Risky Play

Anita Bundy, ScD, OT/L, FAOTA, FOTARA is a professor and head of the occupational therapy department at Colorado State University. She has conducted decades of experiments and research in Risky Play. Listen as Dr. Bundy shares both the benefits of risk-taking in play and the developmental costs of being risk-averse.
The views expressed in the following presentation are those of the presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of STAR Institute.
 
Resources Mentioned In this episode:
Anita Bundy’s bio page, publications and awards at Colorado State University: https://www.chhs.colostate.edu/bio-page/anita-bundy-1189/


Sydney Playground Project: https://www.sydneyplaygroundproject.com/


Revised Knox Preschool Play Scale: https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-1-4419-1698-3_604


Test of Playfulness (Bundy): https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-1-4419-1698-3_299


Neumann, Eva: The Elements of Play https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-1-4419-1698-3_604


Gregory Bateson's concept of “metacommunication”: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0732118X9190042K


David Ball: Playgrounds - risks, benefits and choices: https://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/4990/1/crr02426.pd


Tim Gill: The Benefits of Children's Engagement with Nature: A Systematic Literature Review: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7721/chilyoutenvi.24.2.0010


Ellen Beate Hansen Sandseter: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=vxKzmO8AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao


The Play Outside UBC Lab, led by Dr. Mariana Brussoni: https://playoutsideubc.ca/

 
Episode transcript: 
Carrie Schmitt 
I'm joined today by Dr. Anita Bundy. She's an occupational therapist, and thank you so much for being here today, I would love for you to tell us a little bit about yourself.
 
Dr. Anita Bundy 
My pleasure to be here. Thank you, Carrie. I am currently the department head in occupational therapy at Colorado State University. And I've been engaged in labor you search for a long time now,
 
Carrie Schmitt 
I saw that was an area of interest and research among your many distinctions and awards, and all of the important work that you've done in our field. And when I asked you one of the topics you might be interested in talking about today, you mentioned risky play. And so I was able to, you're able to share some articles with me and I was able to go and look up some of your research, I would love to hear the pathway, maybe or some of the things that you've found early in your research or curiosities about play that led you to study risky play as a research category. And you've done some really important findings on the topic.
 
