The research, led by Henna Launistola of the Folkhälsan Research Center and the University of Helsinki, drew on data from 673 Finnish families with children aged three to six years. The families were participating in the DAGIS intervention study, a clustered randomized controlled trial based in two municipalities in southern Finland that aims to promote healthy eating, physical activity, self-regulation skills and lower screen use among preschoolers. Parents completed a survey asking how often during the previous month their child had visited nature or forest, their own yard, and a park or playground together with at least one adult in the family. Crucially, parents also kept a seven-day screen time diary, recording every stretch of ten minutes or more that their child spent watching television or videos or using tablets, smartphones, computers or game consoles outside early childhood education hours.

The diary approach is one of the study’s technical strengths. Rather than relying on a single retrospective question, which is vulnerable to recall bias, parents logged screen activities day by day, and the researchers calculated average weekday, weekend day and weighted whole-week screen time in minutes. A child’s data were included only if the diary covered at least three weekdays and one weekend day. On average, the preschoolers accumulated 70 minutes of screen time per weekday, 125 minutes per weekend day, and 86 minutes per day across the whole week. That weekend figure, more than an hour higher than the weekday average, immediately signals that weekends are where the battle against excessive screen use is most likely to be lost or won.

The outdoor visit data revealed a striking pattern in their own right. Forty-four percent of families reported visiting their own yard daily, making it by far the most frequented outdoor space. Nature and playgrounds were far less central to family routines: 37 percent of families visited nature only one to three times a month, 35 percent visited playgrounds at that low frequency, and 17 percent had not taken their child to a park or playground at all during the entire month. These frequencies were recoded into continuous weekly values and analyzed using multiple multivariate linear regression, with screen time as the dependent variable and visit frequencies as independent variables, adjusted in successive models for the child’s age and sex, then additionally for parental education, relative household income and season.

The fully adjusted results told a nuanced story. On weekdays, more frequent visits to the family’s own yard were associated with lower child screen time, with each step up in visit frequency corresponding to roughly two fewer minutes per day. Nature visits showed a similar weekday effect, at about 2.3 minutes less screen time per frequency increment. Playgrounds, however, lost their weekday significance once socioeconomic factors and season were accounted for. On weekends the pattern flipped: playground visit frequency was the only context-specific measure that remained significantly associated with lower weekend screen time, at nearly 3.7 minutes less per increment, while yard and nature visits showed no weekend effect. Across the entire week, all three outdoor spaces and the total visit frequency were linked to less screen time, with total outdoor visits showing consistent negative associations on weekdays, weekends and the whole week alike.

Why would the yard and the forest matter on Tuesdays but the playground matter on Saturdays? The authors offer several plausible mechanisms. The own yard is close to home, private, safe and familiar, which may ease the parental safety concerns that are a well-documented barrier to young children’s outdoor play. In Finland, most houses and condominiums have their own yard, often equipped with swings and climbing apparatus, making it a feasible destination even during the compressed routines of a working weekday. Nature, meanwhile, is remarkably accessible in Finland: half of the population lives only 300 meters from the nearest forest, and the traditional right of everyman allows access to natural areas without the landowner’s permission. Both spaces, the researchers suggest, may simply compete more directly with screens during the busy weekday hours between daycare and bedtime.

Weekends, by contrast, offer families abundant unstructured leisure time, and children typically spend more of it in front of screens. The finding that playground visits were linked to lower weekend screen time echoes an earlier American study of low-income families, in which more frequent weekend park visits were associated with less television viewing among two- to four-year-olds. The Finnish authors also note a measurement caveat: in the Finnish language, the terms for park and playground overlap considerably, and the questionnaire item combined them, which may have led to varied interpretations among respondents. They further acknowledge that playgrounds were visited relatively seldom in their sample, and that access may have been uneven because the data were collected in communities that include rural areas where public playground density is lower than in cities.

The study’s authors are careful about what the data cannot show. As a cross-sectional analysis, it captures associations at a single point in time and cannot establish whether outdoor visits reduce screen time or whether screen-heavy families simply venture out less. The data are parent-reported, opening the door to social desirability bias, and the screen time diary, while reducing recall bias, may have produced some overreporting because device-specific times were summed. The data were also collected in autumn 2017, seven to eight years before publication, and children’s screen habits have likely shifted since. The effect sizes, the authors concede, are modest, and factors not controlled in the analysis, such as parental screen use, household screen rules and perceived barriers to outdoor play, may exert a larger influence on children’s screen time than outdoor visits do. Still, from a public health perspective, even small associations contribute to the overall picture of what shapes young children’s behavior.

