Mariana Brussoni on Safety Doing Harm

Lukas: Where did you like to play as a child? I ask this question a lot, because childhood memories shape us into the people we become. Welcome to Play It Forward, a worthy podcast. I'm your host, Lukas Ritson. Thanks so much for joining me. I talk a lot about play. I'm a dad, I'm a husband, I'm an educator, and I'm a playground designer. So I want to gather some of my favourite people who are advocates of children and nature, and create a space to have an honest conversation about getting more kids outside. The power of play is very often underestimated and I think we all need a little more play in our lives.

Lukas: Welcome to another Play It Forward Worthy podcast. We have a special guest for you today. Dr. Mariana Brussoni is an associate professor in the Department of Pediatrics and School of Population Public Health at the University of British Columbia and an investigator with the British Columbia Children's Hospital Research Institute and the BC Injury Research Prevention Unit. Mariana conducts research on children's outdoor and risky play, adult attitudes related to children's risk and safety, and designing supportive outdoor play environments. She has published her research extensively. Her work was featured on CBC's The Nature of Things 2019 documentary, The Power of Play. Mariana was awarded the 2019 inaugural Outdoor Play Canada Dr. Mariana Brussoni Award. And after reading that bio, you can see why I wanted to share Mariana's experience with you. She's one of our people coming from the place of supporting children to have an authentic childhood. So thank you so much for joining us on Play It Forward.

Dr Mariana Brussoni: It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Lucas.

Lukas: Well, all the way from Vancouver, let's get straight into it. As we ask all guests, where did you play as a child?

Dr Mariana Brussoni: Well, I mostly grew up in Calgary, which is in the prairies in Canada, a very flat city. But near our house we had a river, the Bow River, that used to run through. And so, you know, like many people who were born in the 70s and grew up in the eighties, I had a free range childhood and my parents just kind of let me go off and do what I wanted. We always had dogs, and we had a wonderful huge dog that used to go with us everywhere, and we used to go catch garter snakes at the Bow River and just get into trouble generally.

Lukas: And leading into your adult experience after that childhood, how do you think that experience of that wilderness adventure, catching snakes, contributed to where you are now, involving your research, coming from a place of investigating injury prevention essentially, into supporting risk? I find that such an intriguing leap that we tend to view as very separate realms. It's like we've got to prevent injury, promote risk — separate. But your experiences, they're linked. So how did that childhood experience get you there?

Dr Mariana Brussoni: Well, it wasn't just the childhood experience, it was a few things, but I guess it was the childhood experience as well as experiences parenting my own kids, and then some of the research that I was doing with parents, particularly fathers, of children, where I just realized that there was a big disconnect between the kinds of things that I was saying as an injury prevention researcher — and that is common in the field — things like risk is equal to danger or hazard, risk must be minimized, it can only be a negative thing, and my own way of living my own life, the way I was parenting my own children, and what I was learning about how parents and particularly fathers thought about risk and play in their children's lives.

And so, because I'm a developmental psychologist — that's my doctoral training — I noticed that there was a disconnect between what the developmental psychology literature was saying in terms of the importance of kids taking risks and building those capacities to be able to handle risks, and the injury prevention approach that was really just focused on eliminating injuries, and therefore risks were to be discouraged. So it was kind of this harsh rubbing that was bugging me and bugging me until I had to deal with it.

Lukas: Yeah, and it seems to be common with the guests that we have on — when I ask them how they got into this field, it's like there is that linking of those realms, as we speak. The friction creates the spark and the interest moving forward. I love coming across your work, going through your websites and getting to really know your content. For our listeners, a previous guest, Adam Bienenstock, mentioned Mariana's work and how important it is. He said, "You've got to check this out, head over." And since then, I've been delving down a rabbit hole. But I love this term that comes up again and again, and it's "safety doing harm." So maybe you could unpack that a bit for us.

Dr Mariana Brussoni: Yeah, so I guess that's the situation that I came to in terms of the injury prevention research. It's a common problem when you have different realms that get into their own mindset. In public health, that's very common. And in injury prevention, we're just looking at injury stats and getting those injury numbers down, and so implementing whatever safety measures were seen as necessary.