Dr. Anita Bundy 
Well, I started studying play as part of my doctoral work. And I was, I was interested in the notion that therapists had and I think still have, but that maybe not as strongly now that if we helped children to develop skills, those skills would automatically be transferred into their everyday life. And so I was interested in that I was interested in studying the relationship and and I chose to study the relationship between motor skills, and am I needed something functional, that children would do, and I was interested in, you know, graduating in my own lifetime, and I wanted children to be willing to participate. And so I chose play. And so honestly, play was, for me, at that point, a matter of convenience. And so I did my doctoral study. And as I, I observed, a number of children playing. And as I did, I actually became quite fascinated with, with the play part of it with watching children who had some kinds of difficulties. And I had one child in particular, who will always stay with me, and he was a child who had a lot of sensory integrative issues. And he, he was playing outdoors, and I was watching him play outdoors. And he was really terribly, terribly boring to watch out towards he, he was climbing up the slide and going down the slide. And this, this child was sort of he was more than six, he was somewhere between six and eight. But he climbed up beside me like down the slide, and I left the slide went down the slide, and he just did that for ever. And these two other children who were on the playground with him at the same time, they came over and said, Would you like to play with us? Now, of course, what they wanted, they were this was in the days when you had merry go rounds on on playgrounds, and they wanted him to push. But they didn't say that they asked him if he would like to play in. And this would have been a child who probably not very many children, asked him to play. And his response to those two boys was No, I'm busy. And he was busy going up and down the slide. So and I watched him do that for like 15 minutes, and he did nothing else. And so then I, we also watched the children indoors, and I wasn't scoring his play observation indoors, because different people scored them outdoors versus indoors. But I was there when he was playing indoors. And he was like a completely different child. He was he was near Thanksgiving. And he was directing all the other children to make a Thanksgiving dinner. So they had a shoe, which they had turned into a turkey. And he was he was just completely in charge of that whole place situation. And so so I just became very fascinated with the idea that that well, of course, did sensory integration affect his play. It absolutely did. But it didn't keep him from playing. And in fact, he was a great player in in certain circumstances, and that, of course, was not being captured the standardized assessments that we were using of his play. So that's how I got that's how I got into play research. And when I finished that, I finished my doctoral work i i started thinking I used to preschool play scale, to observe play. And I realized at some point that I did the preschool Play School scale was about the skills that children use when they play. It was not really about the play itself, which is how that child was not being captured very well by standardized assessment. And so I thought, well, I'll never do that, again, I'll find a test that really looks at play itself. But there really weren't, aren't very many of those kinds of assessments around. Most assessments really do look at the skills that children use when they play. And so I, I got engaged with several colleagues in developing the test of playfulness to look at the actual interactions that children had not so much what they did not so much the activity or the skills they use. But although the skills are a piece of it, but more about the transaction that was play itself. And so I worked on that for quite a long time. And then I went to Sydney, to work and work for the University of Sydney. And I was interested in doing research with play. And I was interested in something that that somebody would fund, because play research isn't really, I had a lot of funders list. And I gathered a group of colleagues around me who were interested in play in the way that I was interested in it. And so they were, this was a really interdisciplinary group. So we had a human geographer, pediatric exercise science person as a child psychologist. And we that was the core group that that started out. And so we sat down and thought, what would what would we like to do that would inform all of our disciplines, and would be, would actually capture play in the way that we wanted to do that. And so that we started something called the Sydney playground project, which was, which actually was using play as a medium to in the beginning to to promote children's physical activity. But we were very clear that what we what we were doing, what we were going to promote would be play itself. So it wasn't going to be remarkably just put, you know, there's many, many ways that that researchers use to promote physical activity. But we didn't want to do any of those things. We didn't want to draw lines on the playground, we didn't want to leave sporting goods equipment around, we didn't want to do any of that stuff. We wanted to actually promote play in groups of children. So we started out with a, a cluster randomized trial in regular mainstream schools. And we were funded by the government by the Australian government to do this project. And we put recycled materials on the playground. And a whole series of playgrounds. And it was really easy to get the kids to play the play the kids, you know, they love this stuff. They thought it was just great. It had it had no obvious play value. So it was things like tires. And so I don't know, pool noodles. And we had a whole we had a series of seven different criteria that had to be met for us to put these materials on the playground. And we changed them periodically, we added to them. And so you know, barrels, all kinds of different things that we just got from places and put on the playground. And it was really easy. The kids loved it. In fact, it was so popular that school, school principals started doing things like rostering children to the playground and answer them recycled materials when they were on the playground. So you had to use only first and second graders, for example, were allowed to use it on a certain day. And so that was that did kind of muck up the research a little bit because nobody bothered to tell us that they were doing that. But the children loved it. But the adults, the adults didn't love it so much. The adults were convinced that something terrible was going to happen to the children that they were going to get hurt. And so I mean, for example, we use pool noodles. We gave children pool noodles. And you can imagine that the first thing kids do when they have pool noodles is they start playing with them like their swords. And I was on the playground one day when a teacher said to me, you've taken the pool noodle. So I was like, Oh, yeah. She said yes. A child when she named the child, he came in the other day from recess and he had a graze on his nose. And I could just imagine him going home and his mother would be just livid that he had a brace on his nose and I thought Yeah, right. Others probably saying yeah, what happened to you nose, Yeah, I got hit by noodle, you know.
 
