As Safe as Necessary: Why Children Need Risk to Grow
- Claire
- Aug 5
- 12 min read
Updated: Aug 12
A natural part of learning, or someone's fault?
Picture it. A five-year-old at a Forest School session in Singapore loves sitting on a low wooden platform in the trees. It is their favourite spot in the woods to hang out with new camp friends, in full view of staff. One morning, the child falls off. The fall is accidental but the child has a hairline fracture, both unfortunate and painful, but common in childhood. Is this an acceptable part of growing up, or is another child, the tree roots, the equipment or an adult at fault? Should an adult have been standing ready to catch this child, just in case? Are five-year-olds too young to sit in a space like this?
Picture it. Two babies interact at a forest playgroup. There are three adults caring for, and responsible for, these two babies in addition to a forest school leader. Despite this oversight, one baby is holding a craft item and hits the other baby causing a small cut. Should we accept that whilst babies learn to control objects in a group environment, bumps and scrapes may occur? Or should we investigate, blame, eliminate, separate, to ensure each child is as safe as possible from all physical harm? When does the benefit outweigh the risk?
If you read those two stories and felt discomfort should this have been your child, this piece is written for you. Not to tell you that you are worrying too much, but to explain what we know about why children need to climb, wobble, squabble and occasionally come home with a grazed knee or bruise or that priceless sense of achievement when succeeding at something all on their own, and what that means for the way we look after your child at forest school.
The slow shrinking of childhood
In Last Child in the Woods, the American writer Richard Louv pulled together decades of evidence on what has happened to the world of the child. One number sits at the heart of his work. By the 1990s, the radius around the home in which children were allowed to roam on their own had shrunk to roughly a ninth of what it had been in 1970. In one generation, the physical territory of childhood collapsed.
Louv traces the cause, primarily, to fear. Fear of strangers. Fear of traffic. Fear of injury. Fear of judgement from other parents. Fear of being sued. Most of these fears are out of proportion to the actual risk. Child abductions by strangers are vanishingly rare and have been declining for decades. The probability of a child being seriously hurt in well-supervised outdoor play is low. But fear is not statistical. Fear is emotional, and fear compounded across decades has steadily walled off the spaces children used to inhabit.
The British writer Tim Gill made the same point in No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk-Averse Society. His argument is that risk aversion is not neutral. It restricts play, narrows the freedom of movement that builds independence, corrodes the trust between adults and children, and ultimately constrains the way children come to understand the world. It does not make children safer. It makes them and their worlds, smaller.
This is not a uniquely Western pattern. It is now global, and Singapore is no exception.
The Singapore context
Singapore is one of the safest cities in the world to raise a child. It is also one of the most achievement-oriented. Those two facts shape parenting here in particular ways.
Parents are time-poor. Many are managing demanding careers, the academic load on their children, multiple enrichment classes, and the constant comparative pressure of a school system that rewards precision. Underneath it sits a fear of being left behind. A National University of Singapore team followed 263 Singapore children from the age of seven for five years and found that those with more intrusive, controlling parents (their words not ours) became increasingly self-critical over time, and that self-criticism travelled with higher anxiety and depressive symptoms. The intent is loving. The outcome is often the opposite of what was intended, which is precisely why this is worth talking about.
Children are increasingly anxious, less physically confident, less practised at the ordinary work of figuring things out for themselves.
Contrast that with Japan. Anyone who has seen the Netflix show Old Enough! (originally Hajimete no Otsukai, on Japanese television since 1991) will have watched toddlers and preschoolers walking to the shop, carrying parcels, paying for groceries and coming home alone. The programme is filmed with discreet safety crews and full parental consent. The point is that Japan, as a society, expects very young children to perform small, useful tasks out in the world, on the streets, and the community and the schools are built to support that. The result is not children at greater risk, it is children with more capability, more agency, and more confidence.
What the science says about risk
The current developmental research is unambiguous. Risk-taking is a fundamental part of the system. Around puberty, the brain's reward circuitry develops faster than the prefrontal cortex, which handles caution and planning. This produces a biologically driven appetite for thrill and novelty. It is as if the accelerator gets installed before the brakes. This is the engine that drives young people out of the home, into the world and into the experiences that build adult identity.
But risk-taking has a developmental purpose at every age, not only adolescence. Younger children climb, jump, balance, hide, run and test. Through those moments they calibrate their bodies, learn to read danger, build resilience, and learn how to fail and recover. Children who have practised manageable risk in supervised settings become better, not worse, at staying safe in unsupervised ones.
The skill of judging risk is learnt the same way every other skill is learnt - by doing it.