So in the case of kids' play, things like very close supervision, creating playground standards for play equipment that standardized a lot of the equipment, applying a lot of what we learned about workplace-related injury prevention to children's play — where it doesn't really apply. And so, all of this was well-meaning. We just wanted to reduce injuries, keep kids safe. But when that was the only thing we were concentrating on, without thinking about the holistic bigger picture around children's needs and the fact that risk and risk-taking and risky play is a very natural part of children's play, then we were negating that need for kids, trying to eliminate it without understanding the potential harm that could happen from that.

And so as the research — Ellen Sandseter, a Norwegian researcher, has really pioneered since her thesis — she was doing her work starting around 2009 — since that work there's been an explosion, and along with that, an understanding of the harm that we can do when we keep kids too safe, and the importance of risky play for children's health, development, and well-being.

Lukas: Yeah, I see that Sandseter research as such a pivotal point — it's kind of the rebranding of the word "risk." Because it also highlights the power of a single word and the association of a word. As a population, we consider risk something to be avoided, and we've got to eliminate it, for such a huge part of the population. But if you speak to people in the play world, the children's world, risk means possibility, it means challenge, it means fulfillment and all these other things. So Sandseter's research, really defining those categories and formalizing it in such a way where we can really understand it from that adult realm, saying "look at these categories of risk in play that are essential" — anyone who wants to check that out, notes for the Sandseter research will be in the show notes, because they're super valuable.

One thing that we talk to educators about is how a sense of accomplishment is achieved in overcoming risk. Does your research confirm or explore that theory from a research standpoint? And what is the "why" behind it? In my talks, I'm saying we have to have that fulfillment — just look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You've got to feel safe, and then accomplishment, self-fulfillment, and accomplishment. So yeah.

Dr Mariana Brussoni: Well, usually what I do when I do talks with the public is — I think the most effective way for people to relate to this is to think back to their own favorite childhood play memory. We started off this episode with one of mine, but it's not hard for people to take themselves back there and just think about that favorite play memory. It's actually really entertaining when I do this, because smiles start to pop up across the room.

But when I ask people to think about their favorite play memory, and then I just ask them a couple of questions about that play memory — most people were outdoors, most people were taking risks, most people were not supervised, most people were not in a formal playground with a piece of play equipment and a fence. They were in the streets around their home, in ditches, ravines, using loose parts, just making their own play environment. And so if you think about it — what is it about why are those features so

Dr Mariana Brussoni: And so when we ask people that, they talk about a sense of joy, you know, of being able to move their body in ways that they, you know, weren't allowed to inside. Of shouting and running and meeting up with their friends and making up their own ways of playing and just figuring it out for themselves. And just the ever changing outdoor world, right? You know, every time you go out there's something else to explore. And so you can actually map all of those characteristics. Like they're very important, unique characteristics to outdoor play that aren't the same as indoor play. And you can map those to children's child development, health and wellbeing needs, right? So things like being able to play with their friends, figure out what they want to do for themselves, that is really important for a sense of accomplishment, right? So it's not an adult who's telling you what to do. It's you figuring it out. You setting your own goals, figuring out the steps to attain those goals, and knowing that you can do that, you know, and then pushing your body anew in different ways and seeing that you can accomplish it or not, because failure is also, you know, really important. And overcoming failure and adapting the play for different people who are playing or different circumstances. You know, so I think that if people can think back to their own favorite play memory and think a bit about what that gave them, then it becomes all that much easier to understand why, you know, kids now need that.

Lukas: I'm just so overwhelmed with so many questions and so many avenues I wanna go in that one statement. So I'll start on the first note I just jotted down. From a developmental psychologist's point, why is it that these experiences are so ingrained? And when we can think back to it of these memorable experiences, we can be there in a second. So what's going on inside us? And the reason I think this is so important to understand is because the children's experience now in this modern age of the protection effect, it really concerns me about what are children gonna think back on in the future as a memorable childhood. So what's happening to create that memorable childhood?

