The Children's Outdoor Play Project, 2019-2021

Dodd, Helen Frances (2025). The Children's Outdoor Play Project, 2019-2021. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-857813

When children play in an adventurous way, climbing trees, riding their bikes fast downhill, jumping from rocks, they experience feelings of fear and excitement, thrill and adrenaline. Being able to experiment with these feelings by taking some age-appropriate risks in their play helps children to learn about fear, uncertainty, risk-judgement and coping. This learning may later help to protect children from becoming overwhelmed by anxiety when they are faced with a situation that is scary or uncertain.

Unfortunately, many children today do not have the same opportunities to play in an adventurous way that children did in the past. Over the past few decades there has been a decline in the amount of time children spend playing outdoors, where adventurous play most often takes place. There are many reasons for this decline but one important reason is the increased emphasis on keeping children safe from physical harm. Of course, we all want to keep our children safe but there is concern that we may be keeping children too safe. By overly protecting children from physical harm we may increase their risk for emotional problems by denying them to opportunities to learn through adventurous play.

Problems with anxiety during childhood are very common. Almost all children experience periods of fear and anxiety during childhood and these often pass quickly without causing too much concern. However, some children feel so anxious that they cannot do some of the things they would like to do. The research planned will explore whether we may be able to decrease the likelihood of children experiences problematic anxiety by increasing their adventurous play in school.

This research is important because it may help us to design ways of increasing adventurous play and decreasing the chances of children having long-term problems with anxiety. To ensure that the research benefits society, the work is being planned and conducted together with organisations who affect play policy such as the Play Safety Forum, and those and who design children's play spaces, such as HAGS, as well as psychologists, parents and school staff. The research has the potential to dramatically affect the way that schools approach children's play and to significantly decrease anxiety problems as a consequence. This would improve the quality of life of the children across the UK and decrease the substantial societal costs associated with long-term mental health problems.

Data description (abstract)

Adventurous play is increasingly recognised as important for children’s health and development. Schools act as gatekeepers for children’s opportunities for regular, outdoor, adventurous play during breaktimes (recess), but often schools take a risk-adverse approach to break times, denying opportunities for risk and challenge during play. The Children's Outdoor Play project was designed to understand the barriers and facilitators that exist for adventurous play in schools with the aim of informing school-based interventions to increase children's opportunities for adventurous play at school.

We ran two parallel studies; one with parents and one with school staff working in schools in England. 1:1 semi-structured interviews were conducted to find out what parents and staff thought about adventurous play happening during breaktimes in schools. Our aim was to describe the core barriers and facilitators of adventurous play in English schools.

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