Dr. Helen Dodd, Professor of Child Psychology at the University of Exeter, studies the link between children's play and anxiety, and her work proposes something that sounds backwards until you sit with it: the climbing, speeding, height-seeking play that makes parents nervous may be one of childhood's natural defences against anxiety itself.
Helen Dodd is Professor of Child Psychology at the University of Exeter and one of the UK's leading researchers on children's play and anxiety. That pairing of subjects is the point. Most anxiety research starts inside the clinic, with children who are already struggling; most play research stops at the playground gate, with motor skills and social development. Dodd's work joins the two, asking what the ordinary, scabby-kneed business of childhood play does for a child's emotional development, and what it costs a generation when that play quietly disappears.
She is worth listening to because she takes both halves seriously. She is not a nostalgist arguing that children were tougher in the old days, nor an alarmist about climbing frames. She is a child psychologist asking a precise question: when a child feels a flutter of fear on a high branch and carries on anyway, what is that experience doing to the machinery that handles fear?
Dodd's central proposal concerns what she and her colleague Kathryn Lester call adventurous play: the thrilling, slightly scary play children seek out for themselves. Climbing high. Going fast. Balancing on things not designed for balancing. Getting out of sight of the adults. In a 2021 paper in Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, Dodd and Lester set out the case that this kind of play is not merely something anxiety-prone children avoid. It may be a mechanism that reduces the risk of childhood anxiety developing in the first place.
The logic runs like this. Anxiety, at its core, is a problem of handling fear and uncertainty: the anxious child overestimates threat, underestimates their own ability to cope, and learns to manage the feeling by avoiding it. Adventurous play is a training ground for exactly those skills, in miniature and at a dose the child controls. The girl edging along the top of the wall feels real fear, in a small, chosen quantity. She does not know quite how it will go: that is the uncertainty. She wobbles, adjusts, makes it to the end or jumps down early, and either way she has just rehearsed the thing anxiety makes impossible: feeling afraid, staying in the situation, and discovering she could cope. Repeat that hundreds of times across a childhood and you have graduated exposure practice, administered not by a therapist but by the child herself, at a pace her own nerve sets.
The second half of the argument is the uncomfortable one. Modern childhood systematically under-supplies these rehearsals. Across decades, children's freedom to roam, climb and take small physical risks has shrunk: more supervision, safer equipment, less time outdoors, fewer chances to be briefly, deliciously out of sight. Dodd and Lester's point is that if adventurous play really does help protect children against anxiety, this quiet removal of risk is not a neutral act of care: a generation given fewer chances to practise fear may simply be less practised at it. The paper is a theoretical review, proposing a mechanism and mapping the evidence around it rather than reporting a single decisive experiment, and Dodd is careful about that. But the mechanism is plausible, and the practical bet it suggests has very little downside.
The source
Dodd & Lester (2021), Adventurous Play as a Mechanism for Reducing Risk for Childhood Anxiety, Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review · Read the original
First, honesty about what the evidence is and is not. This is a proposed mechanism, not a proven cure, and nobody is suggesting that a climbing frame replaces professional help for a child who needs it. What the work supports is something gentler: a shift in the default. When a parent's instinct says "be careful, come down, hold my hand", it is worth knowing that the wobble you are tempted to prevent may be doing useful work.
For under-5s, adventurous play does not mean cliff edges. At this age the doses are tiny and everywhere: the arm of the sofa, the second step, the log in the park, running down a slope slightly too fast for their legs. The key ingredients from Dodd's account are that the fear is real but small, the challenge is chosen by the child, and the adult resists the urge to remove either. The practical move is to swap "be careful" for watching, and to swap rescuing for waiting. A child who is allowed to feel the flutter, hold it, and find their own way down has just banked a rehearsal. A child lifted off at the first wobble has banked a different lesson: that fear means an adult must intervene.
None of this requires bravado from the parent. You set the outer boundary; the child explores freely inside it. That is not negligence. On Dodd's account, it is provision.
Here is the quiet genius of the traditional garden game: it is adventure with the permission slip already signed. A proper game has real stakes, real misses and real wins, and a child feels every one of them in the body. Nothing is rigged, nothing is padded, and that is precisely what makes it useful.
Picture a four-year-old at the throwing line with a set of wooden garden skittles →. The ball is solid hardwood, heavier than she expects, and the pins stand nine paces away, which from her height looks like the far side of the county. There is a flutter as she lines it up, because she might miss, and everyone is watching, and the flutter is the whole point. She bowls. The ball curves wide and dies in the flowerbed, and the miss is real: no second life, no consoling chime. She fetches it, sets her feet differently, and goes again. When the strike finally comes, the clatter of falling pins is a genuine victory over a genuine uncertainty, and the look on her face is not the glazed satisfaction of a screen reward. It is pride, which is what coping feels like from the inside.
Around the skittles sits the whole family of outdoor games →: quoits that fall short, hoops that bounce out, towers that crash. Jaques London has been making them since 1795, longer than any games company in the world, and the firm that invented croquet in 1851 built its trade on exactly this contract: a game worth playing must be allowed to be lost. Every miss a child shrugs off in the garden is a small rehearsal in feeling the sting of uncertainty and staying in the game, which is Dodd's mechanism wearing its Sunday clothes. The garden game will not carry a child up the climbing tree, but it trains the same muscle at ground level, with the kettle on.
The original paper, Adventurous Play as a Mechanism for Reducing Risk for Childhood Anxiety, is surprisingly readable and worth an evening of any parent who has ever hovered under a climbing frame. On this site, the case for unhurried, child-led challenge continues in why real play matters, the family version of garden adventure is in garden games for families, and the related argument that children profit from struggle is in why boredom is good for kids.
The phrase makes it sound more dramatic than it is. The adventurous play in Dodd's work is climbing, speed, rough-and-tumble and small doses of chosen fear, with the adult still setting the outer boundary: a tree in the park, not a motorway. Minor scrapes are part of the deal, serious injury is not, and a child's own caution is a better regulator than parents tend to credit: children rarely choose a challenge far beyond their nerve.
Pushing is the wrong tool, because the protective ingredient in adventurous play is that the child chooses the dose. For an anxious child the useful move is to shrink the challenge until it is one they will pick up willingly, then let them own it: the second rung rather than the top, the underarm throw from a closer line. If anxiety is significantly affecting your child's daily life, that is a conversation for your GP, not a climbing frame.
Not entirely, but it is worth noticing how often it comes out and what it teaches when it arrives before anything has actually gone wrong. A constant soundtrack of caution tells a child that the world is more dangerous than it is and that fear is a signal to stop. Watching quietly, or asking "what's your plan for getting down?", keeps you present without taking over the risk assessment that the play exists to practise.
The adventure is emotional, not vertical. What Dodd's mechanism needs is real uncertainty, a real possibility of failure, and the experience of staying in the game anyway. A proper garden game supplies all three: the throw might miss, the tower might fall, somebody loses for real. It is the same rehearsal at a lower height, and it is adventure a hesitant child will actually volunteer for.
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