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ShiftED Podcast #90 In Conversation with Mariana Brussoni: Safe as Necessary, Not as Possible
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What if keeping kids too safe is actually holding them back? In this episode, Chris sits down with UBC developmental psychologist Mariana Brussoni to unpack the science behind risky outdoor play — and why scraped knees might be exactly what children need. From brain development to recess culture, this conversation will change the way you see risk, childhood, and your role in both.
Welcome And Guest Introduction
Chris ColleyWelcome back everyone. We are at Shifted Ed Podcast, uh coming to you today. We are going to, as you all know, I love to talk about our young kids and I love to talk about outdoors, and we're combining those two beautifully together. I have Marianne Brussoni, who's coming into us, who is a developmental psychologist at a University of British Columbia, does tons of research in child play, injury, risky play, um, and all the kind of the research behind it, which when we're informed and we're smarter, we can defend our practice a lot better. And I think Marianna, it will add to that knowledge as we go through. But I guess before we start, I like to kind of like you've been at UBC for uh qu quite some time, and I mean you have this beautiful outdoor play, outsideplay.org website where you have all these amazing toolkits and information, and I'll share all that in our podcast descriptor because I encourage you listeners to go and check it out. There's some amazing practical stuff that can really help save the day. Um, but Mariana, I'd love to kind of start like what were some of those moments that brought you to doing this kind of research and your interest in it and how that kind of grew over over time to become, you know, kind of our our go-to person in Canada on these kinds of like risky play and letting kids play, developing them, you know, let how play develops them naturally. And can you kind of give us a little open into that journey that got you to where you are today?
From Injury Prevention To Risky Play
Dr. Mariana BrussoniSure, absolutely, Chris. And first let me say thank you so much for having me. It's a delight to be here and to talk to your listeners. Um, yeah, it's it wasn't a direct pathway. Couldn't have predicted it, to be honest. So I did my graduate work in developmental psychology. And once I came out of that, I was very convinced that I wanted to do something very applied. I wasn't wanting to do work or research that didn't have direct application to the real world. Um, so I came out of university and uh joined the BC Injury Research and Prevention Unit and got deep into injury prevention work from very early on, just back in 2001. Um, and one of the things that happened across that, so that's a field that's dominated by epidemiologists, or at the time it certainly was. And so what they do is they count incidences, in this case of injury. Um, and so you can imagine when all you do is count injuries and classify them, then pretty soon you want to get those numbers down and prevent them, which is good, great. Um, except if that's all you're thinking about, and especially as it comes to recreation, leisure, and in the case of children play and in particular child development issues. And so pretty early on, I was like, hmm, this kind of approach, which really translated to risk, is equivalent to danger or hazard. And therefore, we need to keep people and certainly children, especially, as safe as possible. Discomfort with that approach grew with me as I leaned further into injury prevention and really started thinking about the implications of that, especially with my developmental psychology background. It probably came more to a head, though, once I had my own kids. And I was like, well, I don't parent like this. I don't feel like I can, with all good conscience, tell other parents to parent like this. Um, and at the time I was doing research on parenting, actually, and more specifically fathering. And we were getting deep into the concepts of risk and safety. And so that introduced me to the field more generally, the the theory, the literature. Um, and around the same time, Ellen Sandsetter, who's an amazing Norwegian researcher, she started publishing her first work around risky play. And it was like a light bulb went off, you know, in terms of this, this is what this makes so much sense. And it's a it's a new way of thinking about risk and safety and injury prevention and child development. And so, really from then on, I just kind of dove in and and hoped that the injury prevention community would follow along with me. And, you know, there were some push and pull. But but in the end, we really, you know, there it's been incredibly supportive, and really it it it's an approach now that's quite accepted that we need to keep kids as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible.
Chris ColleyRight, right. Yeah, I um I love that. Thank you for that kind of walk down memory lane, is how you got to here. It it really reinforces a lot of what we're gonna talk about today. Um
Why Risky Play Is Essential
Chris Colleyand I think my first big question, because I think it this is kind of the overarching, that risky play is necessary for brain development. It's like, I mean, if we were to like strip it all back and just risky play and child development need, they need each other. Can you elaborate on that statement?
