Risky Play and Children’s Safety: Balancing Priorities for Optimal Child Development

But modern childhood, in America and elsewhere, is more and more constrained.

Encourage active engagement with the physical world. Do this mostly by modeling it, but also by making opportunities and, to some extent, toys that make it easy and fun, available. Allow mistakes. Expect accidents, falls, minor injuries. Be prepared for the possibility of larger injuries. Remember that people do not learn exclusively from being tol

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there’s vital work needed to develop new approaches to conceptualising, discussing, debating, and mitigating risk in urban prototypes. For the same reason, our students need to be able to swim in a transdisciplinary pond that mixes design, law, and policy.