A Systems Approach to Supporting Children’s Right to Play in Canada

Reimagining Children’s Right to Play Through a Systems and Equity Lens

By Marnie Power

 

 

Children’s play in Canada is increasingly shaped by systems designed around efficiency, safety, supervision, performance, and productivity. While many adults care deeply about children’s wellbeing, the environments surrounding childhood often leave little room for the freedom, autonomy, connection, and exploration that meaningful play requires. This raises an important question: what does it actually take to create the conditions for children to experience their right to play?

The answer cannot rest solely with families, educators, or recreation providers. Supporting children’s right to play requires a systems approach. It requires us to move beyond asking whether children are “playing enough” and instead ask what conditions shape children’s access to play, what systems support or restrict children’s freedom and agency, and how policy, infrastructure, culture, economics, and institutions shape childhood itself.

These questions sit at the heart of the Play Continuum: A Play Security Framework for Advancing Equity-Centred Play in Canada. The framework builds on scholarship related to play-based learning, outdoor play, children’s rights, and developmental wellbeing (Pyle & Danniels, 2017; Power, 2024). It invites a shift in thinking. Rather than focusing only on the type of play taking place, it asks whether children have equitable access to the full range of play experiences necessary for healthy development, belonging, freedom, and wellbeing.

Conversations about play often become polarized. Structured play versus free play. Organized sport versus outdoor play. Adult-led versus child-led experiences. But the reality of children’s lives is far more nuanced. Children move fluidly across different forms of play throughout the day, across seasons, across relationships, and across developmental stages. Structured play, collaborative play, imaginative play, guided exploration, outdoor play, and deep self-directed play all have value.

The goal is not to suggest that one form of play is inherently better than another. Structured play and organized sport can build confidence, physical literacy, belonging, teamwork, and important developmental skills. Adult support and guidance are often essential parts of children’s experiences. The issue is not that structured play exists. The issue is that many children are increasingly spending most of their time within highly supervised, adult-managed, and tightly scheduled environments, with fewer opportunities to move across the broader continuum of play experiences.

Across Canada, children’s opportunities for self-directed outdoor play, neighbourhood exploration, independent mobility, imaginative risk-taking, and uninterrupted free play have significantly narrowed (ParticipACTION, 2022; Public Health Agency of Canada, 2020). Many children move from one adult-managed environment to another with little time, space, or autonomy in between. In this context, children may technically have access to activities while still experiencing limited freedom, reduced agency, restricted mobility, over-surveillance, or little ownership over their own play experiences.

This is where the concept of Play Security becomes important. Play Security is not about eliminating structure or positioning one type of play as superior. Rather, it recognizes that children require access to a range of meaningful play experiences to support healthy development, wellbeing, resilience, and belonging (Canadian Paediatric Society, 2019). A play-secure environment allows children opportunities to experience support and challenge, guidance and freedom, collaboration and independence.

The infographic intentionally emphasizes movement along the continuum because healthy childhoods require balance. Children benefit from opportunities to move between supported play, collaborative play, child-initiated play, and deep self-directed play depending on context, relationships, developmental needs, culture, environment, and personal preference. What matters is not whether play is adult-led or child-led, but whether children can access a broad ecosystem of meaningful play experiences.

The Social Determinants of Play

At the same time, the framework recognizes that access to play is deeply unequal. This is why the Play Continuum is also framed through a social determinants and systems lens. Rather than focusing only on individual children or family choices, the framework examines the upstream, midstream, and downstream conditions shaping access to play.

Upstream determinants include the structural conditions shaping what is possible for children and families. These include government policy, urban planning, childcare systems, income supports, housing, structural inequities such as racism and colonialism, and climate conditions. These forces shape whether children have safe green spaces, affordable recreation, walkable neighbourhoods, supportive outdoor learning policies, and stable environments where play can flourish.

Midstream determinants reflect the community and institutional conditions influencing access to play. Schools, childcare settings, transportation systems, parks, recreation infrastructure, neighbourhood safety, and cultural inclusion all shape whether children feel welcomed, safe, and able to participate meaningfully in their communities.

Downstream determinants reflect children’s immediate lived experiences. These include time for play, caregiver stress and capacity, mobility and independence, emotional safety, access to clothing or adaptive supports, supervision norms, and whether children feel freedom, joy, and belonging in their daily lives.

Importantly, these downstream experiences are often the result of upstream and midstream systems. When children lack time, space, autonomy, safety, or access to meaningful play, the problem is rarely individual. It is systemic.

This is why supporting children’s right to play must become a shared responsibility across sectors. Urban planners shape children’s mobility and access to nature. Schools and childcare systems influence how much time children have for play and whether environments are overly compliance-driven. Recreation and sport systems influence whether children experience belonging, pressure, flexibility, or exclusion. Public health systems shape conversations about wellbeing, movement, mental health, and community connection. Policymakers influence the structural conditions surrounding childhood through legislation, funding, housing, transportation, and social policy.

The infographic also intentionally centers children’s voices alongside systems thinking. Too often, systems conversations become abstract, but children’s experiences remind us what is actually at stake. Across the continuum, children describe experiences such as “I have to follow the rules,” “I get to try things and make some choices,” “We work things out together,” and “I feel free. I belong. I can be myself.” These statements reveal that Play Security is not simply about access to activities. It is about whether children experience agency, trust, freedom, belonging, identity affirmation, connection, and joy.

