adolescentplay

POTENTIAL IN PLAY

As part of an ongoing Masters of Research at Queen Margaret University, Niall is researching the potential for adolescent outdoor play to enhance the lives of teenagers in Scotland. This is a blog he wrote about his upcoming research plans and why this conversation is so important in the first place.

Young people's access to the outdoors has steadily declined, contributing to issues like Play Deprivation and Nature Deficit Disorder (Photo by Rachel Crowe on Unsplash)

IT’S A SHITE STATE OF AFFAIRS BEING A TEENAGER, BUT OUTDOOR PLAY MIGHT HELP

Could simply playing outside be the saviour of a generation? A much-needed intervention for a generation of young people whose wellbeing was already worse than their predecessors even before the compounding impact of the pandemic?

Maybe… but play isn’t new, and it isn’t really an intervention either. It’s the simple, innate behaviour through which humans learn. Plato was already advocating for learning through play thousands of years ago, and in the intervening millennia (admittedly mostly in the last few decades) he’s been joined by legions of academics, educators and campaigners. Paradoxically, despite all the attention, participation in play has steadily declined since the mid-20th century

SO, WHAT IS PLAY?

It’s basically what children do when adults stop interfering.

More formally, it is “behaviour which is freely chosen, personally directed and intrinsically motivated”.

WHERE DOES PLAY HAPPEN?

Well… everywhere, including warzones.

But it’s most likely to flourish if we avoid suppressing it through adult-centric design, rigidly-structured childhoods and allocating the majority of public space to cars, concrete and capitalism.

One of the contexts most conducive to play is the outdoors - you’re in the right place if there’s lots of things to interact with, you can be as noisy and active as you like and everything feels a bit less predictable and “sanitised” than usual.

Isn’t this a bit… risky? ABSOLUTELY - that’s the beauty of it - at its best it includes “scary” things like heights, speed, “dangerous” objects and getting lost. Amongst many benefits, outdoor play has been shown to reduce stress and anxiety and increase connection to nature in young people. By introducing more “risky” elements it can positively impact resilience, self-confidence and even injury-prevention.

It’s notable that risk-appetite peaks in adolescence, but much of our focus and knowledge of play is with younger children. Research on adolescent risk often focuses on reducing negative risk-taking - antisocial behaviour, substance use, violence, etc. This is undoubtedly important, but so is recognising that some risk-taking can be developmentally and/or socially beneficial. Benefits inherent in more positive risk-taking behaviour include increased self-regulation and response inhibition.

Almost counter-intuitively, risky-play like above can actually contribute to injury prevention in young people. (Photo by Luke Porter on Unsplash)

There’s also evidence that individuals with a high risk-appetite can be channelled towards more positive risk-taking behaviours (and may even thrive in these contexts) – perhaps this explains why, when asked “what would you be doing if you weren’t a professional snowboarder/mountain-biker/etc?”, it’s not unusual for athletes to (only half-jokingly) respond with “I’d probably be in prison”.

Balancing care and exposure is critical to the success and enjoyment of outdoor activities. (Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash)

So, should we just ship teenagers to risky outdoor settings and leave them to it? No - and I acknowledge the facetious depiction of adults thus far. The truth is, armed with the right mindset, knowledge and skills, adults can be catalysts for outdoor play. One of the challenges is that even with the requisite knowledge, there’s often a perceived conflict between our duty of care and our willingness to expose young people to genuinely freely chosen, intrinsically motivated, risky outdoor activities.

There’s an obvious synergy here between outdoor play and outdoor learning. Whilst the outdoor learning community doesn’t quite hinge on these principles of self-direction, it does navigate this same apparent conflict between care and exposure. Outdoors instructors navigate this particularly well - they’re experts at managing exposure to risk, encouraging autonomy, scaffolding challenge and placing their participants in the zone of proximal development. Ultimately risk, playfulness and the outdoors are their bread and butter.

And so, to my research and the two groups I plan to engage with:

Adolescents - the (only) experts in what adolescent outdoor play actually looks like. I will document their perceptions and expressions of it and the conditions that enable it. I want to challenge the sense that play is something “administered” by adults, or that it has to be controlled, learning-focused and “safe”. I’ll also try and capture some of the nuance of how perceptions of outdoor risky play might manifest differently based on characteristics like gender, location, socioeconomic status and neurodiversity.

Outdoors Professionals - the experts at facilitating access to outdoors environments that are conducive to risky, playful activities. They’re fluent in the arms-length supervision that enables autonomy, the conditions that limit the potential for harm and the developmental benefits of experiencing agency in the outdoors. Their knowledge will bring pragmatism to the play-aspirations of adolescents and could help a broader range of professionals to step outside their comfort zones in the pursuit of play.

Finally, why is this so important? Well, everyone under the age of 18 in Scotland will soon be legally entitled to participate in play, and we don’t really know much about what this looks like for teenagers. But more than that - the systematic decline of conditions that enable play is part of a wider social justice issue. Declining mental health and physical literacy, nature deficit disorders, play deprivation… Adolescents’ wellbeing is sacrificed, they are denied a voice and they’re being failed by institutions. To paraphrase Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting:

“It’s a shite state of affairs to be in, and all the fresh air in the world

won’t make any fucking COULD ACTUALLY MAKE A difference”.

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