by Ángeles de Hita - Jun 30, 2025. 

 

 

I think it’s very natural, especially for new parents, to want to protect their child as much as possible. I did it myself with my first. Without even realising, I was overprotecting him and that need to protect didn’t come from fear, but from love. What’s interesting is that I had already spent years surrounded by children. I had studied early childhood education and pedagogy, so I understood how important those early years are in a child’s development. I also had the chance to work as a teacher for a few years, interacting with small children every day. But when it’s your own child, everything feels different. That’s when I truly understood how hard it is to let go a little, to give space, and to trust. To allow challenge, not just comfort, because that’s where growth really begins.

 

I’m not particularly fond of the term risky play. It tends to sound alarming to some ears, and beyond that, it feels like one of those trendy labels that catch on quickly without fully reflecting the depth of the idea behind it. What we’re really talking about is something much more universal, positive, and rooted in child development. I prefer the term challenging play. It suggests difficulty that encourages growth, not danger. It’s about creating spaces where children can test their abilities, make decisions, and build confidence by encountering manageable risks in their own time and way.

 

 

A well-designed play environment should invite this kind of challenge. It’s how children grow strong, capable, and self-aware.

 

 

And maybe the most overlooked element in all of this is the child’s own voice. Because it’s not just about safety, or risk, or even challenge. It’s about giving children a sense of belonging and ownership in the spaces they play in. When they’re involved, even in small ways, in shaping their environment, their motivation to explore, create, and care for that space grows naturally. It becomes theirs. When children build their own play spaces, when they decide, arrange, or even invent parts of it, play becomes more than just physical activity. It becomes expression, collaboration, and identity. And that, too, is part of healthy development.

 

This idea of challenge, ownership, and freedom in play is not new. In fact, it has deep roots in the story of adventure playgrounds, spaces that first emerged during times of crisis, not comfort. After the Second World War, when many European cities were left full of rubble, children instinctively found ways to play among the debris. In Denmark, the landscape architect Carl Theodor Sørensen noticed how children gravitated toward construction sites and leftover materials. He proposed something radical: instead of clearing these spaces, why not support children in shaping them? The first “junk playground” opened in 1943 in Emdrup, Copenhagen, and it offered just that, a space with tools, scrap materials, and earth, where children could dig, build, and invent. These playgrounds weren’t designed around safety rails and fixed equipment, but around the belief that children are naturally creative and competent when given freedom and responsibility. They didn’t just play in the space -they made the space-. And in doing so, they developed skills far beyond what traditional play equipment could offer.

 

 

Today’s urban playgrounds feel worlds apart from those early adventure spaces. As cities have become denser and more regulated, play areas have grown smaller, more controlled, and often stripped of the mess and unpredictability children naturally seek. Materials are fixed, surfaces flat, and equipment focused on safety rather than curiosity. With fewer outdoor spaces and limited freedom to shape their environment, children lose that sense of ownership and discovery. Playgrounds may be safer, but they’re often less alive, less open to imagination, risk, and real engagement.

 

In the 1940s, British landscape architect Lady Allen of Hurtwood visited Emdrup and immediately understood its power. She saw that the playground’s apparent disorder was actually full of meaning. That children, given tools and scrap materials, could create real communities through play. When she returned to Britain, she championed the idea and renamed them adventure playgrounds, helping to spread the concept across post-war cities. These spaces were built not to entertain children, but to trust them and let them shape their own environments with freedom and purpose.

 

 

Adventure playgrounds may look wild from the outside: mud, scrap wood, water, tools… but they were never meant to be chaotic or unsafe. In fact, one of their most defining features was the constant presence of an adult known as the play leader. This person wasn’t there to control or instruct, but to observe, support, and stay available. The children built freely, made decisions, created structures, negotiated space. But the leader was always nearby, not doing things for them, not intervening too quickly, but never absent either. It was a delicate balance: giving space without stepping away. This adult role gave children both the freedom to experiment and the security of being seen.

 

We may never fully return to those raw, open-ended adventure playgrounds of the past, but they still hold lessons for us today.

Adventure playgrounds, though rare today, do still exist in some parts of the world. Places like the The Land adventure playground in Wrexham, Wales, the Berkeley Adventure Playground in California, and Junk Playground in Tokyo continue to keep the spirit of child-led, challenging play alive. These sites serve as living reminders of what is possible when we trust children to shape their own play and support them, not by removing risk entirely, but by being present, available, and quietly encouraging.

What would it look like to design play spaces that trusted children again? That allowed for more complexity, more self-direction, more freedom? What might we recover if we stopped designing only for safety and started designing for growth, imagination, and joy?