Abstract
Children spend a large amount of time each day in early childhood education and care (ECEC) institutions, and the ECEC play environments are important for children’s play opportunities. This includes children’s opportunities to engage in risky play. This study examined the relationship between the outdoor play environment and the occurrence of children’s risky play in ECEC institutions. Children (n = 80) were observed in two-minute sequences during periods of the day when they were free to choose what to do. The data consists of 935 randomly recorded two-minute videos, which were coded second by second for several categories of risky play as well as where and with what materials the play occurred. Results revealed that risky play (all categories in total) was positively associated with fixed equipment for functional play, nature and other fixed structures, while analysis of play materials showed that risky play was positively associated with wheeled toys. The results can support practitioners in developing their outdoor areas to provide varied and exciting play opportunities.
Highlights
This includes children’s opportunities to engage in risky play
Based on the literature showing that risky play has developmental benefits and that physical play environments are important for children’s opportunities of engaging in risky play, this study aims to examine the relationship between outdoor play spaces and play materials for the occurrence of children’s risky play
Risky play was distributed among play in great heights (4.8%, SD = 17.9), play with high speed (5.6%, SD = 19.1), play with dangerous tools (0.4%, SD = 5.5), rough-and-tumble play (1.8%, SD = 10.8), play with impact (0.3%, SD = 3.5) and vicarious play
Summary
This includes children’s opportunities to engage in risky play. This study examined the relationship between the outdoor play environment and the occurrence of children’s risky play in ECEC institutions. The results can support practitioners in developing their outdoor areas to provide varied and exciting play opportunities. Over recent decades, children are left with less opportunities for free play, especially outdoors (e.g., [6,7,8,9,10]). Research on outdoor play indicate that children rarely get opportunities to learn and master risk on their own account [9,12,13,14,15,16]. Eight categories of risky play have been established through observations and interviews with children and ECECs [23,24,25]:
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