Take that appetite for risk away and it does not disappear. It finds an outlet. The research is consistent on this point. Adolescents who have been denied appropriate, supervised risk are more likely to seek unsupervised, uncalibrated risk later. They drive too fast. They drink too much. They climb the wrong walls. They take risks online that look small and are not. Adolescent risk-taking is a biological need, not a phase. The only question is whether the adults around them help shape where that need is met and how ready their child is for it.
If this makes you nervous, you are not doing it wrong
The urge to step in when your child is up high, or holding something sharp, or squaring up to another toddler over a bucket, is one of the oldest and most useful instincts there is. It kept children alive for a very long time. It is not a flaw to be corrected, and nobody at Wildlings thinks less of a parent for feeling it. Most of us feel it about our own children too.
What has changed is the world around that instinct. Rolling 24hr news, gossip at the school gate, and a culture that treats any injury as proof that someone was careless and at fault. The instinct is ancient but the volume it is being played at today is new, and it points towards our uncomfortable feelings being out of step as a reliable measure of how dangerous the situation in front of us actually is.
Research tells us the same few things help:
Pause and observe before stepping in, because most wobbles resolve themselves and the child who is concentrating hardest often looks the least steady.
Say what you see rather than what you fear, so "your feet are near the edge" rather than "be careful, you'll fall".
Learn the difference between a child who is frightened and a child who is working hard, because they look similar and need opposite responses.
Show a calm face when your child glances over at you, because they are checking your reading of the situation before they commit to their own actions.
None of this is about pretending you are not worried. It is about not handing the worry to your child.
Children read our faces before they learn to read the actual risk.
Safe as necessary, not as safe as possible
Forest School and the wider risky-play research community have a phrase for the alternative.
As safe as necessary, not as safe as possible.
It looks like a small change of words but it is a fundamental shift in perspective. As safe as possible eliminates risk on principle. It assumes that if harm could occur, it should be removed. As safe as necessary asks a different and more useful question, one that takes seriously what we know about how children's brains develop. What is the level of risk required for this experience to deliver the developmental benefit it offers? The job of a thoughtful educator is to land between those two lines, the balance of risk and reward, not to drop below them.
In practice, that means we accept that some harm might occur. We do not pretend otherwise. We do everything we can to keep harm minor, recoverable and rare. We design environments carefully. We train staff thoroughly. We assess risk and benefit together, in a single process. We trust children to do what their developing minds and bodies need to do. And we tell parents, openly, that this is how we work.
Then we make the trade-off. We accept that a hairline fracture might happen to one in thousands of children visiting Wildlings, in exchange for not raising a generation of children who won't take a step off the pathway for fear of falling.
What this looks like at Wildlings
At Wildlings, children climb things, balance on things, get hot and cold and tired and hungry, find their own way through small problems, fall over and get up, fall out with friends and patch it up, fail and try again. They use tools under supervision. They sit around fires. They make decisions about their own capabilities. They do meaningful work alongside the adults. They are bored, sometimes, on purpose. They are trusted, on purpose, more than the world around them currently trusts them.
Our staff are not there to prevent all discomfort. They are there to design environments where the discomfort is the right size, where the benefits outweigh the costs, and where children grow into themselves.
We want parents to send their children to forest school knowing that this is not an environment where children are controlled, always supervised closely and their every move choreographed. Children come home with scratched shins, bruised knees and insect bites and they rarely are bothered by it. They trip over roots. They drop things on their toes. Now and again they come home having had a difficult afternoon with a friend, maybe they have hit each other, because a group of young people negotiating a den, a rope or the last good stick is a genuine social workout, and not everybody gets their way.
If your child is hurt beyond the ordinary, you will hear from us the same day and we will tell you exactly what happened and what, if anything, we are changing. If two children fall out, our leaders help them repair it rather than simply separating them, because learning to mend a friendship is one of the most valuable things that happens in childhood.
And here is what we ask of you. When your child comes home with a grazed knee, or a story about a disagreement over a stick, try to treat it as evidence that they were properly in the world that day. Ask them what they worked out rather than how others fixed it for them. That response, more than anything we do in the jungle, is what decides whether your child grows up believing they are capable or believing they are fragile.
A grazed knee is not a failure of care. It is usually the evidence of a good day.
Wildlings is not alone in seeing a need for children to develop more strength and resilience. Tanglin Trust School, one of the most highly regarded schools in Singapore, sends every Year 9 student on The Highlands Programme, a compulsory five-week residential on a 15-acre site bordering Baw Baw National Park in Victoria. Phones are handed in on arrival, students live in dormitories, study on site, work the land and finish with a multi-day Rite of Passage expedition. Tanglin talks openly about building grit, perseverance and resilience, and they did not make it compulsory because it was easy or popular. It is the same instinct that drives Forest School at the earlier stage of childhood: some forms of growth only happen when a child is allowed to be uncomfortable, capable, trusted, and a little bit out of reach of an adult.
