Letting Play Bloom: Designing Nature-Based Risky Play for Children
By Lolly Tai; Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2022; 240 pages, $50.
Reviewed by Lisa Casey, ASLA

The playground manufacturer Richter Spielgeräte, who worked on Slide Hill at Governors Island in New York City, wanted a product to help ?make children strong and support them.? This simple statement in the opening case study of Letting Play Bloom: Designing Nature-Based Risky Play for Children evinces a philosophy contrary to the idea that children are fragile beings in need of protection. It?s an idea that echoes an idea from the essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who identifies that some entities are ?antifragile.? A teacup is fragile, particularly in the hands of a toddler. A plastic cup, however, is resilient when thrown on the floor. But antifragile is entirely different: a system that grows stronger under stress. Children are antifragile in that their muscles, bones, and minds need appropriate stress in a supportive context to grow strong. Without it, they fail to thrive. Today ?safetyism? drives American cultural attitudes, which leads to an increase in well-intentioned limitations that ultimately block children?s development. Coined by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in an essay that they cowrote for The Atlantic in 2015 (and expanded into a book in 2018), their premise was that an overabundance of caution pulls safety out of balance with appropriate risk and potential benefits and elevates it i...