Episode 015

Transcript for Podcast Lesson on Taking Risks with Amelia

Jenny Woo: Welcome to 52 Essential Conversations. I'm Jenny Woo and we're sitting next to Amelia Eppel and today we're talking about taking risks. Amelia, as a UK-trained, early-childhood teacher and recent graduate from the Human Development and Psychology Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. As a teacher, Amelia delights in creating learning environments, where kids are purposeful and independent, both indoors and outdoors. With also 10 years of experience as a nanny for babies from two months and two teenagers of 14, Amelia has had the opportunity to think about what makes a healthy and happy child at home, as well as in the classroom. Welcome, Amelia.

Jenny Woo: Tell us, what is taking risk means to you?

Amelia Eppel: Well, I'm thinking about taking risks in terms of physical risks as well as mental risks: being brave, trying new things.

Jenny Woo: Tell me more about physical risks.

Amelia Eppel:  The way that I think about it is something that you want to do, but you maybe don't feel you have the capacity to do it. So it might be something easy, like walking along the street is not a risk until you have something you need to climb or you have something you need to jump over or something that might be a little bit out of the ordinary. So it's kind of those bumps, those different things that you might encounter.

Jenny Woo: Yeah. Oh, that sounds so much fun. It actually reminds me of this adventure playground that I take my children to where it's not a playground in the traditional sense, but it's honestly, it's just nature. It's everywhere. So I know you've worked a lot in terms of outdoor education. What do you do?

Amelia Eppel: So I've worked in an indoor and outdoor kindergarten and preschool and we had three different gardens. One of them was very wild. One of them had a big tree in it and they'd created a treehouse as part of it, which the children could climb on. They could climb the tree and then there was a big area for riding bikes and scooters and different kinds of vehicles. That kindergarten also had a big outside, public space next to it. So, we did a lot of adventuring there, bear hunts through the bushes, climbing boulders, and sliding down the mud hill, those sorts of things.

Jenny Woo: Lots of laundries.

Amelia Eppel: Yes.

Jenny Woo: Yeah,  haha I love it!

Jenny Woo: So, you know, as a parent, I'm so curious because you must get a lot of different children, different personalities, which sort of will inform how they approach risks and what they perceive as risks as well as their home environment in terms of what is emphasized and what isn't. So tell me, a little bit more about those differences that you see in children when they first come to school.

Amelia Eppel: Yeah, that's a really big one, actually. When they first arrive, you get so many different kinds of perspectives on what it feels like to do the things that we do every day. Some kids are really, really nervous. They hang back or they want to hold your hand or climb up on you, be carried down things, and some of them will throw themselves headfirst at it. So, that's really interesting and it's not always clear why those children are behaving that way. Sometimes, the parents may say, “Oh, we don't want what he's wearing to get dirty.” So, you have to wear the rain boots and the water-proofs, which is useful anyway and important, if it's wet, but, you can tell maybe that they are quite protected at home or they need to be kept clean.

Amelia Eppel: But some kids will be nervous. Parents might not be nervous about them getting dirty particularly and they are nervous and other kids just have no fear. I think it’s just personality sometimes.

Amelia Eppel: But there are definitely things that parents do or don't do or can do that affects how much they are interested in exploring.

Jenny Woo: So, tell us some examples of parents which, in your case as a teacher, how you encourage responsible risk-taking.

Amelia Eppel: Yeah. So there are a few things that you can do really, that we used a lot, which is working with children, doing it with them. A lot of role modeling of, “This is fun and it's exciting” and if you do it alongside them, they're more likely to try it. And so, that's a really big one, just showing kids the way. It's really about your actions but also, about your words and this is something, which I think, as a society, we find quite hard. And it's like the automatic way that you speak to kids can be a problem. And even, you know, knowing these things, I find it difficult sometimes myself. But I'm not saying, “Oh, be careful!” expressing that fear that they might not be in control, but instead, there are ways that you can communicate to them that you want them to be careful but in a more positive way, that gets them to notice their surroundings or notice their body or what they might need to do to keep safe.

Amelia Eppel: So things like saying, “Have you noticed where you need to put your foot to climb that tree?” or “Why don't you try using your hands to balance?” Or “Have you thought you might make sure you're wearing wellies?”  -we call them wellies, rain boots and things like that- so that they develop a sense of kind of autonomy over what they need to do to keep themselves safe and able to learn at the same time.

Jenny Woo: I really like the language that you use and it's very productive and it's kind of like planning a base.

Jenny Woo: “Have you planned your rules? Have you thought about this? Have you done that?” instead of, “Oh no, Be careful!” or, “Watch out!”

Jenny Woo: So it's actually, interestingly, more proactive than reactive.

Amelia Eppel: Exactly. It's really about encouraging decision-making and problem-solving rather than creating fear. Because if you're communicating fear, I think it does different things to different people but for some children, it will make them fearful and for some children, it might make them want to do it even more and maybe in a more dangerous way, you can say they want to prove something. You know, different kids react differently to that.

Jenny Woo: Yeah. So with that, let's use your second one as the example, where this also ties into impulse-control.

Jenny Woo: And I also reminded me I believe it's Peter Gray’s book on play. He mentioned something about the thrill of it.

Jenny Woo: That thrill like not knowing if you could really do it but, having enough self-confidence to proceed with it and then afterward realizing, “Oh my goodness, I could do this!” and that's a great confidence booster. But of course, as parents, we're kind of holding our breath going, “Oh my god, what are we going to do? Is that a trip to the E.R.?”

Amelia Eppel: Yeah, haha!

Jenny Woo: So balancing the two, specifically for children, balancing and post-control, doing it for skill-building, for curiosity, for the love of it, maybe thrill. How do you see the thrill and how do you see impulse control in that?