Wildlings exists, Forest School exists, to fill the space left as the territory of childhood has closed in. Under our care children can explore and enjoy the great outdoors and lead their own adventures, kept away from the fears that emptied the streets in the first place: strangers, roads, construction sites. But the purpose is not to wrap children in cotton wool and send them to padded play.
Over-protection also works against the world children are growing into. As more cognitive work shifts to machines, the value of what machines cannot do rises: resilience, judgement, social repair, physical capability, calm under pressure. We have written about that in more depth here: Wildlings Forest School in Singapore: Building the Character AI Cannot Replace.
We think that is a trade worth making. We hope you do too.
If this is the childhood you want for your child, come and see it for yourself. We run weekly Forest School, holiday camps, school excursions and residentials, parent-accompanied playgroups and drop-in nature play across Singapore, with home bases at Dempsey and West Coast Park and camps further afield at Pulau Ubin and Batu Batu in Malaysia. Explore our programmes or email us at hello@wildlings.sg.
Get outside and play in the wild.
Claire Seabrook is the founder of Wildlings, a Forest School and outdoor education company operating in Singapore's green spaces. She holds a first class masters degree in Environmental Science and previously worked in sustainability and air quality policy for the London Borough of Camden. Wildlings delivers programmes for children aged 18 months to 13 years at Dempsey Hill and West Coast Park.
Frequently asked questions
Do children really need risk to develop properly?
Yes. Decades of evidence from developmental psychology, neuroscience and outdoor play research all point in the same direction. Manageable, supervised risk is one of the necessary conditions for healthy physical, emotional and cognitive growth. Children denied it tend to be more anxious and less capable, not less likely to be hurt.
What does "as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible" mean in practice?
It is a framework that asks educators to weigh the developmental benefits of an activity against its risks in a single process, rather than removing the activity at the first hint of risk. It is the standard underpinning credible Forest School and outdoor education programmes worldwide.
Is Wildlings cavalier about safety?
No. We carry out detailed risk-benefit assessments for every session, train our staff thoroughly, run small ratios, and operate inside a clear safety framework. The point of "as safe as necessary" is not to lower the bar. It is to make sure the bar is set in the right place for children to actually develop.
What happens if my child gets hurt at a session?
Minor knocks, scrapes, splinters and insect bites are a normal part of outdoor play and are dealt with on site by our first-aid trained leaders. Anything beyond that and we contact you the same day with a full account of what happened, what we did, and what we are changing if anything needs to change. Every incident is logged and reviewed, and our equipment and spaces are re-assessed on the back of it.
My child fell out with another child. Should I be worried?
Almost certainly not. Disagreements over space, tools and ideas are one of the main reasons Forest School works. Our leaders step in to support the repair rather than to end the conflict, because the skill being practised is negotiation, not avoidance. Children who never have to resolve anything do not learn how. If a pattern develops that concerns us, we will always raise it with you directly.
What if my child is the cautious type?
Cautious children benefit from outdoor experiences as much as bold ones, often more. The progression at Wildlings is gentle and child-led. Children move at their own pace. Over weeks and months they build the kind of confidence that does not come from being told they can do something, but from finding out, themselves, that they can.
How do I start?
Forest School Club, our weekly term programme, is the deepest version of this work. We also run holiday camps, school excursions, parent-accompanied playgroups and drop-in nature play. Visit our programmes page or email us at hello@wildlings.sg.
References and further reading
Louv, R. (2005). Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Algonquin Books.
Gill, T. (2007). No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk-Averse Society. Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Free to read at rethinkingchildhood.com.
Hong, R. Y., Lee, S. S. M., Chng, R. Y., Zhou, Y., Tsai, F.-F., & Tan, S.-H. (2016). Developmental trajectories of maladaptive perfectionism in middle childhood. Journal of Personality. The National University of Singapore study of 263 Singapore children cited above; plain-English summary here.
Sandseter, E. B. H., & Kennair, L. E. O. (2011). Children's risky play from an evolutionary perspective: The anti-phobic effects of thrilling experiences. Evolutionary Psychology, 9(2).
Brussoni, M., Gibbons, R., Gray, C., et al. (2015). What is the relationship between risky outdoor play and health in children? A systematic review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 12(6), 6423-6454.
Steinberg, L. (2008). A social neuroscience perspective on adolescent risk-taking. Developmental Review, 28(1), 78-106.
Ball, D., Gill, T., & Spiegal, B. (2012). Managing Risk in Play Provision: Implementation Guide (2nd ed.). Play Safety Forum / Play England. The source of the risk-benefit assessment approach used at Wildlings.
Old Enough! (Hajimete no Otsukai). Nippon TV, 1991 to present; streaming on Netflix.
Tanglin Trust School. The Highlands Programme.
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