What elevates this study above much of the existing literature is its context-specific design. Previous research has yielded mixed results: a Canadian study found no association between outdoor time and screen time in three- to six-year-olds, and two other studies reported no link between preschoolers’ outdoor play and television viewing, while an Indian study of children aged three to fifteen found that a lack of outdoor play was associated with excessive screen use exceeding two hours per day. Longitudinal work has been more encouraging, with early childhood outdoor play predicting less computer use and gaming later in childhood, and high screen time at ages three to four predicting less outdoor play at ages ten to eleven. By measuring actual visits to distinct outdoor settings rather than merely the availability of green space, and by separating weekdays from weekends, the Finnish team has added a layer of granularity that earlier studies lacked.

The practical implications reach well beyond individual households. The authors argue that municipalities should ensure a variety of outdoor spaces, both built and unbuilt, public and private, are available within feasible distance of residential neighborhoods, so that families from all socioeconomic backgrounds have genuine alternatives to screens. For parents, the message is to make frequent visits to whichever outdoor spaces they prefer, since total visit frequency was consistently associated with lower screen time throughout the week. For urban planners and policymakers grappling with rising urbanization, the findings suggest that preserving yards, forests and playgrounds within walking distance of homes is not merely an aesthetic luxury but a measurable component of children’s healthy development. Future longitudinal and intervention studies, the researchers emphasize, will be needed to establish whether the relationship is causal, and more detailed measurement of visit duration, timing and activity type could clarify exactly which kinds of outdoor excursions best compete with the glowing rectangles that increasingly fill young children’s days.

Subject of Research: Associations between parent-child outdoor visits to nature, own yards and playgrounds and screen time in preschool-aged children

Article Title: Associations between parent–child outdoor visits and preschool-aged children’s screen time: a cross-sectional study

Article References: Launistola, H., Lehto, R., Engberg, E., Björkqvist, J., Rahkola, J., Simonsen, N., Wackström, N., Tilli, E., Roos, E., & Ray, C. (2025). Associations between parent–child outdoor visits and preschool-aged children’s screen time: a cross-sectional study. Journal of Activity, Sedentary and Sleep Behaviors, 4(1), Article 18. https://doi.org/10.1186/s44167-025-00089-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s44167-025-00089-5

Keywords: preschool children, screen time, outdoor play, nature visits, playgrounds, own yard, parent-child activities, sedentary behavior, child health, Finland, DAGIS study, urban planning

The authors ground their argument in a straightforward observation about how childhood has changed. Screens are now an ever-present part of a child’s environment, appearing in homes, vehicles, restaurants, and increasingly in classrooms and childcare settings. Digital media has genuine uses, and the researchers do not dismiss it outright. What concerns them is the pattern of displacement: hours spent with screens are hours not spent climbing, digging, splashing, balancing, and negotiating games with peers in outdoor spaces. Those displaced activities are not trivial fillers in a child’s day. They are, the paper argues, the very mechanisms through which young children build motor skills, spatial reasoning, self-regulation, and social competence.

The technical case against excessive screen time in early childhood draws on several recent studies. A 2025 trajectory analysis by Fitzpatrick and colleagues, published in an academic pediatrics journal, tracked preschooler screen use over time and found associations between persistent high screen exposure and weaker executive function, the suite of cognitive skills that includes working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility. Executive function is widely regarded as a foundation for later academic achievement and emotional regulation, which makes early disruptions potentially consequential. A 2025 systematic scoping review by Sticca, Brauchli, and Lannen in Frontiers in Developmental Psychology synthesized the broader literature on screen effects in early childhood, adopting the pointed framing of whether the screen being on corresponds to development being turned off, and identified consistent signals warranting caution while noting that outcomes depend heavily on content, context, and quantity.

Other studies sharpen the picture of what screens may crowd out. Antrilli and Wang, in work published in the Journal of Children and Media, tested toddlers on touchscreens and found that immediate cognitive flexibility in two-and-a-half-year-olds differed depending on whether children had just engaged with a game or with physical activity, suggesting that even short-term bouts of screen interaction produce different cognitive states than movement does. Research by Ho, Yu, and Brown published in 2024 explored the relationship between children’s screen time and the time they spend in play, documenting an inverse dynamic in which screen use competes directly with play opportunities. A Canadian study by Kerai and colleagues in BMC Public Health linked screen time to developmental health outcomes in early childhood, adding population-level weight to concerns first raised in smaller clinical and experimental studies.