Dr Mariana Brussoni: Yeah, well and to be fair, I think that kids now — and I've asked that question of people of different ages, right? And the ages, you know, you get different responses at different ages. And sometimes you have to dig a bit deeper with some of the younger age groups, right? To get at that feeling of joy. But thankfully everybody has it — it's a universal kind of experience. It's not hard to get anybody to think back to that play memory. What is it? It's a good question, actually. Maybe an interesting study. You know, what is it that's so compelling? And why, like, you know, it tends to be around age eight to twelve that people tended to posit themselves in. You know, and maybe that's kind of memory, you know, the fact that you can remember a bit more from that time. Maybe it's because you were given more freedom at that point, so you're able to do more stuff. I don't know, it's a good question.

Lukas: Yeah. And from there, you mentioned it in that previous statement about the importance of failure. Why is failure so important?

Dr Mariana Brussoni: It's important to fail and to learn to fail because we will fail. You know, there's a lot of failures in life. And if we feel that we can't fail, that we're not allowed to fail, then we don't learn how to cope with failure and how to overcome it. And also sometimes failure can lead to the most exciting innovations, right? So, you know, if something didn't work this way, you adjust it and you do it this way, and it's like, you know, a spectacularly wonderful, different way of doing things. So I think failure is really at the root of a lot of creativity. And you talked about that kind of sense of self confidence and resilience. I think it's critical to that as well.

Lukas: Yeah, and taking that step forward, it goes into the Brene Brown realm of that vulnerability and saying, well, I am gonna fail, but look what comes out the other side. And yeah, if a child can't have the affordance to manage their accomplishment or have that affordance personally, are they gonna go and put it on other people for their confirmation and for their joy? So that external fulfillment versus internal fulfillment.

Dr Mariana Brussoni: Yeah, well and I would actually even back up a bit because there's this term called executive function. I don't know if you've come across that, right? So it encompasses a bunch of things, but things like, you know, having your attention focused on one thing, being able to figure out what your goals are and the steps to attain your goals, and to actually, you know, stay tuned to that thing long enough to do so and things like that. So executive functioning and those skills are like any muscle. You know, they need to be exercised in order to be built. And there's a ton of research showing how executive functioning skills predict later attainment in life, you know, health, the kinds of careers that people end up in and, you know, wealth, all sorts of things. And so they're quite important skills. So, you know, if you have a child who's in a lot of kind of programming, doesn't have a lot of opportunity to kind of make up their own goals and just kind of follow those goals, then you know that muscle isn't exercised. And so the executive functioning skills can be lower. And so you know, I think it's the same really for this too, right? So you need to kind of build up that self-confidence, that feeling that you can do it, and self-efficacy, and have those experiences. Otherwise, how else are you gonna figure out that you're capable and competent and that you can overcome adversity and that you are resilient? You know, it's not something you can teach in a textbook. You gotta just experience it.

Lukas: Yeah, a hundred percent. I'm a big advocate, and the way I break it down in my talks is that it needs to be real. You need to be able to touch and learn and be stimulated through the senses. But we've got this strange thing where we teach these very sensory ideas in abstract ways. We say "don't go in their space" and they look at you like, "well, I can't see it, touch it, taste it — what are you talking about?" Or even so, from a sustainability standpoint of saying, let's care for the environment — it's like, where is it? It's everywhere. Well, unless I'm going out to have the experience in nature — and our overall mission is for children to identify as nature — it would be nice, but it needs to be this sensory, real experience. And real life is about failure. It's overcoming that adversity. And if we just break it down and go, it just needs to be real — just replicate that in the younger years. You mentioned just previously about the importance of well being through play. How's that base of well being achieved through accomplishment, risk and outdoor play?

Dr Mariana Brussoni: Well, I think it relates to the stuff that we've been talking about, right? So, you know, well being is such an internal feeling. And part of it is feeling like you have agency, that you can, you know, take care of yourself, that you can also experience joy and pleasure and love. And I think that those are all really key characteristics of play and really high quality play experiences.

Lukas: What changed in parents to protect their children so much in these recent years? It's like from the eighties to nineties, we had that huge shift. All of a sudden we've got that protection effect. Based on your research and wealth of experience, what caused the shift?

