Stopping children from taking risks 'will leave them unable to cope with what life throws at them'

Children are being turned into accessories with parents competing to have the ‘perfect’ high-achieving child, warns Michelle Wisbey, who runs five Montessori pre-schools in Essex and Hertfordshire.

The target-driven culture that runs through schools is now threatening to permeate into the early years with testing of four-year-olds due to be introduced in September 2016.

Defining children’s development through levels in this way has created ‘pushy’ competitive parents, such as the veritable ‘tiger mums’ who don’t like to let their children make mistakes and nurseries have found this is trickling down into the early years.

Ms Wisbey, who spoke at the Fourth Annual Montessori Evaluation and Accreditation Board Conference on ‘Helping Children to Manage Risk’ is concerned about what this ethos is doing to children today.

She told daynurseries.co.uk that “children are becoming accessories. I am worried it will get to the stage when parents are being competitive over what stage their child got to in the EYFS when they left nursery.

Let children make mistakes

“It is important to let your child make mistakes. Let your child be a child. They are never going to become what their parents want them to be,” she warns.

The philosophy of her pre-schools is very much about encouraging children to be independent and learn through making mistakes. “At our settings we do a lot of training with our staff on the importance of trusting the children.

“We also talk to the parents about the importance of letting their children take risks and as a manager it is about asking the parents to trust you,” she says.

“We are very clear with the parents that we allow the children to take risks from climbing trees to pouring their own drinks and using real knives to cut their own snack. To the simple task of taking the risk in choices throughout their day, in the learning they choose to do and the path their day will take. You may not see a pretty picture of record keeping at the end of it but you will see a true picture of a child’s ability and interests.”

Red tape

She admits there is red tape to navigate when it comes to giving children more freedom but adds: “The red tape is there but it is about making sure everything is in place. The red tape is not there to stop you. It is there to protect you. We try not to let it control us or the decisions we make with the children.

“Yet as practitioners we allow red tape and risk adversity to limit the opportunities the children have. Maria Montessori told us to ‘trust the child’, where did we lose the ability to do this? She reminds us consistently in her writing that the child is the most knowledgeable about himself, yet again and again we stand over the top of him instilling our knowledge and not giving the child the voice to share his knowledge - unless it will tick the box of a learning outcome.

“It is all about making children aware of the risks that can happen and making sure they know what can happen. It is about making the child understand and supporting the extending of their knowledge so they can make fully informed decisions for themselves.”

The principles of the Montessori method are that children learn – through choosing, trying and doing themselves, rather than being told.

Independent learning

Independent learning is about trusting the child that they know their own abilities. She compares it to that old analogy. “If a child is walking along a wall then they will make it to the end but if you say to them be careful, then they will fall as they are distracted by your interference.”

Not giving children the opportunity to take risks has a massive effect on their decisions making skills, as it means they are scared to try things - to take the risk, however small it may be, according to Ms Wisbey.

At her nurseries, the children are allowed to use real jugs, plates and bowls and sharp knives and she says they rarely have any accidents, as the “children learn that things break and that things can be dangerous so they gain respect for them and treat them with care, this then determines how they handle almost everything else around them”.

It is of course a parent’s natural instinct to want to protect their children but she believes that in “the long run their child will be in more danger through a lack of awareness”.

“When I was a child, my mum didn’t always know where I was. So if you scratched your knee you just got on with it and more often than not didn’t worry about it.”

Ms Wisbey has a very useful piece of advice – “if you are watching your child do something that is making you as a carer feel a little sick with worry, count to 10 before stepping in, as invariably they will surprise you and achieve whatever they had set out to do.”

Coping strategies

She has researched the issue of risk and studied the concept in her own nurseries. “I was shocked when I was doing research into risk as I found children were often turning around to check with an adult if it was okay to do something, to try something or even to move to a different part of the room.

“Children nowadays are not learning coping strategies to deal with things and these are skills that they need in life.

“If you don’t start early and have the chance to become resilient and make mistakes, you are never going to cope with what life throws at you. “If you over protect your child, they will never learn how to make mistakes.”

Training and research tends to focus on risk-taking in terms of the outdoor environment and physical risk.

However Ms Wisbey says that risk-taking can easily be integrated on a daily basis into nursery life indoors.

“Day in and day out I observe children taking risks however big or small, deciding independently which activity to work with, using kitchen knives to prepare food, using breakable jugs and cups when having a drink and making choices when leading their learning in our environment, yet these tasks are never perceived as risk! Montessori’s aim was to reduce needless constraints on the child and remove him from the destructive influence of adult expectations.

“The freedom to act, combined with independence-enhancing skills, allows the child to develop autonomously and gain the experience and confidence needed to become a fully functioning adult.

“Empowering children by developing this independence, giving them the power over their choice of risky decisions will better prepare them to be autonomous individuals at a young age and acknowledges their right to be seen as individuals now rather than an adult in waiting,” she says.