Children’s dynamic risk management – a comprehensive approach to children’s risk willingness, risk assessment, and risk handling

Abstract

Theoretical conceptualizations to facilitate understanding of how children manage risk-taking and risky play in their everyday lives are limited. We propose that there are emotional, cognitive and physical processes at work when a child faces a risk and that these processes can be termed risk willingness, risk assessment, and risk handling, respectively. In real-world risky situations, these processes overlap, interlink, and vary across individual and contextual factors. However, combined, they can be seen as a comprehensive expression of children’s risk management. The processes must also be understood within the cultural, social, and environmental contexts of the risk. We aim to unify these concepts within a comprehensive model that can be tested and applied in empirical studies and used to understand children’s risk-taking in general, as well as the implications of increasingly risk-deprived childhoods.