Dr. Mariana BrussoniYeah, and the more research that's done, the more that's just really, really clear. And so, you know, a few years ago, the focus was on physical activity, you know, and so you know, we discovered that kids were more physically active when they were outdoors and when they were taking risks than when they were indoors. But as we got deeper and deeper into kind of learning and as you say, you know, cognitive development, emotional development, and and even mental health, we realized how absolutely critical this was for many different reasons and how you can't actually replace it with it's irreplaceable with other kinds of play or experiences. And so, kind of to walk you through that, I mean, probably the easiest way, even if you or your listeners think back to your favorite play memory, most people were outside. A lot of people remember taking risks and this sense of joy and fun and hanging out with friends and just figuring it out as you went along and things went wrong, and it was like, okay, don't do that again, or things went right, and it was like, yeah, we did it, you know. And so all of those unique characteristics of risky play are really actually quite essential for development for many reasons. And so, if we can, if we get into cognitive development in particular, I mean, more generally, play is how kids are evolutionarily designed to learn, um, like from all time. And so the way that we have structured learning now is in some ways not consistent with our evolutionary, you know, approach, how we how we function in society. And so really getting back to play as a way of learning and risky play in particular. Uh, so if we think about the definition of risky play, that can be helpful because it's thrilling and exciting forms of play that involve uncertainty, and there's a chance of physical injury. And so the thrill and excitement comes from kids kind of pushing themselves beyond, you know, maybe climbing a bit higher or biking a bit faster or, you know, that sort of thing. And the they're engaged, they don't know what's going to happen. It's uncertain. They're they're kind of microdosing uncertainty in new situations. And of course, as they're moving their body in new ways, much like you do in sport, there's a risk of injury. Um, and that's where I've spent a lot of my time, as you can imagine, from my background. But so if we break this down um in terms of kind of, you think about play and those memories and and how kids go about this kind of play, they're they're figuring things out, they're making plans, they're creating the steps to follow those plans, and they're sustaining attention to get through those different steps, you know, to get to their goal. And along the way, things are going in ways they didn't anticipate, and they're pivoting and trying new things. Well, I've just described executive function skills, which are actually fundamental to learning at, you know, to future career, health, well-being, you know, so you know, how else can you do that? You can't learn that in a book. Um, you need to have that consistent practice around it.
Uncertainty And Kids’ Mental Health
Dr. Mariana BrussoniAnd in terms of kind of mental health, in particular social emotional well-being, I think this is a really interesting kind of newer research. Um, so again, getting back to that definition where kids are engaging with thrill and excitement with uncertainty. And so um the risky play is like microdosing uncertainty. You're in a play situation, and so it's it is going to be relatively safe. Like we can talk about the injury stats and all that. And you, you know, kids are driving it, and so they're figuring out for themselves how far do I want to push myself? And they're generally pushing themselves, not so far that it's downright fear, but far enough that there's thrill, hence the thrill and excitement. And so what is the word world but crammed with uncertainty or surrounded by uncertainty? And so these experiences give them microdosing to be able to kind of build the skills and the comfort to deal with that uncertainty and to see that uncertainty and those new experiences as something that could be thrilling and exciting rather than as something that's dangerous or, you know, scary, and I gotta pull away from it, right? And so if we see kind of the epidemic of society that we have right now around anxiety, it's kids. Uh, a main feature of that is kids who interpret uncertainty, unknown situations as scary, hazardous, dangerous, must pull away from rather than leaning in to the possibilities uh of those situations.
Chris ColleyAmazing. I mean, so well explained the benefit, the benefit, not maybe not even the necessity, I would also say that if if we aren't exposing them to those experiences early enough, what could be the repercussions down the way? You have a less resilient child? Like do you like can the the the actual stats transfer to down the road for the child if they haven't experienced enough risky play?
