Affordances for 1- to 3-Year-Olds' Risky Play in Early Childhood Education and Care

The study focuses on how kindergartens give 1-3 year olds the opportunity to take part in risky play. Risky play is play that involves a risk of physical injury. Such play can help develop children’s risk assessment skills and it is also a good way of keeping children healthy. A certain amount of risk-taking is associated with development and increases the likelihood of survival and reproduction.

The main findings describe how three, mainly different, kindergartens provide children with different opportunities to take part in risky play. These environments are assessed using the theoretical concept of manageability and suggest that versatile, flexible and complex environments and equipment, involving little objective risk, are optimal for children’s risky play in the 1-3 year age group.

Three kindergartens were selected from a large-scale project called Better Provision for Norwegian Children in ECEC. 39 children were included, all aged between one and three years old. The kindergartens were chosen based on global quality points. Observations were carried out over three days at all the centres. The observations focused exclusively on situations that involved risk. Either subjective or objective risk could be observed. Objective risk was described as the environmental characteristics of the situation, such as speed, height, or unstable surfaces. Subjective risk was described as individual characteristics, such as how children expressed the experience through nonverbal communication, outward appearance, sounds and words. Data was collected that provided quantifiable information that can be used for descriptive statistics.

Kleppe, R. (2018). "Affordances for 1- to 3-Year-Olds' Risky Play in Early Childhood Education and Care". Journal of Early Childhood Research, 16(3):258-275.