Mariana Brussoni

University of British Columbia - Vancouver | UBC · Department of Pediatrics

Physical literacy (PL) is gaining more attention from educational policy-makers, practitioners, and researchers as a way to improve health and wellness outcomes for children and youth. While the development of PL is important for early years children, there is limited attention in the literature that explores the political, cultural, and social dis...

BACKGROUND Research indicates that risky play benefits children’s risk assessment and risk management skills, and offers several positive health effects such as resilience, social skills, physical activity, well-being and involvement. There are also indications that the lack of risky play and autonomy increases the likelihood of anxiety. Despite it...

Urban environments shape early childhood exposures, experiences, and health behaviors, including outdoor free play, influencing the physical, cognitive, social, and emotional development of young children. We examined evidence for urban or suburban built environment influences on outdoor free play in 0–6-year-olds, considering potential differences...

Mothers more than fathers are discursively produced as responsible for children’s safety. Wives of members in combat arms occupations in the military may have feelings of responsibility for their children’s safety that are shaped through their involvement in military culture. In this research, we examined the feelings of responsibility mothers part...

Research on physical interventions installed in outdoor environments and their impacts on children’s play and development is a growing area of study. This paper focuses on the design and installation of outdoor interventions at early childhood education centres in Vancouver, Canada and the impact that theses interventions had on play affordances. W...

Amid a dearth of research exploring children’s stories of their play in natural environments, we conducted go-along interviews with 105 children aged 10-13 years in Metro Vancouver, Canada. We used narrative inquiry to explore how natural environments shaped their experiences and influenced their development of microcultures. Our thematic narrative...

Background A recent dialogue in the field of play, learn, and teach outdoors (referred to as “PLaTO” hereafter) demonstrated the need for developing harmonized and consensus-based terminology, taxonomy, and ontology for PLaTO. This is important as the field evolves and diversifies in its approaches, contents, and contexts over time and in different...

This paper is written by the members of the Children, Youth and Environments Working Group of the Sustainable Cities and Landscapes Research Hub of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities, which at present includes members from Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. We use six spheres of experience that characterize the typical...

Background At 2 to 3 years after anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction (ACLR), the relationship between known modifiable osteoarthritis (OA) risk factors and recurrent knee injury is unknown. This study aimed to determine the odds of new or recurrent traumatic knee injury in a cohort of young female athletes with ACLR 2 to 3 years postsurgery c...

Background: Participation in outdoor play has been extensively documented as beneficial for the health, well-being and development of children. Canadian early childhood education centres (ECECs) are important settings in young children’s lives and provide opportunities to participate in outdoor play. However, there are barriers to the provision of...

BACKGROUND Participation in outdoor play has been extensively documented as beneficial for the health, well-being, and development of children. Canadian early childhood education centers (ECECs) are important settings in young children’s lives and provide opportunities to participate in outdoor play. However, there are barriers to the provision of...

Unstructured outdoor play has been recognized for its beneficial impacts on children’s healthy development; however, unfortunately, opportunities for children to engage in meaningful play are limited. Early learning and childcare centres can be essential settings for unstructured outdoor play, and educators can play a vital role in supporting child...

BACKGROUND Outdoor play is critical to children’s healthy physical, social, emotional and intellectual development and well-being; yet children’s opportunities for outdoor play have steadily decreased across generations in many developed countries. Early learning and childcare centers are an important venue for increasing children’s outdoor play op...

Background: Outdoor play is critical to children's healthy development and well-being. Early learning and childcare centers (ELCCs) are important venues for increasing children's outdoor play opportunities, and early childhood educators' (ECE) perception of outdoor play can be a major barrier to outdoor play. The OutsidePlay-ECE risk-reframing int...

Autonomy – acting volitionally with a sense of choice – is a crucial right for children. Given parents’ pivotal position in their child’s autonomy development, we examined how parental autonomy support and children’s need for autonomy were negotiated and manifested in the context of children’s independent mobility – children’s ability to play, walk...

Outdoor play is critical for the wellbeing of children. In cities, access to unsupervised outdoor play is limited by a host of obstacles. Many of these limiting factors can be mitigated by environmental design. The following identifies seven design principles for urban public landscapes that support play for "tweens" (children 10 to 13 years old)....

Background Injury is a leading contributor to the global disease burden in children and places children at risk for adverse and lasting impacts on their health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and development. This study aimed to identify key predictors of HRQoL following injury in childhood and adolescence. Methods Data from 2259 injury survivors...

Parents’ experiences with risk can influence their perspectives on their children’s outdoor risky play. Parents in combat arms occupations in the Canadian Armed Forces have unique experiences with risk, as their occupations regularly include encountering and successfully navigating risky environments in military operations. In this study, we conduc...

