Adventurous play in1 schools as a mechanism for reducing risk for childhood anxiety.

当孩子们以冒险的方式玩耍、爬树、骑自行车快速下山、从岩石上跳下时，他们会体验到恐惧和兴奋、兴奋和肾上腺素的感觉。能够通过在游戏中承担一些与年龄相适应的风险来试验这些感觉，有助于儿童学习恐惧、不确定性、风险判断和应对。这种学习以后可能有助于保护儿童，使他们在面对可怕或不确定的情况时不会被焦虑淹没。不幸的是，今天的许多孩子没有像过去的孩子一样有机会以冒险的方式玩耍。在过去的几十年里，儿童在户外玩耍的时间有所减少，户外游戏最常发生在冒险游戏的地方。造成这一下降的原因很多，但其中一个重要原因是对保护儿童免受身体伤害的日益重视。当然，我们都想保护我们的孩子的安全，但有人担心我们可能让孩子们太安全了。过度保护孩子免受身体伤害，我们可能会剥夺他们通过冒险游戏学习的机会，从而增加他们出现情绪问题的风险。儿童时期的焦虑问题是很常见的。几乎所有的孩子在童年时期都经历过恐惧和焦虑的时期，这些通常很快就过去了，不会引起太多的担忧。然而，一些孩子感到如此焦虑，以至于他们无法做一些他们想做的事情。计划中的研究将探索我们是否能够通过增加孩子们在学校的冒险游戏来降低他们经历问题焦虑的可能性。这项研究很重要，因为它可能会帮助我们设计方法，增加冒险游戏，减少儿童长期存在焦虑问题的机会。为了确保这项研究有益于社会，这项工作正在与影响游戏政策的组织(如游戏安全论坛)、设计儿童游戏空间的组织(如HAG)以及心理学家、家长和学校工作人员一起计划和开展。这项研究有可能极大地影响学校处理儿童游戏的方式，并因此显著减少焦虑问题。这将改善英国各地儿童的生活质量，并降低与长期精神健康问题相关的大量社会成本。

When children play in an adventurous way, climbing trees, riding their bikes fast downhill, jumping from rocks, they experience feelings of fear and excitement, thrill and adrenaline. Being able to experiment with these feelings by taking some age-appropriate risks in their play helps children to learn about fear, uncertainty, risk-judgement and coping. This learning may later help to protect children from becoming overwhelmed by anxiety when they are faced with a situation that is scary or uncertain. Unfortunately, many children today do not have the same opportunities to play in an adventurous way that children did in the past. Over the past few decades there has been a decline in the amount of time children spend playing outdoors, where adventurous play most often takes place. There are many reasons for this decline but one important reason is the increased emphasis on keeping children safe from physical harm. Of course, we all want to keep our children safe but there is concern that we may be keeping children too safe. By overly protecting children from physical harm we may increase their risk for emotional problems by denying them to opportunities to learn through adventurous play. Problems with anxiety during childhood are very common. Almost all children experience periods of fear and anxiety during childhood and these often pass quickly without causing too much concern. However, some children feel so anxious that they cannot do some of the things they would like to do. The research planned will explore whether we may be able to decrease the likelihood of children experiences problematic anxiety by increasing their adventurous play in school. This research is important because it may help us to design ways of increasing adventurous play and decreasing the chances of children having long-term problems with anxiety. To ensure that the research benefits society, the work is being planned and conducted together with organisations who affect play policy such as the Play Safety Forum, and those and who design children's play spaces, such as HAGS, as well as psychologists, parents and school staff. The research has the potential to dramatically affect the way that schools approach children's play and to significantly decrease anxiety problems as a consequence. This would improve the quality of life of the children across the UK and decrease the substantial societal costs associated with long-term mental health problems.