Dr. Anita Bundy 
So anyway, we added to our city playground project risk reframing workshop. So we put parents and teachers in the same room and we gave them a series of activities to do they are mostly talking about things and among them you know, what did you do what could you not wait to get to when He left school as a child. And those things were almost always dangerous play risky play, if you will. They were water, they were trees, they were, they were going downhill fast on bicycles or in carts or whatever. And they almost always ended with the same sentences like we were, we would never let kids do that today. And so I started to I heard that so often that I started asking parents will Were your parents negligent? Because there were never any adults and they stood, it was always only the children. And so I started asking them, were your parents negligent? And should they have been there? Or did you learn something that you might not have learned? If you had if they had been there? And they would think about that and talk about that. And almost always, they would come back and say, you know, we've learned to take responsibility. We learned to think, can I do this? And not just Can I do this? But Can my little brother do this? Because often it was siblings playing together? And so you'd have to think, well, will he be safe doing that? And they said, you know, if a parent had been there, we wouldn't have thought about it, the parents would have said, Yes, you can do that, or no, you can't do that. And you could almost see the penny drop with, with these folks, when they start to think that it's like, oh, wow, went through our children learn to do this. When did they learn to take responsibility for their actions, so, so that, while I don't necessarily think that we, the stuff that we put on the playground was very risky, adults, that the teachers thought it was risky, and they were very afraid that parents would think it was risky, and something that happened to the child, and then they would be blamed for it. So that sort of got me intrigued with this idea of risk reframing and risky play, and what are the benefits of risky play? And how do we promote it? And there are a group of researchers around the world who are interested in this phenomenon of risky play. So I've sort of joined a relatively small group of people, although it's a growing group of people who are interested in risky play. And, you know, I would say that, that for me, it's because I'm an occupational therapist, and my colleagues are not, I'm interested in in more than risky play, I'm interested in being able to take risks in everyday life, and manageable risks in everyday life and the benefits of that, and what are the what are the problems if you don't take any risks? So I think that this issue is not just with children in play, but it's also with, with folks with disability, it's the same with old people. And, you know, at all cost, everyone seems to want to keep people safe. And and we don't seem to think very much about what are the consequences of never allowing people to step outside their comfort zone?
 
Carrie Schmitt 
Thank you for sharing that progression. Because I heard so many interesting things in there that I'd love to unpack this idea of trying to measure play skill, when what we really needed to do was look more at the ingredients of play, like what characterizes play, not what does it play skill like? And that seemed to answering some of those questions seem to lead you ultimately, in kind of organically to exposing children to things that adults suddenly decided were potentially risky, which then led you to think about risk assessment. And because of your background, and because of who you are professionally, you started to have some questions around the developmental trajectory, almost of like, what happens if we don't experience some of these essential ingredients of play? That is voluntary, that is pro social, right? That's it, you know, it is played for play sake, it's intrinsically motivated. And then risky play, you could maybe pile on some ingredients, like you mentioned, inherently near risky substances like water. So I'd love to unpack that a little bit like what are some of the ingredients that you're looking for that characterize play? What are some of the ingredients that you look for that would characterize risky play? And how have you figured that those ingredients ended up being kind of essential for risk assessment and for the development of daily comfort with risks? And maybe if they don't, if those ingredients aren't available if those ingredients aren't part of the play, what are we at risk of not developing?
 