Background Parents affect their adolescents' dietary behaviors through food parenting practices both directly and indirectly through adolescents' cognitive factors (self-efficacy, intrinsic or extrinsic motivation). However, it is not known if mothers and fathers use of different food parenting practices similarly influences boys' and girls' dietar...

Purpose The public’s concussion awareness is increasing. However, youth may still participate in sport through concussion symptoms and parents may not take their child with a suspected concussion to a physician for assessment and clearance to return to sport. This study uses qualitative methodology to explore parent and coach experiences with concu...

Background Supracondylar humerus fractures (SCHF) are the most common fractures sustained following a fall onto an outstretched hand among healthy children, and one of the leading causes of hospital admission and surgical intervention. The aim of this study was to examine SCHF occurring at public play spaces—particularly to determine whether or not...

Background: Injury is a leading contributor to the global disease burden in children, affecting their health-related quality of life (HRQoL)-yet valid estimates of burden are absent. Methods: This study pooled longitudinal data from five cohort studies of pediatric injury survivors (5-17 years) at baseline, 1-, 4-, 6-, 12-, and 24- months (n = 2...

Daily life has changed for families due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of this repeated cross-sectional study was to describe movement behaviours in Canadian children and youth 6 months into the pandemic (T2; October 2020) compared with the start of the pandemic (T1, April 2020). An online survey was distributed to parents (N = 1568) of children...

Background Outdoor learning offers clear physical, cognitive, social-emotional and academic benefits for children and yet, it is considered a grassroots approach to teaching and learning in elementary schools. Purpose We examined teachers’ perspectives on barriers and supports for outdoor learning in public elementary schools. Methods Thirty-six...

Daily life has changed for families due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of this repeated cross-sectional study was to describe movement behaviours in Canadian children and youth six months into the pandemic (T2; October 2020) compared with the start of the pandemic (T1, April 2020). An online survey was distributed to parents ( N = 1568) of child...

BACKGROUND Outdoor play supports children’s physical, social, emotional and intellectual development, yet opportunities for outdoor play are declining in many societies. Early learning and childcare centers (ELCCs) can offer young children critical opportunities for quality outdoor play. There are multiple actual and perceived barriers to outdoor p...

Background Early learning and childcare centers (ELCCs) can offer young children critical opportunities for quality outdoor play. There are multiple actual and perceived barriers to outdoor play at ELCCs, ranging from safety fears and lack of familiarity with supporting play outdoors to challenges around diverse perspectives on outdoor play among e...

The restrictions on children’s outdoor risky play is emerging as a pressing public health concern. To the best of our knowledge, no research has examined military mothers’ perspectives on outdoor risky play. Military mothers have unique knowledge of war and combat and potential threats to children’s safety due to their communications with their par...

Background: Outdoor risky play, such as climbing, racing, and independent exploration, is an important part of childhood and is associated with various positive physical, mental, and developmental outcomes for children. Parental attitudes and fears, particularly mothers', are a major deterrent to children's opportunities for outdoor risky play. O...

Background Return to sports (RTS) is frequently considered an indicator of successful recovery after anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction (ACLR). However, despite the well-recognized health benefits of physical activity (PA), little is known about objectively measured PA in the 1 to 2 years after ACLR. Given that young female athletes have a h...

Rural mothers play important roles in shaping their children’s play-related injury experiences. It is thus problematic that their perspectives on their outdoor play-related safety strategies are often considered peripheral to the perspectives of urban and suburban mothers in play research. To center their perspectives on this topic, we examined the...

While children’s independent mobility (CIM) is associated with various benefits, there is evidence of a generational decline in CIM in westernized countries; therefore, it is helpful to understand how CIM is currently negotiated between children and their parents. The purpose of this study was to examine children’s and parents’ perspectives and neg...

The COVID-19 outbreak and related public health guidelines have changed the daily lives of Canadians and restricted opportunities for healthy movement behaviours for children. The purpose of this study was to explore how parents experienced the pandemic-related restrictions and how they impacted their children’s movement behaviours. Methods: Twenty...

Background Participation in recreational activity by children with autism is important for health and social inclusion. However, these children and their families experience many barriers to recreation participation including parental concerns about safety and injury risks and a lack of educational resources to address children’s recreational safet...

Background Outdoor play and risk-taking behaviors, including play at heights, are important to children’s physical, social, and cognitive development. These aspects of play are important to consider when informing prevention policies for serious injuries that commonly occur on play structures. Supracondylar fractures of the humerus (SCH) are the mo...

