B-challenged: Co-creating Physical and Social Environments to Promote Children's Active Outdoor Play

Summary

BACKGROUND An alarmingly low number of children meet public health guidelines for physical activity and healthy dietary behaviours, and are at increased risk of developing lifestyle-related diseases. Importantly, this burden is already unequally distributed at an early age. Unhealthy lifestyle behaviours are driven by complex mechanisms that differ across boys and girls growing up under different socio-economic circumstances. Outdoor play is an important contributor to children's levels of physical activity. Yet, children growing up in underprivileged neighbourhoods play less outside due to limited access to safe and attractive outdoor spaces and appropriate and affordable after school activities than other children. At the same time, today's children have abundant access to inexpensive energy-dense foods and online sedentary activities.

AIM B-challenged aims to tackle the complexity of equality in children's active outdoor play and healthy dietary behaviours by co-creating, implementing and evaluating interventions in the physical and social environmental together with children growing up in socio-economically underprivileged neighbourhoods and other key actors.

APPROACH B-challenged introduces a multi-actor, inter-sectorial democratic approach in five European countries (Denmark, Germany, Spain, Poland and the Netherlands), including all key actors (e.g. children, parents, teachers, policy makers). The investigators in B-Challenged will closely collaborate with all key actors, conduct analyses in European cohort data and consider the broader system (e.g. neighbourhood, family) as well as previous lessons-learned. Therewith, B-challenged aims at structural, relevant and feasible improvements in the physical and social environment promoting children's active outdoor play and dietary behaviours. B-challenged will impact all key actors in the selected neighbourhoods and far beyond through disseminating protocols and recommendations (research and policy) for upscaling the B-challenged approach.

Conditions

• Active Outdoor Play and Related Healthy Dietary Behaviours

Interventions

OTHER

Physical and social environmental interventions.

To be determined in the co-creation groups at the five sites (Denmark, Germany, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands)

Sponsors & Collaborators

• University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• Fundación Instituto Investigación Sanitaria Aragón, Zaragoza, Spain

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• Institute of Mother and Child, Warshaw, Poland

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• University of Bremen, Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology, Bremen, Germany

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• Foundation of the Institute of Mother and Child, Warsaw, Poland

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• Amsterdam UMC, location VUmc

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Teatske Altenburg, A/Prof · Amsterdam UMC, location VUmc, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Study Design

Allocation

NA

Purpose

PREVENTION

Masking

NONE

Model

SINGLE_GROUP

Eligibility

Min Age

6 Years

Max Age

12 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2024-09-01

Primary Completion

2027-09-01

Completion

2027-09-01

Countries

• Denmark
• Germany
• Netherlands
• Poland
• Spain

Study Locations