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Thursday 27 April 2017 10:35am

Professor Rachael Taylor, director of the Edgar Diabetes and Obesity Research Centre (EDOR), and Dr Victoria Farmer, recently completed EDOR PhD student, have authored a publication showing that redesigning and modifying playgrounds to encourage more risk-taking led to children feeling less bullied.

Published in the international journal Pediatrics, the study involved researchers modifying playgrounds in eight schools (the intervention group) to include more loose parts for building, as well as opportunities to play with bikes and skateboards. Researchers also encouraged schools with altered playgrounds to allow things like tree climbing, rough-and-tumble play and going outside on rainy days. A control group of eight schools kept their traditional playgrounds.

After two years, children at the schools with modified playgrounds were 33 percent more likely to report pushing and shoving than kids at schools with traditional playgrounds.  However, kids were 31 percent less likely to report bullying to teachers. These unexpected results have intrigued Professor Taylor:

“The findings that intervention children reported more pushing and shoving yet were less likely to tell a teacher were fascinating.”

"The study doesn't shed light on why this happened, so it's hard to say whether kids got better at resolving disputes on their own or perhaps became more resilient to behaviour that might have felt like bullying before", says Professor Taylor.

With modified playgrounds, kids were 66 percent more likely to report playing with a lot of children after one year, and after two years they were also 64 percent more likely to report being happy at school. A total of 840 kids started the study and 630 of them remained in the study after two years, with children ranging in age from 6 to 9 years old.

Read news articles about the playground study

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