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 For the study, researchers randomly selected eight elementary
schools to get modified playgrounds with lots of loose and moving
parts, chances to socialize and build things, and opportunities to
play with bikes and skateboards. A control group of eight schools
kept their traditional playgrounds.
After two years, children at the schools with modified playgrounds
were about 33 percent more likely to report pushing and shoving
during recess than kids at schools with traditional playgrounds,
researchers report in Pediatrics. With modified playgrounds,
however, kids were 31 percent less likely to report bullying to
teachers.
“To us, the findings that intervention children reported more
pushing and shoving yet were less likely to tell a teacher were
fascinating,” said senior study author Rachael Taylor of the
University of Otago in New Zealand.
The study doesn’t shed light on why this happened, so it’s hard to
say whether kids got better at resolving disputes on their own or
perhaps became more resilient to behavior that might have felt like
bullying before, Taylor said by email.
Researchers assessed all of the existing playgrounds at the 16
primary schools included in the study, then made changes to half of
the spaces to encourage more risk-taking and challenges.
Along with modified physical spaces to play, the study also
encouraged schools with altered playgrounds to change rules for
recess to allow things like tree climbing, rough-and-tumble play and
going outside even on rainy days.
A total of 840 kids started the study, and 630 of them remained
after two years. Children ranged in age from 6 to 9 years old.
With modified playgrounds, kids were 66 percent more likely to
report playing with a lot of children after one year, and after two
years they were also 64 percent more likely to report being happy at
school.
After one year, parents of kids who had modified playgrounds were
almost twice as likely to say kids had happy relationships with
other students. But after two years, the reverse was true.
Teachers didn’t report differences in name-calling or cruel teasing
based on whether playgrounds were altered for the study. But
teachers did report more physical bullying and deliberate exclusion
with modified playgrounds.
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The main limitation of the study is that bullying is difficult to
assess, the authors note. In addition, the study was too small to
detect meaningful differences between girls and boys and had too few
teachers to draw many conclusions from what educators observed.
Even so, the results suggest it may make sense to move from play
areas that are more structured to spaces that offer an element of
risk and fewer rules, said Sarah Clark, co-director of the C.S. Mott
Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health at the
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
“Too often, parents' inclination is to remove anything that could be
potentially risky and they push schools to do the same - but that
inclination works against kids' developmental need to use play as a
way to challenge themselves,” Clark, who wasn’t involved in the
study, said by email. “So parents, back off and allow kids a little
more freedom in their play space and style.”
Kids need chances to play with fewer rules, said Dr. Cora Collette
Breuner, a researcher at Seattle Children’s Hospital and the
University of Washington who wasn’t involved in the study.
So what should parents tell their children about playtime?
“Take risks; Band-Aids are there for a reason,” Breuner said by
email. “I will be there when you need me but not when you don’t.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2oIRDdv Pediatrics, online April 24, 2017.
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