Against this backdrop, the benefits of outdoor play emerge with striking consistency. A systematic review by Dankiw and colleagues published in PLOS ONE in 2020 examined unstructured nature play in early childhood and reported positive impacts across physical health, mental health, and developmental domains. Kiviranta and colleagues, writing in Educational Research in 2024, explored outdoor learning in early childhood education and documented benefits alongside practical challenges, noting that educators who take children outdoors regularly observe richer language use, longer engagement with tasks, and more complex imaginative play. Work by Gorrell and colleagues in Leisure Sciences examined outdoor play, physical activity, and screen time during a health crisis and found that outdoor activity supported children’s emotional wellbeing even under the compressed, stressful conditions of the pandemic era, when screens filled the vacuum left by closed schools and cancelled activities.

The mechanism matters as much as the correlation. Outdoor environments present what researchers describe as affordances: opportunities for action that a flat, luminous screen cannot replicate. Uneven terrain demands constant postural adjustment, building balance and proprioception. Loose parts such as sticks, stones, water, and mud invite open-ended manipulation, which supports divergent thinking and symbolic play. Natural light exposure helps regulate circadian rhythm, and the variable sensory input of wind, temperature, texture, and smell provides a richness of stimulation that no two-dimensional display can match. Socially, outdoor group play requires children to invent rules, resolve disputes, take turns, and manage risk in real time, exercising precisely the executive and social functions that heavy screen use appears to erode.

Scotland and Maynes also address the counterintuitive role of risk in healthy development, drawing on Tim Gill’s influential 2007 book No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk Averse Society. The argument is that a culture of excessive caution, in which playgrounds are stripped of challenge and children are shielded from every scrape, deprives children of the chance to calibrate their own abilities against real physical consequences. Learning that a branch bends before it breaks, or that a slope is too steep to run down, is embodied knowledge that builds confidence and judgment. Risk-averse policies, the paper suggests, have combined with screen attraction and with socio-environmental barriers documented by Loebach and colleagues in 2021, including unsafe traffic, limited green space, and parental concerns, to produce a generation of children with fewer chances to test themselves outdoors.

The review does not leave the problem purely at the level of diagnosis. It points to practical models already in operation, particularly in Canada, where the authors are based. The Canadian Child Care Federation offers outdoor play training for early childhood educators, and Algonquin College runs a program called Play, Learn and Teach Outdoors in the Early Years that trains practitioners to treat the outdoor environment as a primary teaching space rather than a recess adjunct. Head Start program performance standards in the United States embed requirements for active outdoor play into federally funded early education. Organizations such as Outdoor Play Canada and Take Me Outside have built gear libraries and funding programs, including the Canadian Centre for Outdoor Play’s outdoor gear library and the Outdoor Learning Gear Fund, to lower the material barriers that keep childcare programs indoors. Even libraries have joined in, with the Prince Edward Island public library system lending nature backpack kits that equip families for outdoor exploration.

The underlying legal and ethical frame, the authors note, is older than the smartphone. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1990, recognizes the child’s right to play, and the researchers argue that treating outdoor play as a right rather than a luxury changes how educators, policymakers, and parents weigh it against the convenience of a quiet child with a tablet. Siskind and colleagues, writing in the Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, have argued that teacher educators must deliberately prepare early childhood professionals to balance technology and outdoor learning rather than defaulting to screens when planning is difficult. The message from the research community is that balance is possible, but it must be designed for, because the default trajectory of digital life pulls in the other direction.

The takeaway from the Nipissing University review is not that screens must vanish from childhood, but that the developmental ledger must be read honestly. Screen time is easy to measure and easy to expand, while outdoor play requires time, space, appropriate clothing, tolerant adults, and supportive policy. The accumulated evidence, spanning systematic reviews of nature play, longitudinal work on executive function, and studies of displacement effects, suggests that the hours children spend outside are among the most developmentally productive hours of their day. As the paper’s title puts it with disarming simplicity: screens away, get out and play. For a digital world that shows no sign of slowing down, restoring that balance may be one of the most accessible and evidence-backed interventions available to families and educators of young children.