Dr. Anita Bundy 
When I was doing my doctoral work, and my, my supervisor said to me, Well, of course, you will have to define play. And I sort of thought that was a kind of silly statement, because everyone knows one play is. And then I started down very seriously looking into play literature. And I realized that not an awful lot of play literature starts with the same sense. And that is no one has ever successfully defined play. And I think that is because people from all sorts of professions are interested in play. You know, biologists are interested in play, and sociologists and anthropologists and, and all sorts of people are interested in play, but I think occupational therapists have, are interested in the phenomenon of play itself. And so I started looking for good definitions of that would fit occupational therapists. And I actually borrowed a definition from a woman named Eva Newman, who wrote who wrote a book, and it was her doctoral work called The Elements of play. And she offered a really, I think, a lovely, well, I turned it into a graphic, but she offered a really nice conceptualization of play. And she said, you know, play is not, it's not in contrast with work. So first of all, we need to get that off the table that play is in contrast, with non play, and play and non play are a continuum. It's not that something is either play, or it's non play. And she said, there are three elements that contribute to play. And those things are also on continuous. So they're present to a greater or lesser extent, it's not an either or they either are or they aren't. It's a continuum. And it's, I'd started to think about it like, like a scale with weights that you could move, and you could offset. If one of those elements was not so much present, then you could offset it with one of the other elements. And she said those elements were intrinsic motivation, that's relative intrinsic motivation. I'm doing this or the player is doing it really, because they want to do it, relative to internal control. So the player feels like they have control over some control over the situation. But so who am I playing with? What am I playing something about how it's going to come out, but you can never have total control, you don't want total control, because then it becomes boring. So there has to be a little bit of a little bit of play in it, but you but you need to feel as though you're in charge. And at the very least, a player can say I'm taking my choice and going home now I don't want to play anymore. So they have to retain at least that much control. And then the third element that Newman talked about was the suspension of reality. So she said, the player had the right to decide how close to objective reality a particular play transaction would be. And of course, the best you know, the the most common examples of suspension of reality are pretend, pretend it's probably the most common one. But that but I think there are probably other ways of suspending reality. So it's, it's breaking the rules a little bit. It's so it's mischief. I think it's a kind of suspension of reality. And, you know, there are other examples as well. And so I borrowed Newman's conceptualization of play, and I added to that the work of Gregory Bateson, and he was interested in framing, he was interested in the queues. In particular, he started out being interested in the cues that even animals would give. So he was interested in medic metacognition, that a meta communication. And he was interested in whether nonhumans who who weren't speaking could actually communicate in other ways. Now, of course, you remember this quite a long time ago. And he talked about monkeys on Monkey Island, and how they would be running around chasing each other grabbing each other's tails, growling, fighting. And if you just said that made that description and said to someone, what are they doing? Probably people would say they were fighting. But the monkeys didn't think they were fighting. The people who are watching didn't think that they were fighting. So somehow, those monkeys were able to give out cues it said this is not for real. This is just pretending this is just play. And so occasionally, of course, you know, a monkey would buy too hard or and then you know you you know what happens then? And you know, the play stops, because then he doesn't play anymore. So I added that little bit to my conceptualization, of play and playfulness.
 
Carrie Schmitt 
You were beginning your research at a time where lay hadn't been defined and described quite as much as that is in current literature. And maybe hadn't, we hadn't captured or defined it, as well as maybe some of the literature has now. So I love the amalgamation of like those two ideas, because it's what is play, and when does play stop to like that I can take my things and go home is control. But then if I take it too far, it's no longer playful. And there's social consequence to that. And that marries really well with this idea of risky play. Because when, when it is playful, and when we're taking risk, let's say around water, but then the risk was too great. There seems to be a message that sent to our system that helps us with future risk assessment. And that is something that we wonder if it's missing, when we don't allow risky play, and then it might have consequences that we don't fully understand. So I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that. What stops us from taking risks? And maybe it's the adults in the room? And then what, how do we benefit? We take a risk, and it goes a little too far.
 