Dr Mariana Brussoni: Well, it was kind of a soup of social issues all coming to a head to make this very complex problem. But essentially there were a few things. So one of the main things that happened was that you had an increase in inequity. And so in the eighties was the first big recession, right? And so you actually had an increase in wealth differential, you know, between — in different societies, particularly Canada, the US, I think Australia as well. And then there was another one in the nineties, you know, then there was the two thousand eight, and we're, you know, we're experiencing another one now. With each of those, we've actually had an increase, increase, increase, increase in inequities. And the result of that is parents being more concerned that their child will be able to make it, right? Will be able to get into the right university, get the right job, and have a better quality of life than they did, you know, rather than worse. And so that combined with it, it resulted in the development of an intensive parenting model, right? So whereas really parenting became a verb, right? As in something that parents should actively do and that they should read up on how—

Dr Mariana Brussoni: To do, and that there was a right and a wrong way to parent. And of course there was a plethora of advice — magazines, books — that all came out at that time and have continued to come out. And so very much an idea that this is the right way to parent, this intensive parenting model where you are curating your child's life. You're putting them in the right school, you're making sure that they're in ten different programs. But also, at the same time, we had a shifting conception of the child as someone who's vulnerable and in need of care, rather than approaching them from a point of competence and capability. They need us to take care of them, rather than seeing them as so capable of taking care of themselves. And then, on top of all of that, was also a shift in public health from the 50s on, as we reduced communicable diseases like tuberculosis and polio and things like that, there was more of a shift towards prevention, and injuries became the leading cause of death for kids. So then we also had this shift towards the importance of keeping kids safe and making sure that they weren't injured. And there were a few different — there was a change in women going out to work, there was urbanization that meant that you were less likely to know your neighbors — all of these kinds of things that just fell into a soup that have influenced what we're experiencing today.

Lukas: How do we move beyond it? That's the next question.

Dr Mariana Brussoni: Well, it was kind of a multi-generational journey here. It's going to be a multi-generational journey back. There's no quick fix or solution, but I'm cautiously optimistic that a lot of the stuff that we're doing is kind of shifting the needle. First of all, the fact that somebody like you actually wants to talk to me and do a podcast is positive. The media are picking up on this, so it's getting out there more. People want to talk about it. We've also seen, for example, there were some big social movements — like in the States, Utah passed a free-range parenting law in reaction to what was happening in some of the other states around parents, like kids walking to school and potentially getting picked up by social services because it was seen as supervisory neglect. So you had some states that did some important things there to change things. In Canada, we've actually had our chief medical officers of health sign a position statement supporting the importance of active outdoor play and with its risks. So there's been a number of positive shifts. And then, more recently, I'm kind of interested in what happens with COVID. We've never seen, at least in Canada, more interest in being outdoors than we did, especially during the lockdowns. And I think there could be a couple of things happening. One, people getting to know their neighbors more because they're all at home and hanging out outside, so that can improve social cohesion. Or just feeling even more alienated from the outdoors, or more fear for their children, because now other children are a source of infection, other people are a source of infection. So that fear of the abductor, the boogeyman, becomes even more so — now there's a fear of infection too. So it's kind of an interesting time in that sense.

Lukas: Yeah, and you can see that it just depends on the person you talk to. One person's gotten completely into lockdown, they're seeing no one. And then as you drive into my neighborhood, I've never seen so many people as a family out walking or using the trails around the hills around the back of my house. It's been this really polarizing experience — you're one or the other, and there's not really a middle road at the moment. But yeah, even just talking to families with young children — a good friend of mine, he's in Dubai, and his son was born at the start of the year. So ever since, it's gone straight into lockdown, and then into summer where it's forty-five degrees outside. So he's calling me going, "What are the effects going to be of my child being in lockdown for so long?" And I'm reassuring him that his son's got amazing social engagement and still exploring those sensory activations. So it's really affecting people and their concerns for their children, which could have a negative effect, rolling on into more protection.

I love this that you shared in a keynote, about referencing abduction, saying in Canada it's one in fifteen million chance.

Dr Mariana Brussoni: One in fourteen.

Lukas: Yeah, one in fourteen, I was going to—

Dr Mariana Brussoni: Which is — and we have a national lottery, and it has the same odds. One in fourteen million.

