Women are underrepresented in areas critical to innovation, including STEM fields, politics, and C-suites. What all these have in common is that success requires risk taking and bravery. How do we socialize our girls and boys differently – and why is it important to encourage girls to embrace imperfection? Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code, has taken up the charge to socialize young girls to take risks and learn to program — two skills they need to move society forward. Watch her Talk here.

For a list of studies that analyze Risky Play directly, please refer to this article.

"Kids will figure out how to do the most dangerous thing they can." This doesn't have to be a bad thing when it comes to learning in, or out of, the classroom. In this talk, Gever Tulley encourages us all to allow flames of curiosity in our kids to be fanned and fed rather than forced to face the fire extinguisher. 

Learn more about the study involving a playground fire pole, where researchers saw that girls were more likely to be warned by both their moms and dads about its risk than boys.

We call young people who step outside gender lines “brave.” But if adults truly want to support them, we need to be willing to show some courage and embrace some discomfort, say Michele Yulo and Audrey Mason-Hyde. Here they discuss raising kids without rigid gender stereotypes.

If we can teach young boys at an early age to look beyond their physical attributes and to look inward to reflect on their abilities, their values, their passions and their knowledge, we might have a world full of boys and men who are less obsessed with proving strength through how much space they occupy, control or destroy. Read rapper and poet Meta Sarmiento’s piece here.