The scene has repeated itself in my classrooms across various art schools over the last decade: I pose a provocative question, and silence follows. When someone finally speaks, their answer is carefully qualified: ‘I’m not saying this is definitely right, but maybe…’
As a lecturer teaching visual arts, I’ve observed a striking reluctance among today’s 18-35 year-old students to take creative risks.
Despite choosing one of the most inherently risky career paths – that of the artist – my Generation Z students (born 1997-2012) demonstrate remarkable discomfort with experimentation, extraordinary anxiety about ‘being wrong,’ and reflexive avoidance of controversial viewpoints.
The contrast with my own art school experience is stark. For my generation (born 1979), pursuing art meant embracing risk in every aspect of life – working multiple jobs, squatting in abandoned buildings, living precariously. This very precarity primed us for creative risk-taking in our work. Today’s students, by contrast, often remain in their parents’ homes and seek stability in a field defined by its embrace of uncertainty.
Childhood Risk Exposure Builds Adult Resilience
This generational shift in risk tolerance isn’t coincidental. Today’s university students grew up during a transformative period in childhood experience (approximately 1997-2017). Their playgrounds featured rubberised surfaces, minimal heights, and constant adult supervision. Many never experienced the autonomous play that previous generations took for granted.
The developmental pathway from physical to intellectual risk-taking operates across the lifespan: physical risks in early childhood build basic resilience capacities; social risks in middle childhood develop interpersonal resilience; identity risks in adolescence build psychological resilience; culminating in intellectual and creative risks in young adulthood.
When this developmental sequence is interrupted – when children don’t experience appropriate physical risks – the foundation for later intellectual risk-taking becomes unstable.
Without having developed resilience through earlier forms of risk-taking, the creative challenges essential to artistic development feel overwhelming rather than exhilarating.
This relationship between risk and resilience operates bidirectionally. Risk-taking builds resilience through calibrated exposure (training ground), stress inoculation (psychological vaccination), self-efficacy development (concrete evidence of capability), and failure experiences (cognitive flexibility). Conversely, resilience enables more sophisticated risk-taking through improved risk calibration, decreased catastrophic thinking, and recovery confidence – knowing one can bounce back from setbacks.
‘Safetyism’ and Concept Creep Undermine Resilience
In The Coddling of the American Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and co-author Greg Lukianoff identify cultural shifts that have intensified risk aversion. Most significant is what they call ‘concept creep in harm’ – the expansion of concepts like ‘safety’ and ‘harm’ beyond physical wellbeing to include emotional discomfort.
Originally, terms like ‘harm,’ ‘trauma,’ ‘safety,’ and ‘violence’ referred to concrete physical threats. The gradual expansion now includes emotional discomfort as ‘harm,’ challenging ideas as potentially ‘traumatic,’ emotional comfort as necessary for ‘safety,’ and offensive speech as forms of ‘violence.’
This expansion has significant consequences for intellectual development because it recategorises normal emotional discomfort—which is necessary for growth—as harmful. When intellectual challenge is framed as ‘harmful,’ it becomes something to avoid rather than engage with, undermining education’s fundamental purpose.
I’ve witnessed this firsthand when students resist critiquing each other’s work for fear of causing emotional harm, even though constructive criticism is essential to artistic development.
What makes the current situation unique isn’t that educational environments have orthodoxies—they always have—but that today’s students arrive with significantly less practice in navigating intellectual and social conflict.
The Studio as Risk Laboratory
In my teaching at Sydney College of the Arts, we’ve begun deliberately structuring the studio environment as a laboratory for calibrated risk-taking. Drawing on what we’ve learned from observing our students’ hesitations, we implemented several approaches into our Foundation program for first year students:
First, we create ‘low-stakes failure opportunities’ – exercises where the explicit goal is experimentation rather than polished production. Students know in advance that these exercises won’t be formally assessed, removing the grade-based barrier to risk-taking.
Second, we share our own creative failures – discussing works that didn’t succeed and analysing what we learned from the process. This modelling helps students understand that creative failure isn’t catastrophic but informational.
Third, we implemented what we call ‘creative edge practice’ – exercises specifically designed to push students just beyond their current capabilities, similar to how athletic training functions in Barney’s conceptual framework.
Fourth, we encourage physical engagement with materials in unpredictable ways, reconnecting students with the kind of tactile experimentation many missed in childhood. This embodied approach to art-making helps bypass the intellectual censors that often prevent creative risk-taking. From guiding my undergraduate to post graduate students, as well as with art assistants in my own professional studio, I always say the same thing when it comes to artmaking: we learn through doing. You can only speculate about an artwork for so long, at some stage you’ve just got to jump in whole-heartedly and ‘do it’, then lean back, analyse, learn and grow.
These approaches directly counter what Haidt identifies as cognitive distortions that undermine risk-taking: catastrophising, black-and-white thinking, and emotional reasoning. By creating structured opportunities for survivable failure, we help students develop more accurate appraisals of creative risk.
The results have been promising, though not uniform. Students with some foundation of resilience from other life domains adapt quickly, while others require substantial scaffolding to develop baseline confidence.
Embracing Risk’s Dual Nature
The dual etymology of risk – as both cliff (danger) and gift (opportunity) – offers a framework for reconsidering our approach to development. Perhaps the cliff and gift aren’t opposing meanings but complementary aspects of the same phenomenon.
If we accept that creative breakthroughs happen at the edges – in that vulnerable space between known and unknown – then we must consider how we prepare individuals to venture into that territory with confidence rather than terror. This preparation begins not with creativity workshops in adulthood but with skinned knees in childhood.
For art educators, parents, and society at large, the challenge becomes recalibrating our understanding of what constitutes genuine safety in development—recognising that growth happens precisely at those edges where stability begins to give way to possibility.
Sanné Mestrom is Senior Lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, where she researches connections between childhood play, risk-taking, and creative development.