engleski

Risk in play as a right and need: Exploring the fine balance of risk and safety

Play as children’s leading activity and its importance for their healthy development has been a longstanding motto of early childhood education and care (ECEC) academics and professionals for many decades now. The explicit identification of play as a child’s right within the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) only served to solidify these conceptions. Similar could be said of risky play, often being cited as beneficial for children’s development and identified as a child’s right implicitly as early as 1918 by Korszak and also in the UNCRC (1989). Contemporary childhood, being increasingly shaped by supervision, overprotection, timetabling and 'helicoptering' has significant effects on children’s play and specifically risk taking in play in institutional as well as familial settings. Taking all this into consideration, this paper aims at discussing the reality/practices of risky play and the different factors affecting the characteristics of risky play in everyday practices with young children using data obtained by reviewing relevant research on the topic. The paper concludes by discussing the different perspectives on risky play, advocating the importance of the perspectives of all involved actors – parents, teachers and especially children themselves in balancing the fine line of positive risk and safety.

play, risky play, UNCRC, Korszak's rights, right to play, safety

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