Climbing out of crime: An outdoor activity framework for rehabilitating insecure family attachments.

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My PhD research explored how risk-taking in an outdoor activity setting can help people manage challenging emotions. Firstly, our research highlighted that participating in socially accepted forms of risk-taking activities, such as rock climbing, can improve participants' sense of emotional control in daily life for up to 6 weeks (Willegers et al., 2023). Secondly, we expanded Bowlby's Theory of Social Attachment (1969) and found that people who feel emotionally unsupported participate in sporting activities to address the associated emotion difficulty. The originality of our work lies in bringing together positive risk-taking and social attachment as a pathway for rehabilitating untrusting and unsupportive family relationships away from antisocial risk-taking. 80% of prolific adult offenders began committing crimes as children. The estimated cost of late intervention to the UK economy is approximately £17 billion per year (Fraser & Atkins, 2022). Fifty years of research shows that troubled parent-child relationships can push young people towards harmful risk-taking activities as a means of coping, such as self-harm, violence, and substance abuse (Boccio & Beaver, 2019). Our research aims to provide struggling families in Britain with the necessary social and self-regulatory skills to become productive members of society, interrupting a downward spiral and reducing public costs.The aim of the current fellowship is to develop pathways to help young people change their risk-taking course from negative (for the self and for society) to positive, by allowing them to take risks in a supportive and developmental environment. Adventure activities provide an ideal environment for nurturing a co-dependence between parent and child (i.e., secure attachment), by promoting supportive behaviour in response to risk. Managing these risks will improve parents' and children's self-esteem by learning how to control their emotions and seek social support in ways that are not accessible elsewhere in their lives (Barlow et al., 2013). Importantly, these benefits can transfer to daily life, improving family's ability to support each other's emotional needs as a result of engaging in adventure activities (Willegers et al., 2023; Woodman et al., 2020). Taking climbing as an example, the rope connecting both parent and child acts as a physical example of an attachment. This (rope) attachment, from the child's perspective, represents a clear dependence on the caregiver/parent to help manage fear and to ensure safety. The parent provides physical security and emotional reassurance to the child by applying tension to the rope and oral reassurance. In doing so, the nature of the climbing environment exercises a clear co-dependence in which the child places trust in the parent who simultaneously fulfills the child's attachment needs for security. Transferring these experiences to other domains in the parent-child dyad results in the parent feeling able to fulfil the child's needs for security, and the child trusting the parent in times of distress. The dissemination of my PhD findings and innovative responses to costly societal problems has been welcomed by Conwy Council, Family Centres, Outdoor Industry, Youth Justice System, Youth services, and Education Services. As such, all our partners have offered their services in support in disseminating my research and writing completing grant proposals for the aforementioned research (see letters of support in attachments). Our partners and I aim to demonstrate that, nurtured properly, risk can be used to steer struggling families away from antisocial risk-taking and towards supportive relationships. In other words, we aim to develop our understanding into powerful and feasible interventions that have real economic and societal benefits by improving struggling parent-child relationships in the UK and globally. This ESRC doctoral fellowship is a fundamental steppingstone for bringing this potential to