Dr. Anita Bundy 
Well, what stops us I mean, I do think for very young children, it is often adults who stopped them now some children are not stoppable, some children are going to take risks no matter what you do. But that when the children hear repeatedly, the message, you can't do that you're going to get hurt, don't do that. I think they many children, probably not all, but many children internalize that and and learn or learn is the right word, but but begin to feel that they are not capable. And so they stop trying to take risks. And so what are the consequences of that I think what those parents were saying in risky framing, that the children don't learn what their limits are, and, and they don't learn what they're capable of, or maybe what they're not capable of. And of course, children will sometimes cross the line. I mean, if you're learning where your limits are, you will sometimes crossed those limits, and you will sometimes get hurt. And we're not hoping that children have serious injuries. But if you went through life without ever having a bruise, or a scrape or a cut, you know, that just means you haven't done, you haven't done all you're capable of doing. Now, the term risky play came from the work of a woman, an early childhood educator named LMB at East San center. And she's, she's someone that I'm working with now, in my project in Norway, and we're looking at virtual reality and, and risk risky play. So I think in the long run, and this is me, this is just conjecture, really, is that, you know, we have started to see a whole group of university students, for example, who are extremely anxious they have, and I think they've been held to an unreasonable standard all their lives, you know, they have, they're always supposed to be perfect. And everything they do is right, and they never do anything wrong. And, and so I think that's, that's not a realistic standard. But then when they get to university, and they've been that way all their lives, they've always been the top of that class. And they, you know, they've been above average and everything. Well, of course, that isn't going to be maintained forever. And so they become terribly anxious. And then we see another group of children who they're not children anymore, but youth who go off to university, for example, they've never been independent, they've never had to, to determine their own routines, their own schedules, and they go off to university and they become just wild children, you know, for a Navy for only a short period of time, but because they've never been, they've never had the opportunity to test their limits and to go to a certain level of risk. They just don't know how to handle that.
 
Carrie Schmitt 
I like that both of those examples give a different perspective on limitations. So in one example, there were the students who have always been top of the class top of the heap, right, and now they're finding themselves running up against their human limitations, and is making them anxious and then in the other example, the people maybe never got to two test their limits or take risks within the context of their development. And so when the, you know, supervising adults are no longer there on a daily, they decide that it's probably a good time to test their limits. And it both both examples, talk about limits and limitations. And that, inherently, the ability or being allowed to take risks in the context of play, and maybe with lesser stakes, because they're three, or five or seven, would be the ideal time to let them test limits, because when they're testing their limits, it's maybe jumping out of a tree where their arm could get broken, but they probably won't die, versus when they go to university. And they test their limits, and it's involving substances or something where their life could be more at risk. So that's a really interesting. So really interesting observation that now we're looking at the outcomes of maybe not being allowed to take those risks and seeing we need to maybe think about how we're allowing kids to play. What are some of the obstacles to that you have found? Or what are some of the common concerns you hear from caregivers? Why not? Why not let them play in a risky way?
 
Dr. Anita Bundy 
Well, I think it depends on who you are. But very commonly, why not let a child play, many parents or teachers will say, I would let my own child do that. But I won't let other children do it. I don't know what they're capable of, I don't want if someone's at my house, and I'm watching them, and they get hurt, I will, I'm afraid that I will be blamed. And teachers, similarly would say, if a child on my watch gets hurt in some way out, I could lose my job, which course is not realistic, and it's probably not going to happen. And we're not talking about head injuries, we're talking about, you know, very minor injuries. But so I think that's one thing that that keeps people keeps adults from allowing children to, to engage in risky play that the fear that they will, they will be thought to be a bad parent or a bad teacher or, or not good enough to supervise someone else's children. I think that's probably the biggest reason why adults don't now don't let children take risks and get involved in risky play. And of course, I mean, the over if you ask people why they don't let them by they don't let their children do particular kinds of risky play. The most common thing, the most common fear is that children will be abducted. And that's almost universal, that there's a fear that if I let my child go out and play out of my sight or out of an adult, a supervising adults site, then they could be abducted.
 
Carrie Schmitt 
Yeah, as as an ingredient for rescue play, or part of the definition of rescue play is that there's not adults present, right. So allowing your child to go out and explore in groups by themselves. I, as a parent that resonates with me, I grew up in the late 70s and early 80s, when, you know, there was a lot of talk about abduction. And I also have four children of my own, and three of the four children had what I would call very little self preservation. As toddlers, they love risk, and they loved risky play. And when you said that, about knowing their capabilities that rang true to me, because I knew that they could land it if they jumped off something so high. But my friends would panic, because I would let them do that. But one of my children in particular, I would tell like a babysitter, for example, you know, if you think he might, he will, like there is not going to be a stop. So don't like if you know, if he's standing on the top of an 18 foot tower, he will jump he just would he didn't really have that, you know, self preservation kind of button. And so my sisters and I both share that, that a lot of our children take really big risks, but I knew their capabilities. Like I knew a lot of times he could jump from six or seven feet and landed and I'd say don't jump, you'll get hurt. And he would jump and say see, I didn't get hurt. And he was testing his limits. Like I'm i He knew confidently he could jump six feet and land it and it was me being worried and landed. So all Have that really resonated with me both as a parent and as you know, someone who grew up at a time when media exposure to the terrible things that happen, really made, made our generation maybe a little too insistent on supervision and, you know, really shortened, you know, our tolerance of allowing them to be unsupervised and explore.
 
