Dr. Mariana Brussoni of the University of British Columbia studies what children gain from risky outdoor play, and her evidence suggests we have been protecting them from the wrong thing.
Dr. Mariana Brussoni is a Professor at the University of British Columbia and a developmental psychologist with an unusual double specialism: children's outdoor risky play, and injury prevention. That combination matters. She is not a romantic arguing that children should climb trees because childhood used to be better; she comes from the field whose entire job is to stop children getting hurt. Her research, gathered at the Brussoni Lab, asks the question the injury-prevention world had largely skipped: when we remove risk from children's play, what do we remove along with it?
It is precisely because she sits on both sides of the ledger, the benefits of challenge and the costs of injury, that her conclusion carries weight. A play advocate telling you to relax is easy to dismiss. An injury researcher telling you the same thing is worth hearing out.
Brussoni's central finding comes from a systematic review, the kind of study that gathers everything the research record holds on a question and weighs it together. The question was simple: what happens to children who engage in risky outdoor play, the climbing, the speed, the rough-and-tumble, the playing at height and out of immediate adult reach? The answer ran against half a century of parenting instinct. Risky outdoor play was associated with better physical health, better mental health, more physical activity and better social functioning. And, crucially, it was not associated with worse injury outcomes.
Sit with that last part, because it is the surprise. The entire architecture of modern caution, the softened playgrounds, the lowered climbing frames, the hovering, rests on an assumed trade-off: less risk in play means fewer hurt children, and the price in adventure is worth paying. Brussoni's review suggests the trade-off is largely an illusion. The benefits of risky play showed up clearly in the evidence; the feared cost, more and worse injuries, did not. Children who are allowed to test themselves do not, on the evidence gathered, end up in hospital more than children who are kept from testing themselves at all.
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Out of this evidence comes the phrase that has become the standard in her field: keep children "as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible". The two sound almost identical and are in fact opposites. As safe as possible removes every hazard it can find, and removes the challenge with it. As safe as necessary removes the hazards a child cannot see or judge, the broken glass, the traffic, the faulty equipment, and deliberately leaves the risks a child can see and choose: the height, the speed, the throw that might miss. The first standard asks "could anything go wrong here?" The second asks "is anything here genuinely beyond this child's growing judgement?" On Brussoni's evidence, the second question is the one that protects children, in both senses of the word.
The usual honesty applies. These findings are associational: the review found that risky play and good outcomes travel together, not that one was experimentally proven to produce the other, and children who are allowed more challenge may differ in other ways too. But the direction of the evidence is consistent, and the burden of proof has quietly shifted. It now sits with the assumption that maximum safety is doing children good.
Risky play for a three-year-old does not mean cliff edges. It means the small, real challenges that sit at the edge of what they can currently do: climbing slightly higher than is comfortable to watch, running down a slope a touch too fast, swinging something heavy, throwing at a target and missing, balancing on a wall with a wobble in it. The risk is real but proportionate, and the child can see it, which is the whole point. Judging a visible risk is a skill, and like every skill it is learned by practice, not by waiting until eighteen and hoping it arrives.
The practical shift Brussoni's work asks of parents is mostly a shift in what we say and where we stand. Standing two feet away with arms outstretched teaches a child that the adult is the safety system. Standing back a little, and swapping "be careful" for something concrete, "notice how that branch bends", "find a good place for your foot", teaches the child to run their own checks. Neither approach loves the child more; one of them trains judgement and the other postpones it.
It is also worth saying what this is not. It is not a verdict on cautious parents, who are responding rationally to a culture that treats every scrape as a failure of supervision. Brussoni's evidence is, if anything, a permission slip: the data does not support the guilt. The graze on the knee was never the danger. The childhood without grazes might be.
For most British families the laboratory for all this is not a forest or a mountainside. It is the garden: the safest dangerous place a child has. Inside the fence, the hazards a child cannot judge are already fenced out, no traffic, no strangers, no long drops, which means a parent can afford to leave the good risks in. The garden is "as safe as necessary" made of grass.
Watch what traditional garden games actually ask of a child and you see Brussoni's principle running quietly inside them. A four-year-old playing quoits is doing something genuinely uncertain: the rope ring has real weight, the throw can really miss, and everyone watching will see it miss. She steps closer, throws, misses, frowns, adjusts, and the third ring drops over the peg with a small definite thump that no screen has ever replicated. A game of garden skittles is the same education by other means: the heavy ball, the backswing she has to control so it does not fly anywhere silly, the clatter of pins or the silence of a miss. There is mild physical risk, mild social risk, and a steady supply of the thing risky play runs on, which is the real possibility of failure, survived and corrected in the open air.
This is the kind of challenge Jaques has been putting inside garden fences since 1795, longer than any games maker on earth, and a generation of grandparents will recognise every piece of it. Throwing, aiming, swinging, missing and trying again: a set of classic outdoor games → is, in Brussoni's terms, a box of well-judged risks. The equipment is honest, wood that is properly heavy, distances that genuinely test, and the child's own developing judgement does the rest. Nobody calls it risk training. The children involved call it a Saturday.
The best next step is the Brussoni Lab at UBC, which gathers her research and practical tools for rethinking risk at home. On this site, her evidence connects naturally to our guide to garden games for families, to the wider case in why real play matters, and to reducing toddler screen time, since the most reliable rival to a screen indoors is a worthwhile challenge outdoors.
Challenge at the edge of their current ability, where the risk is visible to the child: climbing, balancing, running fast, throwing and swinging things with real weight, playing slightly beyond arm's reach. It does not mean hazards a child cannot perceive or judge, like traffic, water or broken equipment. The working test is whether the child can see the risk and choose how to meet it.
This is exactly what Brussoni's systematic review checked, and the answer in the evidence was no: risky outdoor play was not associated with worse injury outcomes, while the benefits to health, activity and social functioning were consistent. Minor scrapes and bruises are part of the deal, but the feared rise in serious harm did not appear in the research record.
Remove what a child cannot judge, then leave the rest alone. Check the gate, the tools, the obvious hazards; then let the climbing, throwing, swinging and racing happen without narrating every step. A fenced garden already does most of the "necessary" work, which is what makes it such a good place to practise letting go of the "possible".
Swap the reflex for something specific. "Look where your feet are", "that's heavy, hold it with two hands", "throw when nobody is in front of you" all give the child information they can use, where "be careful" only transmits anxiety. The aim is not silence; it is handing the child the checklist, one concrete item at a time, until the checking voice is their own.
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