Lukas: And then it was — was it your child could play for two hundred thousand years?

Dr Mariana Brussoni: Yep, yeah, to log the hours it would take for your number to come up. It's about two hundred thousand years, unsupervised.

Lukas: Yeah. And that's a constant, even within relationships — and maybe with your research on dads being more pro-risk than mums — what are some strategies you can share with the listeners for dads to kind of turn the table or create a cheerleader in the mum that might not be so risk-embracing?

Dr Mariana Brussoni: Yeah, and to be fair, there were a lot of couples that were the opposite too. So when there's a mismatch, a lot of the times the parent who was more conservative actually recognized that and also saw it as an issue, and so took steps themselves — to, for example, not be around when that particular activity was being engaged in, or whatever. But one of the things that we've done is we've created a tool for parents that any parent can access anytime they want at outsideplay.ca. And so you could go through it together as a couple, or share it with your partner. And the idea behind the tool — we use health behavior change techniques to actually guide people through a personal journey, get them to think about their own childhood and what they want for their child, and what they're doing to support those opportunities for their kid. So yeah, people can go to outsideplay.ca and give that a try.

Lukas: Yeah, and you've got an exciting new launch happening. Do you want to talk to our listeners about that?

Dr Mariana Brussoni: Sure, yeah. So at the same URL, outsideplay.ca, we have a tool for early childhood educators. So now, it's mid-September — it's in the beta form right now, but we will be releasing the final version by the end of October. So please go back to outsideplay.ca and check that one out, because we've been working with early childhood educators and we've got a lot more details in there to try and address some of the barriers that they describe.

Lukas: Yeah, and what I see it as — in summary for our listeners — it's a brilliant way to overcome that nostalgia and actually hold up risk and outdoor play as a place of importance. It's actually an essential developmental need to have these experiences. It's not just something that was nice and we enjoyed conveniently in the past — it's actually integral for your child's well-being and their sense of accomplishment, and for them moving into — in brackets — a successful adulthood. So in summary, as brief as it can be — I know we could do a whole different podcast on this question — how do you move beyond that nostalgia to one of supporting action?

Dr Mariana Brussoni: Yeah, well, and I want to be careful too with nostalgia, right? Because it's also not about going back to say a 1980s childhood. There were lots of problems with the eighties that we don't want to bring back. And we're not in the eighties — we're in our own reality, right? So it's also kind of accepting that the world has changed, that we have, for example, screens, and we have more urbanization, we have other realities, and that's fine. But also recognizing that kids actually are really resilient, and play can happen anywhere. It's easy to support play in very small spaces. You don't need the beautiful forest with lots of access to different things — kids find all sorts of joy in very small spaces, say with loose parts or other things. So one of the things that we found important in our research is a sense of social cohesion in communities, right? We talked about how parents really fear letting their kids out, for a variety of reasons, mostly kidnapping and their kids getting hit by a car. But what we found is that when there's high social cohesion in communities, then those—

Dr Mariana Brussoni: fears really go down and they seem to be unrelated to the crime statistics of the neighborhood. Their fears and the crime statistics are unrelated. Same with social cohesion. So really, part of it is social planning — building spaces in our cities where people want to be outdoors, want to meet their neighbors, having play streets where you close a street so that kids can play, or you have a designated area that it's okay for kids to play, normalizing that. But really, people wanting to make the effort to make their neighborhood more play friendly — but they can start with themselves. They can start by going to outsideplay.ca, thinking about what's important to them and how to start on that journey. Because it's important to note that this is a journey, right? We're not gonna, as I mentioned, it's gonna take us some time to get past and move forward to supporting children's play. So think about one key, manageable thing that you can do. For some parents it's even been like I tell them about the 17 second rule. Next time you want to say "be careful," just count to 17, and just kind of let it play out. And maybe that's the first step in the journey, right? And then you can build from there. And that's okay. It's just feeling like you actually have agency. All of us have to work together. So it's up to all of us to try and make changes.

Lukas: And speaking of changes, just we'll take a moment to pause — we're creating the ideal play/learning environment for a child. Where do you start?

