Let’s Raise Our Children to Take Intellectual Risks

A few years ago, my then three-year-old daughter took a risk that terrified me. There was a tall magnolia tree next to our church, and kids of all ages were apt to climb it after Sunday services. My daughter had never displayed any interest in this activity, but that Sunday, as we were getting ready to leave church, we couldn’t find her. I walked several laps around the building and the surrounding areas, my heart pounding with rising alarm, until I ran into another mom, who was leading my daughter by the hand. “I was walking by the magnolia tree,” she said, “and heard someone crying at the top.” 

Yes, my daughter had climbed up the tree—all the way up!—with all the bravado of her three years, but then she couldn’t figure out how to get down, so she just stayed up there and cried until help arrived. And you thought only cats did that!

This was only the beginning of a long and still on-going love affair between my daughter and heights. Now almost six, she is the ultimate daredevil on every playground she encounters. Not only can she climb any tree, but she has also mastered the trickier process of getting down. My husband, who is much more cautious by nature, has observed that raising her is like raising Curious George. He may be right, but the ways that she, and our older kids to some extent, take risks is good for them. A new study that Nature published in early January confirms this. 

The study focused specifically on physical risks, such as those that kids used to be able to take on playgrounds, before modern safety standards added extra guardrails on, well, everything. True, we certainly don’t want kids to get injured regularly while playing at the park—and some kids still manage to get hurt even with all the safety measures—yet there is a measurable negative effect from the modern safety innovations now in place on most playgrounds. As the study notes:

Over the past two decades, research has emerged showing that opportunities for risky play are crucial for healthy physical, mental and emotional development. Children need these opportunities to develop spatial awareness, coordination, tolerance of uncertainty, and confidence. Despite this, in many nations risky play is now more restricted than ever, thanks to misconceptions about risk and a general undervaluing of its benefits.

Before you get really riled up, the article is wise to note the crucial difference between risk and danger. It’s one thing to let kids play at a playground that has fewer rails and higher slides. It’s another to allow kids to run into a busy street. Needless to say, the second is a bad idea, and no one is advocating for it! But a study that allowed kids to play at a riskier (but not dangerous) environment found that they developed greater self-confidence and were less anxious in general. 

There are important implications here. It seems that our modern guardrail mentality and the fear of anything remotely risky is contributing to a reduced capacity in growing children—and eventually the adults they will become—to face the world. An underlying anxiety about the world develops instead; an unspoken fear that one’s environment is hostile, and everything unfamiliar and possibly familiar, too, could harm us. The results of exceedingly safe play in childhood, in other words, are not just physical, but mental and emotional. 

But there is a related risk that I think is no less important to consider here: While the abovementioned study focused on physical risk, I think a similar phenomenon is at play at the intellectual level. Just as kids over the past few decades have become over-sheltered from physical risks by improved safety measures at playgrounds, so too have they become over-sheltered from the possibility of intellectual exploration and risk-taking that characterized my childhood in the late twentieth century. Put simply, since the era of No Child Left Behind, if not earlier, the modern American educational system has accumulated too many guardrails and standardization. As a result, students are afraid—or, more often, have no time or opportunity—to explore outside the areas that are required for general testing. 

The results speak for themselves. Educational outcomes in math—one of the most highly prioritized fields in the U.S.—are not great compared to other countries. In other words, the increased attention to certain privileged subjects, in which extra testing forces teachers to keep teaching to the test, has not resulted in student improvement in those subjects. Instead, we have a crisis of literacy, with elite college kids who can’t read books, and too many students who graduate high school and are simply not prepared for college-level coursework. No wonder cheating with generative AI is a plague on college campuses this academic year.

Just like exploration and risk-taking are essential for kids to grow up with the level of confidence in the physical environment around them, so is intellectual exploration and risk-taking vital for raising kids who are creative thinkers—and who delight in the very process of such creative thought. Think of great inventors, artists, writers of the past and present; they are repeatedly praised for their fearlessness in taking necessary risks for science or for their art. Where someone else might dismiss an idea or a question as too difficult or impossible, they simply wade in with the spirit of intellectual curiosity and joy. 

Innovation in every field relies on people like DaVinci, Einstein, or Marilynne Robinson (to name just a few examples), but the current generation of kids is the least poised to take these intellectual risks. This does not bode well for our country’s future capacity for innovation. 

So how might we turn the tide and offer the necessary encouragement? 

Alas, there is no magic fix for any large systemic problem, but there is no doubt in my mind that the solution must begin in the home. Families that have homes filled with books implicitly encourage kids to explore, read widely, and treat knowledge and learning as friends and companions rather than threats or just hurdles to jump through to graduate. A home filled with books of every sort fosters intellectual risk-taking in the same way that a playground without all the extra guardrails might encourage a child to play more boldly.

The effects of such an environment are cumulative because every moment is filled with activity. The questions we should be asking include: Does it foster wonder? Does it encourage exploration? Does it make the child ask questions, think up experiments, pursue adventure, whether physical or intellectual? The reason Maria Montessori’s ideas remain popular today is precisely because this is what her entire philosophy of child-rearing and education was about—and it is a philosophy that fosters more creative and resilient children. 

My husband and I joke that our home has become a Montessori school by default. Here’s a corner with blocks and puzzles. Over there are art supplies of one sort; and in another corner more art supplies of another. And, absolutely everywhere you look, there are books! When we allow kids to pursue their own interests and ideas, intellectual exploration becomes a joy to cultivate rather than a risk to fear and avoid.

Nadya Williams is a homeschooling mother, Managing Editor for Current, and the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church, and Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity.