Risky Play

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Anita Bundy, ScD, OT/L, FAOTA, FOTARA is a professor and head of the occupational therapy department at Colorado State University. She has conducted decades of experiments and research in Risky Play. Listen as Dr. Bundy shares both the benefits of risk-taking in play and the developmental costs of being risk-averse.
The views expressed in the following presentation are those of the presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of STAR Institute.
Resources Mentioned In this episode:
Anita Bundy’s bio page, publications and awards at Colorado State University: www.chhs.colos...
Sydney Playground Project: www.sydneyplay...
Revised Knox Preschool Play Scale: link.springer....
Test of Playfulness (Bundy): link.springer....
Neumann, Eva: The Elements of Play link.springer....
Gregory Bateson's concept of “metacommunication”: www.sciencedir...
David Ball: Playgrounds - risks, benefits and choices: eprints.mdx.ac...
Tim Gill: The Benefits of Children's Engagement with Nature: A Systematic Literature Review: www.jstor.org/...
Ellen Beate Hansen Sandseter: scholar.google...
The Play Outside UBC Lab, led by Dr. Mariana Brussoni: playoutsideubc...
Episode transcript:
Carrie Schmitt I'm joined today by Dr. Anita Bundy. She's an occupational therapist, and thank you so much for being here today, I would love for you to tell us a little bit about yourself.
Dr. Anita Bundy My pleasure to be here. Thank you, Carrie. I am currently the department head in occupational therapy at Colorado State University. And I've been engaged in labor you search for a long time now,
Carrie Schmitt I saw that was an area of interest and research among your many distinctions and awards, and all of the important work that you've done in our field. And when I asked you one of the topics you might be interested in talking about today, you mentioned risky play. And so I was able to, you're able to share some articles with me and I was able to go and look up some of your research, I would love to hear the pathway, maybe or some of the things that you've found early in your research or curiosities about play that led you to study risky play as a research category. And you've done some really important findings on the topic.
Dr. Anita Bundy Well, I started studying play as part of my doctoral work. And I was, I was interested in the notion that therapists had and I think still have, but that maybe not as strongly now that if we helped children to develop skills, those skills would automatically be transferred into their everyday life. And so I was interested in that I was interested in studying the relationship and and I chose to study the relationship between motor skills, and am I needed something functional, that children would do, and I was interested in, you know, graduating in my own lifetime, and I wanted children to be willing to participate. And so I chose play. And so honestly, play was, for me, at that point, a matter of convenience. And so I did my doctoral study. And as I, I observed, a number of children playing. And as I did, I actually became quite fascinated with, with the play part of it with watching children who had some kinds of difficulties. And I had one child in particular, who will always stay with me, and he was a child who had a lot of sensory integrative issues. And he, he was playing outdoors, and I was watching him play outdoors. And he was really terribly, terribly boring to watch out towards he, he was climbing up the slide and going down the slide. And this, this child was sort of he was more than six, he was somewhere between six and eight. But he climbed up beside me like down the slide, and I left the slide went down the slide, and he just did that for ever. And these two other children who were on the playground with him at the same time, they came over and said, Would you like to play with us? Now, of course, what they wanted, they were this was in the days when you had merry go rounds on on playgrounds, and they wanted him to push. But they didn't say that they asked him if he would like to play in. And this would have been a child who probably not very many children, asked him to play. And his response to those two boys was No, I'm busy. And he was busy going up and down the slide. So and I watched him do that for like 15 minutes, and he did nothing else. And so then I, we also watched the children indoors, and I wasn't scoring his play observation indoors, because different people scored them outdoors versus