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

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.