Dr. Anita Bundy 
Yeah. You know, I think children are remarkably good at knowing their limits. You know, I've watched so many children and playgrounds in other places now. And for the most part, I mean, an occasional there's occasionally a child will go past where, you know, they, they shouldn't have done that. But for the most part, they are remarkably good at knowing their limits. And you know, we did the city playground project for more than a decade. And in that time, we had one accident that required some kind of care. It was a child, it was actually a child with autism. And he stacked no crates on top of each other, and I don't know, like, four of them and got up on top and fell off and broke his arm. And he, he, they had the school, of course, had to call his mother. And the child when he got up off the ground said, I knew I shouldn't do that. And when they called his mother, she said he did no, he shouldn't do that. He did something like that once before he broke the other arm. So so but for the most part, I mean, in more than a decade, and countless children and countless schools. That was the only accident that we had, and it wasn't I mean, even then the parents, they weren't distressed and the child was in distress, like, Oops, I shouldn't have done that. And yes, he has a broken arm. But as you said, he's not going to die from a broken arm. So.
 
Carrie Schmitt 
I'm interested about that child, you mentioned that he had a diagnosis of autism. Have you looked at any research for children with neurodevelopmental or motor developmental differences and limitations around play?
 
Dr. Anita Bundy 
What half of the Sydney playground project was done with children with autism? And they were it was a programs that were substantially separate or and one of the schools was, it was a mainstream school, but it had a substantially separate program for children who had mostly autism, and could be autism and intellectual disability. And, yeah, I mean, I think I mean, I just even think back on my own practice, and I remember, you know, being really afraid that a child would, something bad would happen to them. I remember thinking, I have no, I'm sure we wouldn't be doing this today. But I remember taking a child to a fair that we had, we had like three or four of the kids were there. And this little boy had Athetoid cerebral palsy, and he wanted it the worst way to ride by himself in one of the sort of cars that goes on a track. And I was really scared to death, the left. And the guy who was running the car said, just let him do it. I mean, if something happens, we can always stop these covers. And by the time he was done, he was he had fallen all the way down inside of the character, he couldn't see a thing. But he did it all himself. And he was so excited that he had done that himself. And I mean, I think that's, it's really important. I just can't imagine being someone who, for all of your life are never allowed to do anything. That's even mildly risky, because you could get hurt. And that message that I'm not capable of doing anything is such a strong and horrible message to give to children and the children and send me a playground project, we found that one of the one of the programs that we were involved with was a program that really they talked about recess as being play lessons. And they if a child was on the playground for more than like, two minutes without engaging a play, then an adult would go and engage the child in play. And our students started coming back and saying, you know, we don't think that those kids know their other kids on the playground. They wait for an adult to come up and engage them in doing something. And that was in contrast with the program with children where it was a mainstream school, and the children were just expected To do a lot, and they did, they, and they benefited a lot from the playground project, much more than the children in the in the school where they did play lessons. And you know, they were really proud of the fact that they were promoting play. And when you think about it, you know, at first blush, promoting play should have been a desirable thing. And parents really wanted their child to go to this school, but actually turned out that they weren't really promoting play, they were promoting dependence, adults.
 