Supporting children’s right to play is therefore both an ethical and legal imperative. Article 31 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child recognizes children’s right to play, rest, leisure, and participation in cultural life (United Nations, 1989). Yet play is still often treated as secondary to productivity, tightly controlled by adults, or accessible only to families with sufficient time, income, and resources.

Exploring the Questions Through Our Own Work

As we have grown as an organization focused on disrupting adverse childhood experiences and supporting child and caregiver mental health through outdoor play, we have continuously wrestled with important questions about our own role within this work.

How do we balance the need for playful prevention with the growing demand for playful interventions and therapeutic offerings? How do we navigate the tension between tangible program delivery and systems-level policy advocacy? How do we meaningfully contribute to systems change while also operating as a small and growing charity with limited resources?

The truth is that we have not found definitive answers to these questions.

Instead, we continue to sit with them.

We continue to explore our work through a systems and equity lens, recognizing that supporting children’s right to play requires both immediate action and long-term structural change. Some days this looks like delivering outdoor play programs directly with children and families. Other days it looks like convening conversations, engaging in advocacy, building partnerships, contributing to policy discussions, or simply creating space for people across sectors to think differently about childhood.

What we have become increasingly certain of, however, is that no single sector can address this work alone.

As we host and participate in dialogue across social services, mental health, early childhood education, parks and recreation, public health, housing, community development, and related sectors, one thing becomes consistently clear: coordinated and integrated approaches that prioritize play create stronger outcomes for children, families, and communities.

This is particularly true when it comes to mental health.

Play supports emotional regulation, belonging, resilience, connection, stress reduction, identity development, and relationship-building (Gray, 2011; Lester & Russell, 2008). Outdoor and play-based experiences can create opportunities for healing, joy, attachment, community connection, and nervous system regulation for both children and caregivers.

Yet too often, systems remain fragmented. Children and families encounter disconnected services, competing priorities, rigid structures, and environments that unintentionally limit opportunities for meaningful play and connection.

A Play Security lens invites us to think differently. It encourages sectors not only to ask what services they provide, but how their systems, environments, and decisions either support or constrain children’s opportunities for play, belonging, freedom, movement, and wellbeing.

Protecting Play Is Protecting Childhood

Ultimately, this work continues to bring us back to the experience of the child.

What does play feel like to a child?

Sometimes it feels like running freely across a field without being hurried. Sometimes it feels like climbing something for the first time and realizing, “I can do this.” Sometimes it feels like laughing with friends, building imaginary worlds, making up rules together, getting muddy, feeling capable, feeling trusted, or finding a quiet sense of belonging outdoors.

Sometimes play feels supported and guided. Sometimes it feels adventurous and uncertain. Sometimes it feels collaborative, creative, restful, joyful, challenging, or deeply freeing.

Children need opportunities to move across this continuum of experiences. To experience both support and autonomy. Structure and freedom. Safety and exploration. Connection and independence.

Play Security is ultimately about whether children have access to these experiences consistently, equitably, and meaningfully throughout their lives.

When children experience environments where play is protected, welcomed, and valued, they experience something deeply powerful. They begin to feel that they matter. That their ideas matter. That their curiosity, imagination, movement, questions, relationships, and ways of being in the world matter.

To protect play is not simply to create opportunities for recreation. It is to protect childhood itself.

It is to create conditions where children feel trusted enough to explore, safe enough to take risks, connected enough to belong, and free enough to discover who they are. It is to make space for wonder, creativity, joy, rest, adventure, messiness, connection, and possibility.

For a child, play can feel like freedom. It can feel like confidence growing quietly from the inside. It can feel like being included, being capable, being seen, being listened to, and being allowed to exist fully as themselves.

And perhaps this is the deeper invitation of a Play Security approach: not simply to ask whether children have access to activities, but whether the systems, environments, and relationships surrounding them communicate something essential:

You belong here.
You are valued here.
There is space for you to be fully a child here.

References

Canadian Paediatric Society. (2019). Active play: An essential component of healthy child development. Paediatrics & Child Health, 24(8), 411–415. https://doi.org/10.1093/pch/pxz163

Gray, P. (2011). The decline of play and the rise of psychopathology in children and adolescents. American Journal of Play, 3(4), 443–463.

Lester, S., & Russell, W. (2008). Play for a change: Play, policy and practice: A review of contemporary perspectives. National Children’s Bureau.

ParticipACTION. (2022). The 2022 ParticipACTION report card on physical activity for children and youth.

Power, M. (2024). Playing with play: Considerations for embedding outdoor play-based learning into the early years (Master’s thesis). Trent University, Peterborough, ON.

Public Health Agency of Canada. (2020). A common vision for increasing physical activity and reducing sedentary living in Canada: Let’s get moving.

Pyle, A., & Danniels, E. (2017). A continuum of play-based learning: The role of the teacher in play-based pedagogy and the fear of hijacking play. Early Education and Development, 28(3), 274–289. https://doi.org/10.1080/10409289.2016.1220771

United Nations. (1989). Convention on the Rights of the Child. https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-rights-child