Subject of Research: The developmental effects of outdoor play versus screen time in early childhood

Article Title: Screens Away, Get Out and Play: The Importance of Outdoor Play for Young Children in a Digital World

Article References: Scotland, E. K., & Maynes, N. (2026). Screens Away, Get Out and Play: The Importance of Outdoor Play for Young Children in a Digital World. Early Childhood Education Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-026-02345-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10643-026-02345-y

Keywords: outdoor play, screen time, early childhood development, executive function, nature play, digital media, child health, physical activity, unstructured play, early childhood education, developmental psychology, risk-averse parenting

The research team, led by Brianne A. Bruijns of Western University’s School of Occupational Therapy, contacted 10,768 childcare facilities and recruited 1,340 directors and owners, yielding a response rate of 12.4 percent. The vast majority of respondents, 84 percent, represented centre-based facilities such as daycare centres, preschools, nursery schools, Montessori schools, and Indigenous early learning programs, while 13.4 percent came from family- or home-based childcare settings. Participants completed a 129-item online survey between September and November 2025 that included a comprehensive movement behaviour policy audit covering 28 topics across physical activity, sedentary behaviour and screen time, and sleep domains. The instrument was modelled on earlier national work and the validated PLAYCE Policy Environment Audit, with additional items developed to capture sedentary and sleep content that existing tools had overlooked.

The headline numbers tell a story of uneven progress. Nearly all directors and owners, 96.6 percent, reported having at least one written movement behaviour policy, and 87.7 percent reported at least one written physical activity policy. Half of facilities, 50.0 percent, had a written policy specifying the amount of time provided for overall physical activity, while 68.7 percent had a written policy on daily outdoor physical activity. But the picture deteriorates sharply when the lens shifts to other behaviours. Only 17.0 percent of facilities reported written policies limiting prolonged seated time, and just 46.6 percent reported policies ensuring age-appropriate nap durations. Policies providing education to families about children’s physical activity were reported by a mere 11.7 percent of facilities, and educator professional development policies on physical activity reached only 19.7 percent. For sedentary behaviour and screen time, family education policies dropped to 6.3 percent and educator training to 10.2 percent.

Perhaps the most striking statistical finding concerns the shadow cast by regional legislation. The researchers classified each of Canada’s 13 provinces and territories according to whether their childcare legislation explicitly mentioned physical activity, sedentary behaviour, or sleep, building on an earlier review led by Leigh Vanderloo. Only one jurisdiction, British Columbia, references the Canadian 24-Hour Movement Guidelines in its regulations; four mention physical activity explicitly, three reference sedentary behaviour, and seven provide guidance on sleep. When the team ran binary logistic regression models controlling for facility characteristics, facilities in jurisdictions without behaviour-specific legislation had significantly lower odds of reporting written policies. Facilities in provinces or territories without explicit physical activity legislation had 57 percent lower odds of having a written overall physical activity policy than those where it was legislated, an odds ratio of 0.43. The same pattern held for limiting prolonged seated time, with an odds ratio of 0.503, and for age-appropriate nap durations, with an odds ratio of 0.64. All three associations were statistically significant.

This legislative echo effect is not merely theoretical. British Columbia introduced mandatory Active Play Standards in licensed childcare settings in 2017, and subsequent research, including a natural policy experiment published in 2022, documented higher prevalence of written movement behaviour policies following implementation. In the present survey, 72.8 percent of British Columbia directors reported written overall physical activity policies, among the highest rates in the country, and the province also led on limiting seated time at 28.0 percent. Nova Scotia, another jurisdiction with explicit physical activity references, posted the highest rate of written no-screen-time policies at 81.1 percent, while Ontario, which legislates sleep, showed the strongest nap duration policy prevalence at 85.5 percent. The authors suggest that embedding movement behaviour guidance within legislation may reduce inequities by establishing minimum licensing expectations that providers must meet, an approach consistent with the World Health Organization’s 2021 Standards for Healthy Eating, Physical Activity, Sedentary Behaviour and Sleep in Early Childhood Education and Care Settings.

