Dr. Ellen Beate Hansen Sandseter, the Norwegian professor who defined the six categories of risky play, argues that the scary-looking things children insist on doing are a built-in programme for outgrowing fear, and one that goes wrong when adults switch it off.
Ellen Beate Hansen Sandseter is Professor at Queen Maud University College of Early Childhood Education in Norway, and she is the researcher who gave the world a vocabulary for something every parent has watched with their heart in their mouth. Children, left to themselves, do not play safely. They climb higher than they need to, run faster than is sensible, swing sticks, wrestle, wander out of sight and edge towards the very things they have been told to avoid. Before Sandseter, this looked like a discipline problem. After her, it has a name and a purpose.
Her contribution was to define risky play and sort it into six categories: play with great heights, play with high speed, play with dangerous tools, rough-and-tumble play, play where children can disappear from an adult's sight, and play near dangerous elements. Once you see that these six appetites show up in children everywhere, deliberately and universally, the question stops being "what is wrong with my child?" and becomes the one Sandseter set out to answer: what is all this risk-seeking for?
Sandseter's answer, developed with Kennair in a 2011 paper in Evolutionary Psychology, is that risky play has an anti-phobic function. Young children naturally carry a set of fears: of heights, of speed, of separation, of the unknown. Those fears are useful in an infant, but crippling in an adult, so childhood needs a mechanism for dismantling them. Risky play, on this account, is that mechanism. When a child climbs a little higher than feels comfortable, she is exposing herself to the feared thing in a dose she has chosen, in a state of thrilled excitement rather than terror. Do that again and again, each time a rung further, and the fear is gradually extinguished. The child ends up competent and calm around the very thing that once frightened her.
What makes this account so striking is how closely the child's method matches the adult cure. Graduated, self-paced exposure to a feared stimulus is essentially how phobias are treated clinically. Sandseter and Kennair's argument is that children come fitted with the treatment as standard: the urge to seek out heights, speed, tools, tussles, hiding places and forbidden edges is evolution's exposure programme, run through play. The wobble at the top of the climbing frame is not a failure of supervision. It is the therapy working.
The uncomfortable corollary is what happens when the programme is blocked. If risky play is how childhood fears get extinguished, preventing it may leave those fears intact, carried into an age where they no longer fit. Sandseter and Kennair's evolutionary account proposes exactly this: children deprived of age-appropriate risk may end up more fearful and more anxious, not less. A generation raised under maximum supervision, on soft surfaces, indoors and on screens, has been protected from the scraped knee at a possible cost to the thing risky play exists to build: a mind that has met fear in small doses and worn it out.
The source
Sandseter & Kennair (2011), Children's Risky Play from an Evolutionary Perspective, Evolutionary Psychology · Read the original
First, the honest caveat. The 2011 paper is a theoretical account: an argument from evolutionary reasoning about what risky play is for, not a controlled trial proving that restricting it causes anxiety. The claim that prevention leaves fears intact is a well-argued proposal, and it sits alongside, rather than replaces, a parent's judgement about a real child on a real climbing frame.
What the account does change is how you read your child's behaviour. The two-year-old who insists on the big slide, the three-year-old who climbs the arm of the sofa, the four-year-old who wants to carry the heavy thing, hide where you cannot see her, or run down the slope flat out: these are not lapses to be trained away. They are a child working through the curriculum Sandseter described, at the dose her own nervous system has selected. The useful parental move is rarely to forbid the category. It is to manage the setting: a softer landing, a closer eye, a better tool, then let the child feel the flutter of fear, master it, and come back taller.
It also reframes the quiet child on the tablet. A screen is the lowest-risk activity ever devised, which is exactly why it should not fill the hours in which fears are meant to be met and worn down.
You do not need a fjord or a forest kindergarten to run Sandseter's programme. A British garden on an ordinary Saturday contains most of the six categories, provided the adults let it. A box of traditional garden games turns out to be a well-judged delivery system for risk in measured doses, refined over generations by people who never read an evolutionary psychology journal but knew exactly how much wobble a child could handle.
Consider what is actually going on out there. A five-year-old gripping a rounders bat or a croquet mallet is engaged in play with a tool: a real one, with weight and consequence, that must be swung with care because her brother is standing too close, and she knows it, and learns from knowing it. The full-tilt sprint between makeshift bases is play with speed, lungs burning, legs only just keeping up. The tree at the lawn's edge the game somehow always requires somebody to climb: heights, in doses. The wrestle for the nearly-caught ball is rough-and-tumble with a referee no sterner than a laughing parent. Even disappearing from sight gets its turn, behind the shed, in the long grass, in every game of hide and seek the equipment inspires. A set of traditional garden games → is, looked at through Sandseter's eyes, a graduated exposure kit disguised as a present.
Jaques London has been provisioning this kind of afternoon since 1795, and the world's oldest games company invented croquet in 1851: a game that hands a child a long mallet, a hard ball and the family's trust, all at once. The heft of the thing in small hands is the point. A toy that cannot hurt anything teaches nothing about care; a real wooden mallet, swung under a watchful eye, teaches a child that she can be trusted with something that matters. That is the Norwegian permission slip, written out in beech: not "anything goes", but "this much, today, with me nearby". The outdoor games collection → is full of such permissions, each calibrated by generations of children who survived them splendidly.
The original paper, Children's Risky Play from an Evolutionary Perspective, is surprisingly readable, and it will change what you see at the top of a climbing frame. On this site, garden games for families shows measured doses of speed and tools on an ordinary lawn, why real play matters sets risky play in the wider case for the physical world, and the expert library gathers the other researchers whose evidence points the same way.
No, and the distinction is the whole craft of it. A risk is something a child can see, feel and choose: the height of the branch, the speed of the run, the weight of the mallet. A hazard is something she cannot assess: the rotten rung, the broken glass, the unfenced pond. The parent's job is to remove what the child cannot judge, then stop removing the things she can, because judging them is precisely the skill being built.
A child who seeks thrills hard is usually running the programme enthusiastically, not malfunctioning. The dose is self-selected: children climb to the height that thrills them, not the height that terrifies them. Your leverage is the environment, not the appetite. Offer better outlets, softer landings and real supervision, and save the hard "no" for genuine hazards he cannot see for himself.
Stand closer rather than forbidding further. Many parental vetoes are really treatments for the parent's fear, not the child's safety, and the honest fix is to position yourself where you could help, then let the moment run. It also helps to lower the stakes: a garden game with real wooden pieces gives a child speed, tools and competition in doses the equipment has already moderated. You are allowed to find it hard. You are not required to act on it.
Yes, scaled. Risky play begins with the sofa cushion climbed, the slope toddled down too fast, the brief hide behind the curtain. The categories are the same, the doses smaller, the supervision closer. A toddler's wobble on a low wall with your hand an inch from her back is the same anti-phobic machinery as the eight-year-old's tree climb. The mistake is treating the flutter of fear as a signal to stop everything, when it is usually the signal that the play is working.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.