Dr Mariana Brussoni: Ideal. So I guess there's three key ingredients that I usually share about the kind of high quality outdoor play environments: time, space, and freedom. So with respect to time, it's making sure the kids have that free time to actually play and to play the way that they want to play — which gets to our freedom component. So the biggest challenge around freedom is adults, adults being freaked out by the way kids are playing and putting limits on it or stopping it or whatever. So with respect to freedom, it's really us working on our fears — our fears of injury, our fears of kidnapping, our fears of whatever it is — working through the fact that the worst case scenario is actually not that bad. I can give you a ton of injury statistics to show you how unlikely the worst case scenario is. And just recognizing what you're seeing in front of you — how supporting children's play can improve your relationship with the child, rather than being in a policing situation that you're co-creating potentially or that you're supporting. You're there to support them rather than to stymie them. And then the third ingredient is space. We talked a little bit about that, but one of the key things that we have found that's just really helpful for activating a space when you don't have many resources is loose parts, right? Making sure that you have a variety of loose parts, a lot of them, so that kids can really explore different kinds of things, that they can move them around, that they can let their imagination shape the play, and that they feel like they can play the way they want to play.

Lukas: Amazing. And I didn't hear you mention a slide or a swing or a park. So maybe you can unpack that a bit.

Dr Mariana Brussoni: Sure, yeah. So parks are — you don't need a piece of fixed equipment to have a high quality experience. So the way we think about play is using the theory of affordances. If you think about an affordance for say a stick, it has as many affordances as the imagination of the person holding it and their capabilities. So a child — maybe it's a sword, maybe it's a wand, maybe it's a stir stick, maybe it's a piece to build a shelter — depending on what they're capable of doing. So if the stick is really big and the child is small, then the affordances for that will reduce. So what you want is to maximize the affordances. When you have pieces of fixed equipment, because you can't move them, then the affordances are limited, because it was the designer that decided how that piece of equipment should look and the kids can't shift it. They can do maybe a little bit, and sometimes kids are pretty creative with what they do with fixed equipment. But what you tend to find is that they get pretty tired of that equipment. And if you think about equipment that's in schools or childcare centers where kids are at those places for years and years and years, day after day after day, that same piece of equipment is going to get really boring really quickly. And so loose parts, because they can be moved around — the same part can fulfill tons of different purposes — is a really good way of increasing affordances, and of not prescribing, not being the adult again in that experience and saying "climb here, slide here, slide here."

Lukas: From that injury prevention standpoint, what is the data on traditional park versus wilderness?

Dr Mariana Brussoni: I'd love to get those data. It's actually really hard, because the data and the way they're coded — they're coded for administrators, not for play researchers, unfortunately. So the kind of data that we can look at are only codes for things like falls from play equipment and falls from trees. Other than that, and there's like some sports, but other than that, there's no really good codes to allow us to impact the injury data. But I can tell you — I looked at death data for Canada, not Australia, but Canada, 17 years' worth of child deaths across Canada for falls from trees, and found zero — not one, not one child died in 17 years falling from a tree. There was 10 years of data for falls from play equipment, and there were two children that died over the course of those ten years, which is a rate of one in thirty-five million, right? Like it's extremely rare. So while hospitalizations due to injuries are one of the leading causes of hospitalization, what you tend to find is that falls are one of the most important causes for kids, and falls from play equipment are up there, but what they are is fractures — basically broken arms. And so they're not actually considered serious injuries. Last time I looked, about 89% of hospitalizations were due to fractures, right? So we're really looking at a very low likelihood of a serious trauma or injury.

Lukas: Yeah, and yet we're seeing the very unlikelihood dictate policy, dictate standards, and increase standards. I was at a play area with my daughter — she was climbing this tree, climbed up really high. There were people looking at me, pointing at her because she's so high up the tree. I was like, "She's fine, she's got it." She came down, jumped on the swing, swung probably a meter and a half, fell on the rubber, and broke her arm.

Dr Mariana Brussoni: Ironic, isn't it?

Lukas: So ironic. Going back to that research, what's your favorite piece of research that you've been involved with?

