than once without my parents' knowledge. 

I went on to another young person who told us that she had recently gone on her first road trip "alone with friends." The big risk was that they found themselves without "data" so their GPS didn't work and they had to find their way without it. That was every day for those of us who grew up in the 60's and 70's.

Of course, I've read about this phenomenon, young people being raised without the experience of genuine risk. They've lived their entire lives under adult supervision and now, as young adults themselves, the most risky thing they can imagine is to be without that supervision. They feel so "behind" to me. I worry about what they will do, what risks they will take, as they find themselves going off to college or getting their first full-time jobs, and discover themselves without their parents always at hand. Indeed, I've read about parents continuing to attempt to supervise their adult children from afar, checking up on them through professors, employers, and, yes, even drill sergeants. 

The most obvious impact is learned incompetence and anxiety, but more importantly these children are missing out on -- or at least delaying -- the cognitive, emotional, social, and physical benefits of what, until very recently, was considered "normal" childhood risk-taking: great heights, great speeds, rough-and-tumble play, dangerous tools and elements (like gasoline!), and disappearing or getting lost. Parents have never been particularly keen on allowing their children any of this, of course, even in the 60's and 70's, but when left to their own devices, children will naturally take risks, and learn from those risks, perhaps the most important lesson being how to balance courage with an accurate assessment the risk being contemplated. That was our certification.

I worry about these young people for whom the only relatively unsupervised space in their lives is the internet. I want to tell parents to back off, to trust their children enough to allow them to make mistakes, even if that results in occasional injuries or frightening moments. 

This is why I've always created opportunities for risky play in my work as an early childhood educator. These 2-5 year olds had both permission and opportunity to engaged in self-selected risk, to climb, to race about, to use hammers and saws and even some power tools, to wrestle and play with water, sand, rocks, and sticks. We even held regular family bonfires so that children could explore what it meant to safely play with fire.

And that's the point. As a cooperative preschool, the parents were right there learning how and when to step back and to step in, how to allow their children to gain confidence and courage, to practice resilience, to explore their limits, and to learn to keep themselves safe. None of this can be learned in an environment of hovering, scolding, and cautioning. I recall a mother once bringing her four-year-old inside to tend to a bloody knee. She deadpanned, "I should sue you," then we laughed because we both knew it was a joke, one that would not have been at all funny in a typical preschool. I'm proud that we offered the opportunity for that boy to risk a raspberry, but even more proud that we offered the opportunity for this parent to experience "normal" parenting.

It's from this experience and experiences like it that I've created my course for early childhood educators entitled Partnering With Parents (see below). We will likely never return to the 60's and 70's when good parenting meant sending your child outside, unsupervised, to learn through playing with the other kids, including risk-taking. But our preschools can be these kinds of places, but only if we actively seek to make their parents our allies.

So often, I hear educators complain about the parents of the children they teach. They don't understand. They helicopter. They complain about every bump or bruise. They really do threaten to sue. They want their babies indoors, learning their letters and if they must go outside, they insist on certifications for everything. 

But I have learned that this really isn't what they want, but rather what our modern world has taught them they should want . . . in the name of safety first. They've been lead to believe that not only is the world more dangerous than it really is, but that their children are incompetent. It's warping our world in ways that are harmful to all of us. Fear and anxiety is no way to go through life and it's the natural consequence of 24/7 supervision.

I hear myself. I sound a bit like one of those old codgers who pines for the good old days, and maybe I am, at least to an extent. Children did get hurt and even died doing stupid things in the 60's and 70's. But at the same time, I hope we can all agree that the pendulum has by now swung too far. I've spent my career advocating for our preschools to become the kind of middle ground in which we allow children the freedom to explore and experiment, even if sometimes that results in risky play. Of course, we still supervise, but with an understanding that if we are to allow our children to learn how to keep themselves safe, sometimes the best time to step in is after the knee is bloody. And the only way we will get there is with the children's parents as our allies.

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Sometimes it seems like the most challenging part of our job is dealing with parents. At the same time, we all know that it takes a village to raise a child. As preschool educators, we don't just educate children, but their families as well. For decades, I've been working in a place that puts the tricornered relationship of child-parent-educator at the center, and over that time I've learned a great deal about how to work with families to create the kind of village every child needs and deserves. I've assembled what I've learned course called Partnering With Parents in which I share my best thinking on how educators can and should make allies of the parents of the children we teach. Click this link to register for the 2025 cohort and to learn more. Discounts are available for groups. Registration closes at the end of this week, so act now!

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