By Hilary Caton
As a mother of three kids under the age of seven, Dani Seligman is no stranger to stitches, fractures and scrapes. But she doesn’t let her kids’ past fumbles make her fearful of their outdoor activities at the local playground. Seligman is a big fan of unstructured free play — an approach she acknowledges isn’t always shared by some of her more cautious peers.
“I know it sometimes feels unnatural for parents not to be fearful of their child hurting themselves,” says Seligman. “But part of parenting is also about us learning how to judge our own feelings and reactions, so that we know when to intervene or not to intervene.”
Seligman isn’t alone in her belief in risky outdoor play and unstructured free play. Experts are also paying attention.
Take a 2023 finding in the Journal of Pediatrics, which concludes that one of the main reasons for the rise in youth mental health issues is the drop in “opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults.”
Then came a 2024 position statement from the Canadian Paediatric Society (CPS) encouraging caregivers to ditch overly supervised play for more opportunities for children to engage in outdoor free play, particularly risky free play.
So, what’s with the explicit advice that hands-off parenting is needed?
“There is increasing research that has come into the forefront recently on the loss of outdoor, free and risky types of play that used to be so common and prevalent. This loss is felt to be impacting the rising rates of mental health conditions that we are seeing in children, and the rising rates of obesity, anxiety and behavioural disorders that are potentially connected to a loss of risky play,” says Suzanne Beno, an associate professor in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine’s Department of Paediatrics and co-author of the CPS position statement. Risky play is described in the statement as “thrilling and exciting forms of free play that involve uncertainty of outcome and a possibility of physical injury.” (Risky play is not to be confused with hazardous play, in which “the potential for injury is beyond the child’s capacity to recognize it as such or to manage it.”)
“We’ve become so supervised, and so structured, and so precautionary. There’s been such a shift away from unstructured free play, and there’s so much value to that type of play,” says Beno. “What prompted us to write this position statement is that there is an increasing amount of research demonstrating the significant value and loss that our kids are experiencing from not being exposed to risky play anymore. We really needed to make the statement that kids need to be as safe as necessary, rather than as safe as possible.”
An increase in “helicopter parenting” — a term first coined in 1990 to illustrate how parents may hover, metaphorically, over their children, ready to swoop in and rescue them from disappointments, painful experiences and the dangers of the world. But this hovering can have a negative impact on a child’s mental health.
According to Ripudaman Minhas, an associate professor with Temerty Medicine’s Department of Paediatrics, children lack independence and have fewer opportunities to spread their wings, and experiment and learn from their mistakes.
“There may be less risk-taking, and less opportunities to try and learn new things. There may also be difficulty in coping when situations aren’t successful,” says Minhas, who is also the principal investigator of the Our Kids’ Health Network and a developmental paediatrician at Unity Health’s St. Michael’s Hospital.
What parents may not realize is that there are multiple benefits for children when caregivers learn to let go and allow unstructured play to happen, according to CPS. By encouraging risky free play, parents may be increasing their child’s physical literacy, and the mental health benefits may include greater resilience, better conflict resolution and problem-solving skills, and higher self-esteem.
Their social-emotional health may also increase, which includes a child’s ability to communicate, cooperate and compromise. It gives them opportunities to experiment with uncertainty and develop coping strategies, which can significantly reduce a child’s risk of elevated anxiety, according to the CPS statement.
“Children need to learn how to regulate themselves through times where there may be feelings of failure. They need to have the tools to cope with things that may not go as initially planned. Those are important things to learn early on so that they have these skills as adults, and helicopter parenting can hinder that development,” says Minhas.
Emerging evidence suggests that “overprotective and controlling” parenting may possibly lead to increased anxiety, depression, prescribed medication and recreational consumption of pain pills, according to a report in Frontiers in Psychology. It has also been linked to a decrease in well-being, self-regulation, self-efficacy and poorer academic achievement, according to an article in the Journal of Child and Family Studies.
Brendan Andrade, an associate professor in Temerty Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry and a senior scientist with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, says it’s important not to rest the blame squarely on the shoulders of parents for discouraging free play.
“There’s no fault here,” Andrade says. “They’re doing what they think is best for their child to keep them out of trouble, or to help stop them from hurting themselves,” Every situation is unique, he adds, but ultimately it’s about, “parents trying to do what they can to meet their children’s needs.
“Sometimes when kids have higher degrees of needs or sometimes when there’s environments or situations that are problematic, parents do what they think makes sense,” continues Andrade. “They’re typically doing it with the best of intentions. But sometimes even the best intentions may result in something that’s unintended.”
Simple things such as allowing children to fill boredom with their own interests can be important, says Minhas, adding that it’s crucial for a child’s development to have unstructured time.
“It’s important to position the parenting journey as being something where you’re slowly passing the baton on to the child in terms of incremental tasks where they get to take more of a lead,” adds Minhas. It also means giving children the opportunity to explore and to develop abilities in a play situation that sometimes doesn’t involve parents at all, he says.
“One of the things that’s important for parents to think about is giving the child the opportunity to get through their experience of emotional distress in a way that’s supported or coached,” explains Andrade. “It’s important for kids to be able to test their own limits, to be able to develop their own problem-solving skills and their own capacity to tolerate distress and work through it. Risky play allows them to do just that.”
That advice rings true for Seligman.
“When we make all of the decisions for the kids, it really doesn’t allow them to develop that skill set which they will need for later in life for the things that will have bigger repercussions,” she says. •