Association between active outdoor play and health among children, adolescents, and adults: An umbrella review.

Lifestyle changes, including increases in sedentary behaviors and time spent on digital media, have dramatically decreased the quality and quantity of time humans spend outdoors, with ever emerging evidence highlighting the negative impact that this trend has had and continues to have on our health. In 2015, concerns over the impact of these lifestyle changes on children’s health led a group based in Canada to develop the 2015 Position Statement on Active Outdoor Play. This position statement was a major contributor to the galvanization of the outdoor play movement both in Canada and globally. Notably, since 2015, there was a 10-fold increase in outdoor play publications in Canada alone, with the greatest number of new publications focusing on health.

Evidence continues to be published on the benefits of active outdoor play (AOP)—defined as “voluntary engagement in activity that takes place outdoors, involving physical activity of any intensity, that is fun and/or rewarding and usually driven by intrinsic motivation”—for human health. For example, in 2 systematic reviews by Johnstone et al, the authors found that outdoor play and learning in the early years is associated with improved physical and mental health, as well as improved social and emotional well-being. A recent scoping review identified a 10-fold increase in outdoor play-related publications since 2015 in Canada alone, with the greatest number of publications focusing on health outcomes, including 17 review papers exploring associations between the outdoors and a wide range of health outcomes and physical, mental, social, and emotional, as well determinants of these associations. Such a rapid pace of updates and knowledge generation can make keeping up with the best available evidence challenging for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers. Further, many of the above-mentioned publications refer not to AOP directly but to terms aligned with it such as “nature experiences,” “spending time in nature,” “outdoor time,” “playground play,” and “outdoor physical activity,” making it difficult to identify and collate evidence specifically on the benefits of AOP. This broad range of terminology also makes it challenging to disentangle evidence on AOP from nonactive forms of outdoor play, structured physical activity, and/or outdoor educational activities that fall outside the above-mentioned international consensus definition of AOP.