Facility characteristics mattered as well, and in ways that expose structural fault lines in the childcare system. Urban facilities had 57 percent higher odds of having a written overall physical activity policy than rural ones, and 63 percent higher odds of a no-screen-time policy. Enrolment size emerged as a subtle but significant predictor of sleep policies, with each additional enrolled child raising the odds by 0.2 percent, hinting that larger organizations may have more robust administrative systems for formalizing rules. Most dramatically, childcare type split the findings: family- and home-based facilities had 78 percent lower odds of reporting a no-screen-time policy than centre-based facilities, an odds ratio of 0.22, yet paradoxically had nearly twice the odds of reporting a policy limiting prolonged seated time, at 1.94. This counterintuitive combination reflects the lived realities of home-based educators described in the survey’s open-ended responses.

Those qualitative accounts, analyzed through inductive thematic analysis, add human texture to the statistics. Home-based providers described working ten-hour days with rarely a break, using tablets to occupy preschoolers quietly while infants were settled for naps. Others explained that infants cannot spend as long outdoors in winter months, that toddlers receive no screen time while older children get minimal television, and that nap arrangements differ by age, with babies in cribs requiring longer sleep periods than five-year-olds. More than 62 percent of directors said sleep-related policies differed by child age, and 35.5 percent said the same for physical activity policies, illustrating how developmentally responsive practice often operates informally, outside the bounds of written rules. These insights matter because home-based care is absorbing growing demand as families face long waitlists for centre-based spots, and international comparisons show several OECD countries rely heavily on home-based arrangements.

The screen time findings carry particular weight given the accumulated evidence on early childhood development. A systematic review previously found that home-based childcare programs provided more screen time for preschoolers, 1.8 to 2.4 hours daily, than centre-based programs, at 0.1 to 1.3 hours. Research following 2,441 Alberta mothers and children found that higher screen time at ages two and three predicted lower developmental screening scores at age three, and studies suggest children may accumulate upwards of 3.6 additional hours of screen time at home after childcare, making a screen-free childcare day all the more consequential. In the present survey, 61.1 percent of facilities reported written no-screen-time policies, a substantial figure, but only 31.4 percent regulated educators’ own screen use in children’s presence, and among the 33.7 percent of facilities permitting screen time, fewer than half had written limits on viewing duration. Not all sedentary time is harmful, the authors caution; meaningful seated activities such as reading, storytelling, and fine motor play support cognitive and social-emotional development, and compositional research on 405 Canadian preschoolers linked more sedentary time relative to physical activity with better psychosocial functioning.

The study’s implications extend beyond Canada’s borders. An international scoping review of 43 childcare movement behaviour policies found that most are enacted at subnational levels and broadly worded, producing wide variability in interpretation, and only about half specified a duration for sedentary bouts, ranging from 15 to 60 minutes. The authors argue that countries should develop national movement behaviour standards for childcare, designed to be legislated, monitored, and adapted by subnational governments, consistent with the WHO Standards. But given the slow pace of national coordination, they also call for interim supports: leveraging existing professional learning platforms, investing urgently in paid professional development time, and addressing chronic staffing shortages that consume educators’ available hours. Canadian early childhood educators have repeatedly reported lacking movement behaviour training and wanting more, and comparative research found Canadian facilities least compliant among Australia, Canada, and the United States in providing staff professional learning and family education on physical activity. The survey has limitations, notably its reliance on self-reported rather than audited policies, which the authors acknowledge may inflate prevalence through social desirability bias, and incomplete directory access in some provinces likely affected representativeness. Still, with nearly one million Canadian children under five attending licensed or regulated childcare, the message is unambiguous: written policy, backed by legislation and supported by a properly resourced workforce, remains one of the most powerful levers for ensuring that every child’s earliest years are filled with movement, rest, and developmentally rich engagement rather than left to the luck of geography and circumstance.

Subject of Research: Movement behaviour policies in Canadian childcare facilities and their association with regional legislation

Article Title: Movement behaviour policies in Canadian childcare facilities: Prevalence, content, and associations with facility characteristics and regional legislation

Article References: Bruijns, B. A., Coyle-Asbil, H. J., Phillips, S. M., Vanderloo, L. M., Wong, S., & Tucker, P. (2026). Movement behaviour policies in Canadian childcare facilities: Prevalence, content, and associations with facility characteristics and regional legislation. Journal of Activity, Sedentary and Sleep Behaviors, 5(1), Article 13. https://doi.org/10.1186/s44167-026-00103-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s44167-026-00103-4

Keywords: childcare, physical activity, sedentary behaviour, screen time, sleep, movement behaviours, early childhood education, policy, legislation, Canada, outdoor play, professional development