Try it out!

Let’s rise to the challenge of exploring how to move our bodies through thrilling play! Thrilling play, often called risky play, invites children to explore speed and momentum, height and elevation, the use of adult tools, interaction with natural elements, or rough and tumble play. Adults support and monitor children’s exploration and play, which decreases risks. You can offer scaffolding by setting up stages of risk, asking reflective questions, and helping children make choices that are within their zone of challenge without being unsafe.

Risky play offers amazing benefits, including large motor physical development, executive functioning skills, risk assessment, and emotional literacy and regulation. As children climb up slides, jump over equipment, and chase each other, they learn to assess risk and how they are feeling. They solve problems, plan, and then act.

For example, you can stage hammering practice from easy to more difficult. Start with plastic hammers, golf tees, and Styrofoam™ to introduce the action. Then, guide and support children into using real hammers and nails. Finally, let them hammer into wood using adult hammers with the nails lightly embedded. Throughout the process, ask children questions about how they will hold the hammer, help them practice using softer or harder strikes, and talk about using safety gear like goggles and gloves.

Be intentional with your exploration.

• Talk to families about their approach to risky play at home and how they feel about it. Offer chances for families to join as they are able.
• Follow children’s lead, letting them decide how they would like to explore. Encourage children to extend their physical boundaries with your care and support.
• Ask self-reflective questions like, “Am I a risk taker? What concerns me or excites me about taking risks? How could this impact how I support or restrict children’s risky play?”
• As children prepare to play, ask them, “How are you feeling about the play situation? Do you have a plan for how to explore and keep your body safe? How would you like me to help?”
• For infants and toddlers, model movements and use your hands to help guide their bodies as they are gaining coordination and understanding of how their limbs move.
• Observe children closely as they run, jump, climb, or move over uneven ground to gather information about their motor skills. To guide your support, note their skill levels as well as children’s approaches to challenges.
• Help children identify how they are feeling about challenges, from excited or interested to nervous or scared. Talk to children about managing these feelings through deep breathing, pausing before entering play, and talking through concerns or questions.
• Help infants and toddlers recognize and understand their emotions around play by pointing out what their expressions show or asking basic questions or making short statements about how they might be feeling.
• To help increase children’s interest in risky play, consider breaking down challenges into smaller steps and following the child’s lead to determine their readiness for each challenge.
• Help children think and talk about how they feel when they accomplish something a little out of their comfort zone. Celebrate the joy and sense of accomplishment that comes from trying new things and challenging their bodies to move in new ways.
• Read books about children exploring risky play and adventure and ask children what they think about the story and how it makes them feel.

Gather materials to support your messy play.

• Observe the environment to prepare it. Ask, “How would children navigate the area? What challenges could they face? How could I prepare the space and materials to support them?”
• Include safety equipment like goggles and work gloves and support children’s exploration of tools and materials. Model and practice how to use safety equipment with children.
• Provide materials for children to balance on, such as railroad ties, blocks, short tree stumps, non-slip half balance ball, or items created specifically for children’s balancing practice.

Consider adaptations that help everyone engage.

• Assume that, with adult support, all children can test their physical abilities safely.
• With support, cooperative forms of risky play, like rough and tumble play, provides children with disabilities opportunities to practice social skills such as giving and receiving cues.
• Create individualized opportunities. For example, for a child who uses a walker or a wheelchair, providing different materials to roll over could provide a sense of thrill as they maneuver over them. Even touching an unpreferred texture can be out of some children’s comfort zone.
• For infants or toddlers, provide environmental supports like cushioned mats or pillows in indoor physical play areas. Model physical movements like placing feet or hands a certain way to help children be successful. Reinforce feelings of safety with warm encouragement.
• Provide infants and toddlers with stabilization of surfaces as shown. For example, the adult is holding the rope of a swing to help children stand and balance.
• Use visual supports to reinforce how to use tools and equipment responsibly (e.g., put safety goggles on before picking up a hammer).

Look for connections to the Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework (ELOF) goals shown below, though this activity can be adapted with any domain.

• Infant-Toddler Approaches to Learning 6: Child demonstrates emerging initiative in interactions, experiences, and explorations.
• Infant-Toddler Perceptual, Motor, and Physical Development 3: Child demonstrates effective and efficient use of large muscles for movement and position.
• Preschool Perceptual, Motor, and Physical Development 1: Child demonstrates control, strength, and coordination of large muscles.
• Preschool Approaches to Learning 4: Child manages actions, words, and behavior with increasing independence.

Connect and Extend

Create a culture of inquiry with great questions.

One strategy for extending conversations with children involves asking meaningful questions such as, “What do you think will happen next?” Asking open-ended questions with many possible answers lets children express their ideas. They can provide explanations and make predictions. For some children, especially infants and toddlers, this may mean providing them with time to think and watching for nonverbal responses and then giving them prompts or labeling their gestures.

