ArticleChild: care, health and development2025
The Role of Timing and Amount of Outdoor Play in Emotional Dysregulation in Preschool Children.
Article in Child: care, health and development, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Household Poverty and Movement Behaviors in Preschool Children: A Longitudinal Study of Physical Activity, Screen Time, and Sleep.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Disrupted beginnings: Neurodevelopmental outcomes of COVID-19 lockdowns in early childhood (Review).Experimental and therapeutic medicine · 2026Review
- Age Differences in the Relationship Between Outdoor Physical Activity and School Emotional Well-Being in Pre-Adolescents: A Stratified Correlation Analysis.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- 2025 Position statement on active outdoor play.The international journal of behavioral nutrition and physical activity · 2025Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundCurrently, the time children spend playing outdoors is at an all-time low. However, the existing literature suggests that outdoor play may have cognitive and emotional benefits for children.
methodsThe present study carried out a mediation analysis to explore whether amount and timing of outdoor play affects children's emotion regulation and whether working memory mediates these relations among 325 preschool children (M
resultsResults showed that greater amounts of outdoor play very early (i.e., wake-up to noon) and very late (i.e., 6 PM to bedtime) in the day were related to greater emotional dysregulation. By contrast, greater amount of outdoor play from noon to 6 PM was related to lower emotional dysregulation. Importantly, the effect of amount of outdoor play from noon to 6 PM on emotion regulation was fully mediated by working memory.
conclusionThe findings of the present study suggest that in early childhood outdoor play that supports children's circadian rhythms may have cognitive and, in turn, emotional benefits.
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