Read the full transcript of active living environments Professor Jasper Schipperijn’s talk at TEDxOdense, June 11, 2026.
Editor’s Note: In this insightful talk, researcher Jasper Schipperijn explores why children, particularly pre-teens, are spending less time playing outside and how adult-imposed rules and poorly designed spaces often hinder their natural desire for exploration. Drawing on years of observation, he argues that to encourage outdoor play, we must stop dictating how children should use spaces and instead truly listen to them to create environments that meet their actual needs for challenge, independence, and variety.
Listen to the audio version here:
Why Outdoor Play Matters
PROFESSOR JASPER SCHIPPERIJN: Outdoor play is fun, usually a lot of fun, but it’s not just for fun. Outdoor play is essential for children’s healthy development. Yet today, children play outside less than their parents did. They play outside less than any of us adults did. And that is a problem. That is a problem for children’s physical, emotional, mental and social health and development. And if we want to do something with that problem, we have to understand why children don’t play outside anymore.
The Tweenager
And you know who I really would like to see play outside more? The tweenager. The tweenager, the dreaded tweenager, the 9 to 14 year old, some of you might have them lurking around your houses, only leaving their room occasionally to eat and if you’re lucky to take a shower.
Can you remember what it was like being a tweenager? Can you remember the awkwardness, the cringe, the one minute wanting to be big, the next minute longing to be a child again? For those of you who have a tweenager at home, have you tried asking them, what did you do today at school? I can recognize those of you that have tried asking them. They will say something like, “nothing,” or “I don’t know,” or if you’re really lucky and your tweenager still likes talking to you, they might say something like, “oh we played tug of war today and it was lit.” And you are like, what? What are they saying?
We parents, adults, we just don’t seem to understand our tweens. And we don’t understand why they don’t play outside anymore.
Studying Outdoor Play for Over 20 Years
And that is where my team and I come in. We have studied outdoor play for more than 20 years, we’ve spent more than a thousand hours observing children play. We see what kids do when parents and teachers are looking away. But seeing what kids do is not enough to understand why they do it. We have to ask. But asking them, we don’t understand what they tell us either.
So the way we do that is we invite tweenagers and kids to show us around in their places. And while they show us around, we get them to talk about what they’re doing, where they’re doing it, and why they’re doing it, or not doing things. And that has really given us some great insights into why children don’t play outside anymore.
The Story of the Hills
Let me tell you a few stories from our research projects. In one of our projects, we were at a small town school, and the school was getting a new schoolyard. And it was a very involved process, the children were involved in the design, the teachers, the parents, and so on. And one of the things they wanted was hills. Denmark is very, very flat, and hills are always popular on playgrounds. So they got hills, nice, colorful hills.
And when we do this type of research projects, we use a very classic research design. We go, we observe before things are happening, and then a change is happening. In this case, the school got a new playground, and we come back afterwards to see what has changed. And at this particular school, to our big surprise, it went from a flat, boring asphalt area to these nice, colorful hills. But what we saw to our big surprise was that the use of this hilly area was less than of the old asphalt area.
Why? We couldn’t quite understand. So we went to ask, and we went in particular to ask some of the boys that we knew and could recognize had been very, very involved in the design process. And they had been very vocal about wanting the hills. And they told us, “well, we used to roll. We used to roll on our scooters, on our skateboards. So we wanted hills to roll on.” But the hills they got, they had edges like this, a sharp edge. You can’t roll on a sharp edge. So they were extremely disappointed with the hills they had gotten and didn’t use them.
Details matter. Back to the hills.
The Hill That Became a Status Symbol
So they got these colorful hills. And one of the hills was really, really big, about six meters tall, very steep. And a few weeks before the opening of this new schoolyard, there was a parent-teacher meeting. And some of the parents were very concerned with this big, steep hill and worried that their children might fall down and hurt themselves.
We were at this teacher-parent meeting, and the headmaster, an elderly gentleman close to retirement, at a certain point he gets up and he’s like, “They’re kids. They have to learn to take risks.” Okay, bold statement. Afterwards, the headmaster told us researchers, “I’m sure one or two will break their arm the first week. I’ll explain it to the parents. It’ll be fine.” He was our hero for a very, very long time. We need more of those heroes.
What happened? So obviously when we were at the school, after it opened, we had to ask what happened the first couple of weeks. One kid fell and broke their arm. The kids wanted hills. They got hills.