Risky Play Making Sense

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: https://www.chhs.colostate.edu/bio-page/anita-bundy-1189/
Sydney Playground Project: https://www.sydneyplaygroundproject.com/
Revised Knox Preschool Play Scale: https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-1-4419-1698-3_604
Test of Playfulness (Bundy): https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-1-4419-1698-3_299
Neumann, Eva: The Elements of Play https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-1-4419-1698-3_604
Gregory Bateson's concept of “metacommunication”: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0732118X9190042K
David Ball: Playgrounds - risks, benefits and choices: https://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/4990/1/crr02426.pd
Tim Gill: The Benefits of Children's Engagement with Nature: A Systematic Literature Review: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7721/chilyoutenvi.24.2.0010
Ellen Beate Hansen Sandseter: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=vxKzmO8AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
The Play Outside UBC Lab, led by Dr. Mariana Brussoni: https://playoutsideubc.ca/
 
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 t