ADVENTURE PLAY

Adventure Play is an essential play for nurturing resilient, critical thinkers. It’s the type of play that many of us parents remember as children, and it is becoming more and more rare. Do you remember wandering through woods and vacant lots or fields? Do you remember building forts and special places? Being called back home at dinner time? It’s a right of passage, and quite necessary to healthy human development.

Adventure play is a way of being and engaging with the world. Children don’t have to be 5 or 7 or 13 years old to start, you can support adventure play even with infants!

Providing emotional and physical supports, not too much, just enough to help them to learn to navigate, climb, hide, build, and be adventurous. Learning to take risks, in healthy supportive environments with risks mitigated by caring adults, helps children to learn where their limits are.

This kind of perceived risk testing and learning is important in helping children to develop physical and cognitive competencies, creativity and self-worth.