New Data On Vulnerability
Dr. Mariana BrussoniYeah, well, that's an excellent question. So we have some data around that. Um you really need longitudinal data for that, and it's hard and expensive to get. But we just completed an analysis, a really interesting analysis with BC data. And this is with kids across the province using, so I'm the director of the Human Early Learning Partnership, that's one of my hats. And that entity we call help collects population-level data on child development and well-being. And one of the instruments that we collect is the early development instrument, which kindergarten teachers fill out about those kids. Um, and then at the same time with those kids, the parents, when the kids start kindergarten, the parents fill out the childhood experiences questionnaire about their experiences before they got to kindergarten. So in that way, we have we have a few months between when the parents filled it out and the teachers fill it out, but we also know what happened before. And so the parents are asked things like how, you know, how much screen time, how much outdoor play, how much risky play, all of those kinds of things. And so we've looked at an analysis to see how what are the relationships between risky play experiences and subsequent with the EDI, what it measures is vulnerability, childhood vulnerability on five different scales. And so you have your all overall vulnerability and you have your um your specific scale vulnerability. And so this new analysis that we were just, we hope to submit it very soon to peer review shows that risky play is like early risky play is associated with childhood vulnerability in kindergarten. And so that, and and inter, even more interesting than that, was that the relationship between risky play and vulnerability was greater than the relationship between outdoor play and vulnerability. So really fascinating.
Chris ColleyYeah. Those are starting to be some like light bulents that we need to latch on to and start selling. Because in a way, I I always feel that we just don't know how to sell risky play to parents, you know, as educators, you know, and being parents too in an educator can also add to that. But this idea of I love that you have this thing with be careful, you know, like be careful, don't go too, you know, don't, don't, don't like these types of things start to uh get in the way of yet it seems like we're um we're propelled to like always be overwatching, like and and making sure that the care is there and that there's no danger, and and your research actually proves the absolute opposite that risky play does not equal the kid is gonna get hurt. It actually is quite the opposite of that. Can you elaborate on just this kind of like misconception we have that risky play equals injury or as you said, hazardous conditions or yeah, that risk equals danger or hazard, exactly.
Risky Play Versus Real Danger
Dr. Mariana BrussoniUm, so I mean, what we have found in in other research, so Ellen Sansetter and I have worked together for a number of years now, and we completed a study looking at the hypothesis that if kids have, you know, that kids' risky play experiences would help influence their risk management skills. So essentially um that keeping kids safe means letting them take risks because they develop those risk management skills in a play situation that they can then apply to, you know, the other um other situations. And so we did a study in virtual reality where we had kids, we asked them about their previous risky play experiences, but we had kids do a couple of tasks. One was a task where they were playing in kind of a playground environment virtually, and they had helmets on, they had to move around the space so we could see where they moved and how much risks they took. And then we tested them in a pedestrian street crossing task to see how they did in that. And so there were cars and bikes and stuff that they had to navigate to get across the street. And you can imagine you have to do this in virtual reality because you can't throw kids into the street and hope that they cross safely. Not ethical. So what we found really, and so we compared also Norwegian and Canadian kids, the Norwegian kids, as you can imagine, had they did more risky play. They they engaged in more risks in that playground task. Um, but interestingly, that the so not unexpectedly, uh, taking risks in the playground task led to more what we would call failures. They fell. They were more likely to fall, which makes sense. You know, you're taking risks, you're more likely to fall. You're gonna get those minor scrapes, bruises, etc. Um, but that's kind of a low stakes situation, right? You move to the pedestrian environment, it's a high stakes. That's like life or death. And those kids, there was a relationship between how, so if they took more risks in the playground task, they actually were more efficient in the street crossing task. And they were less likely to have those near misses or hits, right? And so they understood they were kind of playing, developing, taking risks in one situation with low stakes, but they could apply that to another situation where the stakes were higher.
