Author’s practical guidance
Safe risk-taking
Source named in the book: risky play research (Sandseter) · RIE (Gerber)
Children climb higher than you want, jump off things, go fast downhill and wrestle.
Say this now
“Look at where your feet are going.”
Direct their attention instead of your own anxiety. Specific beats careful.
“Can you get down on your own?”
The question they should be asking themselves. Ask it before they are stuck, not after.
Do this
- Check the ground, not the height. What matters is what is underneath.
- Let them climb up only as far as they can climb down. That rule does most of the work.
- Say the specific hazard once — "that branch is thin" — then stop talking.
- Stand back far enough that they have to judge it themselves.
- Notice your own flinching. A good deal of "be careful" is about the adult, not the drop.
Avoid this
- "Be careful!" every few minutes — too vague to act on, and it interrupts the concentration that keeps them safe.
- Lifting them down from something they climbed up themselves.
- Hovering close enough to catch them from every height.
If it repeats
Seeking height and speed is strong from two and peaks between four and seven. What improves with practice is not caution but accuracy — children who climb often get better at knowing what they can do, which is a different thing from doing less.
Why the book suggests this
Children climb higher than you want, jump off things, go fast downhill and wrestle. This is not a failure of judgment. Researchers who study risky play describe it as a category children actively seek out — height, speed, rough-and-tumble, being briefly out of sight — and one that appears in every culture where children are allowed it.
The awkward finding is that removing the risk removes the learning. Judging what your body can do is worked out by trying things near the edge, and a child who is stopped every time arrives at six with the same impulses and less information.
From this collection
Same Words: Big Skills
45 prepared situations in this family area.