Carrie Schmitt 
Interesting, the, which you mentioned about the roller coaster. And you know, the child has cerebral palsy, the joy attained through independence and autonomy. And then the, the example on the playground of play lessons, where we teach them just wait two minutes, and an adult will engage you. Right. So it's like a dependence on adults, again. And so I wonder about that, again, as an ingredient for play and for risky play, is autonomy is body agency, and, you know, maybe allowing them to stand there for a little while until they can figure out how to move their body for play. So interesting. I love this topic. If people are interested in this topic, I've captured some of the names that you mentioned, so that they could maybe look up some of the the authors that you referenced, and I'll definitely include them in the show notes. But is there any voice that you really like in this space, or any particular research that you think is interesting that they could look up?
 
Dr. Anita Bundy 
There's a lot of Sydney playground project, research that's been published, I think all of the work that lnbf a Zen Center has done is really fascinating work. You know, in Norway, there are an awful lot of outdoor preschools. And her a lot of her work has been done in those outdoor preschools, Mariana Gressoney, who's choosing entry, she began as an injury prevention person at the University of British Columbia, her work is really, really interesting. There's folks in the UK who've done quite a lot of looking at risk benefit analyses. So David ball, if you just Google risky play, you'll get a relatively small group, Tim Gill is the name I was trying to think of Team gills, a person from the UK who's done a lot of work in risky play. So there's, you know, there's sort of a kind of a core group of people that you'll find if you just Google was kidnapped?
 
Carrie Schmitt 
Yes, thank you. And of course, that's in addition to looking you up on the Colorado State University website, because I, you're obviously very well versed in this a little published. And if anybody's interested in seeing your work, all your publications are listed there as well. I always like to end our conversations, asking a question and that question is, at Star, we place a really high value on curiosity, and recognize that over time, things change and things evolve. And the science leads us to unexpected places. So we have to be humble, and our willingness to follow the science and it often requires us to change our minds about something. So I'm just curious about maybe something that you once believe that you've changed your mind about?
 
Dr. Anita Bundy 
Well, I think play in general, is something that I changed my mind about. You know, I probably started out like, many, many people of my generation, and even since me, thinking that play was what you do when you're done with everything else. No, it's sort of a spare time and whoever has any of that. So it's no, it's not a very important thing. And I have come to see that it is it's a hugely important thing. And I've also changed my beliefs, and I think I alluded to this earlier is that I've changed my beliefs about what is our role as a professional, and as an occupational therapist, trying to help people to lead the life they want to lead. And I think that I have changed my beliefs about that a lot. It's not my life, it's someone else's life. And they have a right to take risks and in fact, pretty much their entire life will be a risk. So if you don't, if you don't embrace risk, you're not going to do very much and what a sad way to live your life. It's our I believe it is our responsibility to help people prepare to take risk and and I'm not no I'm not thinking that, that somebody, a parent's going to open the door and say bye See ya. You know, I think you do help children to prepare to take risks. And that's really important. And I think as OTS Our job is to help people prepare to take risks.
 
Carrie Schmitt 
Yeah, thank you. That's a really important message and a call to action, maybe for other occupational therapists to think about the ways that we help our clients prepare for risk and maybe teach parents if you're in the pediatric space, how they themselves could work on their tolerance for risk or how they themselves can prepare their children through modeling and modeling what we might do or even just helping them and parent education.
 
Dr. Anita Bundy 
If you take play seriously, it will cause you a lot of problem as the therapist, the more seriously you take it, the more the more it will cause you a problem. And it's a problem worth embracing.
 
Carrie Schmitt 
I love that. It's a problem worth embracing. That's great. Thank you so much, not just for being here today, but for the important work that you've done in your career. I'm sure have enjoyed looking at your work and and I haven't learned a tremendous amount. So thank you for for modeling, what it looks like to follow a curiosity and to contribute to the body of work around it and a really purposeful, meaningful way. So I really appreciate it.
 
Dr. Anita Bundy 
You're very welcome. Thank you for showcasing this work.

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Find out more about Dr. Anita Bundy: https://www.chhs.colostate.edu/bio-page/anita-bundy-1189/
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