Prompt toddlers and preschool-aged children to observe their space and potential challenges with questions such as:

• How could you reach that toy? Could you roll over to it?
• Where could you step to climb higher?
• How will you hold your hands as you swing to the next rung? What would make you swing farther?
• What do you see on the ground in front of you? Will you go over it or around it?
• Does the ground look shiny and wet? How could you move your body differently on wet and muddy ground?

Develop creative connections and be a “good relative.”

What does it mean to be a good relative? In many American Indian and Alaska Native cultures, being a good relative is a way to describe treating others, the land, and all living creatures with care, kindness, and respect. It is a practice we want to encourage in all children and adults, in all cultural backgrounds.

We are all related and connected! Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• How does this community connection extend into risky play?
• What do you see in your natural environment?
• How do you provide chances for children to explore the natural world, including through risky play?
• Do we ask children questions that help them notice their world and explore it respectfully? For example, before climbing trees, do we say, “Is the tree branch strong enough? Is the surface slippery? We want to be sure you and the tree are ready for climbing.”
• Have we engaged families in conversations that consider their culture and their worldview of risky play?

Take a Look

Benefits of Outdoor Play and Exploration
Children benefit from outdoor play and exploration in important ways. Check out these resources to explore four of these benefits:

• Improvements in children's health
• Strengthening children's development and learning
• Building children's connection to nature
• Extending infant and toddler curriculum

Outdoor play is great for every child!

Digging Deeper into Why Sensory Play Matters

When children engage in riskier activities, they develop better decision-making and problem-solving abilities. They learn to assess their limits and evaluate safety. Risky play encourages social interaction, cooperation, and teamwork among peers as children negotiate rules and boundaries of play. Children who engage in challenging play are practicing how to handle stress and regulating their emotions including fear and apprehension.

An Early Learning Educator Shares Why Risky Play Matters

Play, and certainly risky play is often interpreted as overly aggressive or out of control because it doesn’t follow that notion of what play “should” look like (e.g., children sitting at a desk, tracing their names, raising their hand, etc.). This can lead to educators using timeout, giving suspensions, or programs expelling at higher rates. Childhood has never been about control. And when we start policing children’s every move, every interaction, every emotion, and more, early childhood education will not be early childhood education anymore. It will be kindergarten. So once again, this time louder for the people in the back: Despite how uncomfortable we may feel, risky play is learning. Risky play is essential. Not just for kindergarten readiness, but for lifelong success.

When we as adults think about risky or big body play, we preach safety, and rightfully so. But what does safety mean? Safety is such a relative term. What is safe for me may not be safe for you. And when we think about safety, do we put it into the perspective of the child? In other words, what lens do we see this child with?

• Do we consider the child’s needs, ability, perceptual, motor, and physical development when we see them jumping off the couch? Or do we only see a potential incident report?
• Do we take a child-centered approach to learning, while emphasizing culturally and developmentally responsive strategies?
• Do we support children to exhibit confidence in themselves by taking control of their own learning? Or are we concerned that being child-centered goes against everything we have been taught. Taught that “organization,” “structure,” “classrooms”, and “instruction” must look like respect, obedience, conformity, and control.

So, the next time you think of risky play — whether it was playing at great heights, speed, with adult tools, near uncertain elements, or rough-and-tumble — think about how … it has taught (and still teaches) so many, including me, how to be confident. How to make quick decisions. How to be resilient. Without risky play, where would I be? Who would I have become? So, before we shut down anything that’s related to risky play, ask yourself this first, risky for whom?

Reflection Questions for Educators

• What types of play and conversations seem risky for me? What emotions does it bring up for me and why?
• In what ways do I avoid risky play? In what ways do I engage and elevate children’s play based on the space and the materials I provide? What opportunities do I provide for this type of play inside the learning environment?
• Do our systems and procedures allow children to test out their skills by engaging in complex play? Or do they aim to teach these skills by “teaching to the test”? How could they be adjusted?

Read About It

Playful and Fun Learning Environments for Infants and Toddlers
Explore how children learn about the world through play. Find the most up-to-date information to answer three prompts: “What does research say?”; “What does it look like?”; and “Try this!” There’s also an accompanying resource, Connecting at Home, which includes easy-to-try tips to help families provide playful learning environments that are rich with context and meaning.

I Am Moving, I Am Learning (IMIL)
I Am Moving, I Am Learning (IMIL) is a Head Start physical activity and nutrition initiative for preschool children. It is designed to enhance what programs already do to support children and families. IMIL seeks to increase the quantity of time children spend in physical activity during daily routines and improve the quality of their physical movement experiences.

Joy for the Journey

The more risks you allow children to take, the better they learn to take care of themselves. If you never let them take any risks, then I believe they become very prone to injury. Boys should be allowed to climb tall trees and walk along the tops of high walls and dive into the sea from high rocks... The same with girls. I like the type of child who takes risks. Better by far than the one who never does so. — Roald Dahl

Last Updated: July 16, 2025