Amelia Eppel: Yeah, that's a really interesting question because it is such a fine line, I think.

Amelia Eppel: I think it's something that we have to constantly navigate when we’re with children, kind of trying to step back and take a second and assess the danger, the risk. I'm wondering, “What is the worst that could happen?” and, “Is it likely that they are going to break their leg?” Constantly just checking in with ourselves, Is it fear? because, we want to control it or we're not sure of what they are doing or that’s not what we want them to be doing, which is a different thing, too. That is a dangerous thing to be doing. Impulse-control and children, this is something that's come out of research on nature. Nature-based schooling and outdoor learning are really beneficial for impulse-control because they learn how to navigate their bodies, the boundaries of what their bodies can do, and regulate themselves through that amount of physical activity.

Amelia Eppel: As much as anything else.

Amelia Eppel: So I think it is a fine line of the threat there is, thrill in it, but that is part of what helps to regulate what is positive and what is dangerous. You can imagine, if you never had a chance to try anything that was exciting, you wouldn't know what was positive excitement or what wasn't, so finding the boundaries of what is scary and what is dangerous.

Jenny Woo: It's so awesome, but also so frustrating at the same time that this definition is so relative and it entirely changes developmentally. And it is rewarding, as a child, to approach a monkey-bar that, maybe she or he was really afraid of, and being able to make it from one end to the other versus two years ago. That's a great comparison of knowing where you are.

Jenny Woo: I can't help but ask. You've had a great long experience working as a nanny and you must really see behind-the-scenes working with different families. So don’t want to air out too much dirty laundry but…give us some insights into taking risks from an adult standpoint, in the sense of parents. How? What are some of the ways you’ve seen how parents enable, allow, or encourage children or NOT to take risks that have worked or not worked so well?

Amelia Eppel: Yeah. Gosh, so many.

Amelia Eppel: Well at the moment, I'm looking after a baby, who is 10 months now, so he's just started crawling a month or two ago. Now, he's got very fast and he's got very good at pulling up on things. One of the things that he keeps wanting to pull up on our chairs and some of the chairs are not strong enough to take his weight if he pulls up on it.  At first, I wasn't sure what the best tactic was because if you let him pull up on it and then it falls over on him, that's dangerous.

Amelia Eppel: He will hurt himself. Something that is not helpful is to hold the chair or sit on the chair so that he doesn't know that it could fall on him. So I've been trying to balance kind of lightly holding the chair so it doesn't actually fall on him, but so that he feels that it's not strong enough and then he stopped doing it because he knows that that's not gonna work, but not kind of watching from the other side of the room thinking, well, that's not gonna work.

Jenny Woo: Right.

Amelia Eppel: It's going to fall on him. But at the same time, not stepping in before he has a chance to find out that that's not something he can do because otherwise, he won't learn that some things aren't strong enough. Some things are bobbly. Some things are good for climbing on. Some things aren't. So.

Amelia Eppel: Kind of navigating that.

Jenny Woo: That is really interesting because, you know, in Westernized society or even specifically in the US, there's a whole lot of regulations, especially around baby products; a product that touches the whole child-development part. You get lawsuits and you can't make a product anymore because of these accidents, you know? And yes, it's a good thing but then it also makes me personally wonder, How much of that is too overprotective? or like user-error in a sense. So that's an interesting point. I'm going to go back to my question again, working with different families. I'm sure your entry point, when you get into that family to help with the child or children are at different ages and so some are more settled in terms of their routines and expectations and how they operate as a family. As someone who advocates for risk-taking responsibility, especially outdoors, how do you manage these expectations but still challenge them in such a way, that they are able to take more risk? And I say that because maybe in a household with two to a couple. One might be in the school, and you just let them play with them, figure it out. The other one may be more conservative. So how do you manage those dynamics?

Amelia Eppel: Yeah, that's a great question. I definitely get a variety of standpoints on this. It's kind of something that I've always felt is best to do slowly and in the same way that you might want kids to take risks, kind of manageable risk. And I might take the risk of one day, you know, saying, oh, let's go out and play, even though it's raining. And some families, they just don't take them out when it's raining. Know, which is, you know, that's a choice. That's fine. But for me, there’s a lot of learning to be had in the rain. I make sure that I'm taking those boxes of what they need for their kids, so making sure that they're really well dressed, that I have everything they might need, if that's something that they're worried about, you know, making sure we have snacks, making sure we have a phone and making sure I told them exactly when we were going to be back and having contingency plans.

Amelia Eppel:  So, those things are covered. And then pushing it a little bit-

Amelia Eppel:  -letting them play in the rain or play in the mud, but knowing that as soon as we got home, they can change and put on clean clothes and they're not gonna get hypothermia.

Jenny Woo: Haha!

Amelia Eppel: Yeah, it's about having the right amount of things to feel safe and protected. And usually, parents are surprised by how much their kids enjoy it and how it's not that big an issue. And it usually ends up like, “Oh wow, they had such a good time!” and they trust in it. But it's all about building up trust, like I'm not gonna take them down a cliff or they, you know, without climbing gear on if they're going climbing.

Amelia Eppel: But it’s making sure you have all of your things, your bases covered in terms of safety and whatever the parents might be concerned about.

Jenny Woo: Yeah, I love that.

Jenny Woo: Not giving up, really understanding, what everybody, ALL parties need in this case. And so, there is hope for other couples where maybe one is a little bit more adventurous than the other or maybe the in-laws are more of a hovering type.

Amelia Eppel: Yes.

Jenny Woo: To build that trust.

Amelia Eppel: Exactly.

Jenny Woo: And with that said, thank you so much for being here, Emily.

Amelia Eppel: Thank you, it was such a pleasure.

Jenny Woo: Thank you, for tuning into 52 Essential Conversations.