Dr Mariana Brussoni: I have some really interesting stuff. Yeah, it's like choosing from your children. So we did do kind of an elegant little study, which was modifying the outdoor environment of two child care centers. Both had really, really impoverished environments. This was work I did with my colleague Professor Susan Herrington — she's a landscape architect, professor at UBC — and she developed the seven C's design guidelines for outdoor play environments. So we used her guidelines to modify the play environment, and it mostly involved bringing in nature — pots of bamboo that we could position, loose parts, dirt, mud, grass, water, sand. And it wasn't just dumping it in, laying it out in a thoughtful way that created zones and still allowed the kids to do a lot of tricycling around — still allowed that sort of thing — and zones for individual play and kind of hiding, as well as for group play where you could get more rambunctious, and those sorts of things. Small study, two child care centers, we expected nothing — it was a pilot — and yet we found that depressive symptomatology reduced in the kids, pro-social behaviors increased, antisocial behaviors decreased, based on this very small, very limited study. So I think that's one of my favorites.

Lukas: Yeah. And from a personal level, I've seen this happen time and time again — like intentional design, honouring the childhood experience. I had one scenario where we went to a center and it was very astroturf and fort previously, and we put in garden areas and just wilderness for the children to be, and spread it all out intentional with zones, and the owner came for a handover and with the

Dr Mariana Brussoni: ...director of the center. I thought everyone was outside. Yeah, they're not all here. He goes, "Yes they are. Everyone's out here." What? No. Because previously it was just high speed and chaos, and now all of a sudden just with that intentional tweak you've got four children in a play frame over here. And then they had the behavioural challenges drop as well.

Lukas: We'll have to continue this conversation because I want to know how you collected that data so I can do the same thing. That would be amazing.

Dr Mariana Brussoni: Something, and even where we want to explore putting trackers on and analyze the movement of those children in the different spaces before and after as well.

Lukas: That's awesome. You're talking to a parent and you want to promote risk in a really sharp, concise way, maybe mention some data. What is your go-to conversation starter to support a parent?

Dr Mariana Brussoni: I have to say data doesn't work. What works better, as we talked about at the beginning, is taking them back to their own childhood play experience, reminding them about their favorite play, making them think about why that was their favorite play, and whether their child is having similar experiences or not. That I find is what — you watch the light bulbs turn on in people's eyes.

Lukas: Yeah, from a research standpoint, we can look at the data of the amount of outdoor play happening one generation ago, and there's research showing it's dropped forty percent in around that mark in one generation. What do you think that impact's going to be of the huge reductions in outdoor play for generations to come?

Dr Mariana Brussoni: I think — well, we're concerned, but there's a few things that are concerning. First of all is a shifting of goalposts, right? So as you have kids having less freedom to go out and play, to be independent, to wander their neighborhoods, their range of motion gets restricted, the goalposts shift in terms of what's normal for kids. And so now we have kids who grew up in the nineties, post that kind of tightening of restrictions, who are parents now, and their perceptions of what kids are capable of are shaped by their own childhood, which was more restricted than my childhood or previous childhoods — gone backwards. And so as those goalposts shift, it's harder and harder to push them back, to expand them. So that's one thing I'm worried about.

But there's other more concrete things too. For example, certainly in Canada, and I know it's the same in Australia and most developed countries around the world, there's an increase in obesity. So we have kids in Canada who are taller, but they're also heavier, fatter, rounder, weaker, less aerobically fit as generations proceed than they were before. So you have physical changes to kids' bodies that are already happening.

Because we know, to connect the dots, kids playing outside are more physically active than kids playing indoors. And we also know that risky play — kids who are able to engage in the kind of play they want to engage in — are more physically active than kids who are controlled in their play. So physical activity levels are important.

Myopia is kind of an interesting one — short-sightedness. Even ophthalmologists are saying how important it is for kids to get outside three-plus hours a day to experience the rays of the sun and look into the distance, to reduce the likelihood of myopia. So we're seeing an increase in myopia. We're seeing increases in allergies and asthma, and one of the hypotheses is that it's because kids aren't getting their hands in the dirt — they're too clean, too sterilized.