Chris ColleyI love that. It's it's so fascinating that the research where we have kind of like deconstructed like this timeline or this journey of it's the selling of. And I wanted to ask you about that. Of how do we make this more understandable so that parents, even educators, you know, administrators, lower the anxiety in themselves and allow for this because we know what research is showing us is it's necessary. Instead of it being like, no, they'll be in danger. We can't risk you know them getting hurt or anything when we know that result, you know, that data is very, very low. They're more likely to, you know, get injured in a car or you know, in an environment where their parents are there supervising, um, than them off trying to climb a tree.
Dr. Mariana BrussoniMm-hmm. Yeah, even indoors, there's more injuries indoors than outdoors.
Chris ColleyYeah, well, throw sports in there too, right? I mean, all parents want kids to do sports, they're gonna get hurt more likely with sports than they are with playing outside. I guess like how do how do you approach when you're when you're trying to explain this to uh parents and educators that you have to let them do this? Um, because it's the backs are up as soon as like it's like like how do we how do we contour that and also like demystify that the necessity of it for for the for their life really, right? I mean, because you're setting them up as these young kids, they need to have these experiences. Like you said before, you can't teach resilience, you can't teach, you know, like you've had to do it through experiencing it. But it's so hard to take those ideas and and pass them on so that they embody those, you know. Like I even feel as me as a parent, like sometimes I'd be like, be careful, you know.
Dr. Mariana BrussoniTotally. I've said it.
Chris ColleyYeah. Like, how do we start to reverse that a little bit more?
Tools To Calm Adult Fear
Dr. Mariana BrussoniYeah. Yeah, yeah. And this is one of our key challenges and and what we've really worked on in our research program is how do we provide the tools to change the mindset? I mean, it's it is complicated and also not. So one of the things that we do is, well, first of all, you want to approach this with compassion, right? So, you know, as parents, we're built to worry about our kids. You know, fear, fear in and of itself is not a bad thing. What's concerning is when we let fear overwhelm our decision making and when we're making decisions around managing our own fear rather than kind of taking in the situation and man, you know, and what's best for the child, you know, that's in front of me. Right. Um, and so part of it is really pointing out that kind of disconnect, right? So when we're afraid, like when we're saying be careful, it comes from the a beautiful place. It's like, I love this child more than life itself. I, you know, I don't want the anything to happen to them. That is beautiful. Um, but we need to take a step back and think about how harmful it can be. And so we talk about like when you're when you're making your way through life, most of the time you're in fast thinking mode. And that's just survival, right? You need to make so many decisions every day. You can't sit there and ponder, you know, every single decision. So you're like, you know, you're you're relying on shortcuts and cues and all of that. But that fast thinking mode is also more vulnerable to uh emotion and fear. And so when we're in that fast thinking mode and some, you know, our child does something or there's a threat, we perceive a threat that, you know, our body gets overwhelmed by fear. And then it's just like it's it's anxiety-based caregiving. Like I'm just, I want to just stop my fear right now because it's so overpowering. And so, you know, one of the things that we encourage parents to do is just slow down. We'd call it a 17-second rule, like just count to 17, you know, uh that gives time for your body to, you know, you to realize your body's flooded and kind of bring it down and just observe, you know, what's going on. Is this really such a big deal? How likely are they to get hurt? What's going to happen if I step in? Oh, look, they they kind of manage it. And, you know, and the child could also have opportunities. Um, but part of also what we want to like, you know, that's just one tool, one instance. What we want parents, schools, teachers, everybody really to think about is their core values around what they want for these kids. Right. And so, and it doesn't really matter what that is. Like it, you know, your core values are going to be different from. Mine, but we could end up in the same place in the sense that you know kids need this. So because there's so many benefits to risky play, like you know, if parents parents want their kids to, you know, be independent or to to be successful, or yeah, I don't, you know, fill in the blank, or schools want the kids to be more engaged with learning, or to, you know, have better mental health or social emotional connection, you know, whatever. It doesn't matter, um, that that that's kind of held up as the values or the north star. And then we can really, when we get to these decision points, we can think about that North Star and make decisions based on, you know, keeping that intact. So that when the yeah buts come up, because they will for sure, uh, yeah, but it's raining out, yeah, but whatever, it's it's like this is really important to me. And therefore, when I'm making decisions, I'm keeping that in mind. And so then it becomes just a lot clearer what you know, what the guide is. And I mean, that's there are some challenges. We have a society that is really overprotective of kids and moves towards that. So you, you know, you have to be prepared to deal with that. Um, but and actually Ellen Sanseter and I are writing a book all about this. Uh, and Megan Zenny and I have the book for schools as well that really practical. Yeah.