And then of course we have things like — there's been successive tests of creativity in the US, for example, and we're seeing drops in creativity scores for successive generations. These are correlations — we don't know that outdoor play necessarily causes that — but it's a number of things that raise those concerns. We've seen an increase in anxiety and depression — dramatic increases in anxiety and depression. We know the importance of outdoor play for reducing anxiety and depression, so again, there's a concern there. And on and on and on.

Lukas: Yeah, and like you mentioned earlier, the pivotal point is that adult role in this as well — not only for educators, not only for parents, but the caretakers. If you've got a relationship with the child, you can foster and support this essential need of a memorable childhood experience. Anything else you would like to mention that's popped up for you as we've chatted?

Dr Mariana Brussoni: So, I guess one of the challenges that comes up a lot is screens, right? Screens are extremely compelling, and they're also appealing to parents because if kids are on screen, they're indoors, parents know exactly where they are, they feel like they're safe — even though, of course, we know all the challenges and problems with that.

So what to do about screens is a problem, a challenge, and something I'm actually struggling with. I used to think that if we just made the outdoor play environment stimulating enough, kids would think, "Well, screens aren't as good — I'd rather be out there." And to a certain point I think that is true, but it's above and beyond that. So it's one of those "to be continued" — we need more research, trying to figure out the best we can what we can do about that one.

Lukas: Yeah, so where's more research needed for the people listening? Maybe you're feeling inspired after this — you can link in with some colleagues, collect some data to convey this important message. What's your advice for people wanting to do that?

Dr Mariana Brussoni: Hmm, so, well, I guess I would be really curious — what we don't have is data, for example, on... let's say you and your company come and do a redesign of an outdoor play environment. And I'm not talking necessarily about a childcare center or school, because that's a more controlled environment, but say a neighborhood — would you see kids more likely to play outside, a reduction in screen time?

There's already research out there showing that as screen time increases, well-being decreases, the perception of the importance of nature decreases, and what's displaced by that screen time is actually outdoor play. So we already know that. But I guess it's just a kind of wondering — can we make environments compelling enough that they can compete with screens? And do we need to compete with screens? What about incorporating screens into it — just accepting the fact that they're here and thinking about how we can best use screens to support children's outdoor play? I don't know — these are all questions that are going through my head.

Lukas: Yeah, and it's "how long's a piece of string," considering the term "risky play" hasn't been around for that long. We're only in the infancy of looking into this research — we're really only now getting to the point where we're getting some conclusive data coming out of it, from my understanding. Correct me if I'm wrong, because you're the research guru, not me — but yeah, it seems like we're really getting the ball rolling with more and more research that confirms previous suspicions of the importance of outdoor play, which I think we all innately know is important, but is now getting the data to say this is the impact on communities, this is the impact on health, this is the impact on the economy, well-being — which has never been so important in these times of lockdown.

I'd love to — thank you so much for being on and joining us today on the Play It Forward Podcast. It's been an honor to just sit down and chat with you, putting a face and a conversation to all the research I've read of yours. I've got to thank you personally for being an advocate of getting this data out there, that's so, so important. Like when I do a presentation, I've done the same thing — I've asked people to reflect and close their eyes and think about this, and the smiles that light up the room when you say "think about your childhood." Even when I say "did you get hurt" and the smile gets even bigger — that's an indication of how important this is, and the work that you do is so important. I'm absolutely honored to sit down and talk to you. So thank you so much.

Dr Mariana Brussoni: Well, thank you for providing the platform, Lukas, and it was a really entertaining conversation. Thank you.

Lukas: And we're going to follow this conversation up in the background, and we're going to get some...

Dr Mariana Brussoni: Crazy data to share with all the listeners in the world.

Lukas: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Mariana Brussoni.

Dr Mariana Brussoni: My pleasure.

Lukas: Thank you for listening to another Play It Forward worthy podcast. That was the amazing Dr. Mariana Brussoni. Head over to outsideplay.ca for those resources that we just spoke about: the early childhood tool and the parenting tool to support risk for the children in your world. If you're a geek like me, head over to the Brussoni lab to read all the research and go deep on risk and injury and why it's important. Another recommendation is Outdoor Play Canada for amazing research. Only the best content is on Outdoor Play Canada. So head on over. Thanks so much for listening.