Chris ColleyYeah. Yeah, I I I really enjoyed looking at that, and I'm definitely going to share that out. Yes. We'll check that book out. And I guess to to kind of wrap things up, I I I really appreciate your insight. And I love research that that informs us, you know, and paints a picture. And I think you painted a really beautiful picture on how we can start to just think about things. And I love that just slow down for a minute instead of this visceral reaction that we that we have, which I mean, we're not saying it's wrong. I mean, like you said, we want to protect our youngest. Any any animal does, right? It's just a part of the natural way. Um you have a wonderful site that's called Outside Play, and there are toolkits in there. Um, and you have some for teachers, parents, and I I think it was it administrators as well. There's like three seconds.
Dr. Mariana BrussoniYeah, there's one for early childhood educators. Yeah.
Chris ColleyExcellent, excellent. And if you could pass on any kind of advice as we kind of close off here, like I love the Northern Star idea. Like, what what's our intent here with these littles? You know, like what is it that we want or we hope to? And we have kind of lost our footing, I bit, I think, a bit on that, because kids are going out less, side out less, they're playing less. Um, how do we start to maybe turn the clocks back? I want to say a little bit, so that we are being aware of that. Because you had mentioned it, Ray, the start, and I was like, of course I remember those experiences, me outside climbing a tree, and you know, I hit my head one time and had to get stitched. You know, like this stuff happens, but it's not the end of the world. And I was much more cautious after that of, you know, making sure that I could clear underneath trees that had fallen. Um what are those some of those salient things that we need to keep at the forefront as we open up our doors to the kids going out and playing more?
Time Space Freedom And Closing
Dr. Mariana BrussoniWell, at the center of it, it's about the kids, right? You know, and and what we want most for them. And so if we recognize that, then that that makes things a lot easier because the kids want and need this. Um what so there's four really three key ingredients that we think about for outdoor and risky play in circumstances like schools and childcare. And there's a fourth ingredient that comes into play in neighborhoods. And so in order to create the conditions for kids, we need to make sure that those ingredients are in play. And so they're time, space, freedom, and in neighborhoods, other children. Right. And so time means actually recognizing that kids need these experiences every day, and that we have to think about them like we do eating or sleeping or any other activity, that it is core to kids' lives. Space is having spaces where that are stimulating, that have exciting and challenging things for kids to do, particularly as kids get older, you know, and the challenge, you know, they still need that challenge, you know, and they where are they gonna get it? Um, freedom relates to us as adults and our letting the kids play in the ways that they choose in those spaces. And then, of course, if you're in a neighborhood and you want your kid to go and play outside and there's no other kids playing outside, they're not gonna go play outside. You know, they're gonna find them on the screens, you know, where it's a lot easier to connect with friends. And so just thinking about what that looks like. And we do provide tools in in the book around each of those and how you how you make them come to life. Because what we're really doing here is we're we're creating as adults, we're creating the conditions for risky play. We're not forcing it, you know. It's not about us teaching them how to do it or telling them what they, you know, to push harder. No, absolutely not. We create the conditions and then risky play will emerge, you know, but so will other kinds of play. It's really you want to maximize the affordances.
Chris ColleyLove it. Thank you. It's been a real pleasure. These are so short, but I think it's a compact thought that we need to think about. And I appreciate your research and all that you've done for this theme, which is so important. And I think the more we talk about it, the smarter we get. So I want to thank you for making us all a little smarter today, Marianna. That was really great. Thank you.
Dr. Mariana BrussoniIt's my pleasure, Chris. Thank you for the invitation.