Playing outdoors offers rich play opportunities and has unique characteristics less apparent in indoor play, including taking physical risks. Risky play occurs when children intentionally seek exhilarating and scary physical play situations that allow them to gain mastery over their fears. Opportunities for outdoor risky play have been severely cur...

BACKGROUND Outdoor risky play, such as climbing, racing and independent exploration, is an important part of childhood and is associated with various positive physical, mental and developmental outcomes for children. Parental attitudes and fears, particularly mothers’, are a major deterrent to children’s opportunities for outdoor risky play. OBJEC...

This paper explores patterns of increased/ decreased physical activity, sedentary and sleep behaviours among Canadian children and youth aged 5-17 years during the COVID-19 pandemic, and examines how these changes are associated with the built environment near residential locations. A cluster analysis identified two groups who were primarily distin...

Objectives The goal of this study was to investigate socio-demographic and contextual factors in relation to the frequency of outdoor play in the neighbourhood in early childhood, drawing from a large sample of children in British Columbia, Canada.Methods Parents/caregivers of 2280 4- to 5-year-old children completed the Childhood Experiences Quest...

Background: Healthy childhood development is fostered through sufficient physical activity (PA; including time outdoors), limiting sedentary behaviours (SB), and adequate sleep; collectively known as movement behaviours. Though the COVID-19 virus outbreak has changed the daily lives of children and youth, it is unknown to what extent related restr...

Background: Geographic masks are techniques used to protect individual privacy in published maps but are highly under-utilized in research. This leads to continual violations of individual privacy, as sensitive health records are put at risk in unmasked maps. New approaches to geographic masking are required that foster accessibility and ease of u...

BACKGROUND Outdoor play and risk-taking behaviors, including play at heights, are important to children’s physical, social, and cognitive development. These aspects of play are important to consider when informing prevention policies for serious injuries that commonly occur on play structures. Supracondylar fractures of the humerus (SCH) are the mo...

Background: Healthy child and youth development is fostered through sufficient physical activity (PA; including time outdoors), limiting sedentary behaviours (SB), and adequate sleep; collectively known as movement behaviours. Though the COVID-19 virus outbreak has changed the daily lives of children and youth, it is unknown to what extent related...

There has been increasing recognition of the importance of children's outdoor play and independent mobility for thriving children, neighbourhoods, cities and society, which has led to calls to reverse children's retreat from the street commonplace in many Western nations. We privilege the voices of children aged 10–13 living in three diverse neighb...

PurposeTo translate and cross-culturally adapt the Swedish Knee Self-Efficacy Scale (K-SES) into English and evaluate the measurement properties in a sample of individuals with previous knee injury.Methods Translation, cross-cultural adaptation, and evaluation followed the Beaton multi-step process and COSMIN guidelines. Participants (n = 125) aged...

Background: There is inconsistency across child development and care literature in operationalizing serious play-related injury, and also a lack of understanding of how mothers and fathers conceptualize serious play-related injury. The current study explores parents' perspectives of their 2- to 7-year-old children's serious play-related injuries i...

Children's independent mobility (IM) is profoundly connected to their healthy development and wellbeing, and plays a critical role in promoting their further territorial expansion in their neighborhood. In this paper, we explore perspectives of Canadian children aged 10-13 years on their IM in their neighborhood, using interpretive description anal...

Geographic masks are techniques used to protect privacy when publishing sensitive data in maps, but are not well adopted among researchers and may be difficult to execute for some GIS users. We developed a client‐side web application called MaskMy.XYZ that makes geographic masking easy to perform. It executes donut geomasking, a well‐known geograph...

Outdoor play has been associated with children’s and adolescents’ healthy development and physical activity. Attributes of the neighbourhood built environment can influence play behaviours. This systematic review examined the relationship between attributes of the neighbourhood built environment and the time children and adolescents (0–18 years) sp...

Children’s independent mobility (IM), their freedom to move about their neighbourhood without supervision by adults, has been in steady decline in recent decades. Previous research has linked perceptions of the environment with various measures of IM, but recently concerns have been raised regarding inconsistency in measuring IM. This study used va...

Background Parental attitudes regarding child safety and risk engagement play important roles in child injury prevention and health promotion efforts. Few studies have compared mothers’ and fathers’ attitudes on these topics. This study used the risk engagement and protection survey (REPS) previously validated with fathers to compare with data coll...

(1) Background: Family environments can impact obesity risk among adolescents. Little is known about the mechanisms by which parents can influence obesity-related adolescent health behaviours and specifically how parenting practices (e.g., rules or routines) and/or their own health behaviours relate to their adolescent’s behaviours. The primary aim...

Objectives The objective of this study was to explore parent perspectives of and interest in an interactive knowledge translation platform called Child-Sized KT that proposes to catalyse the collaboration of patients, families, practitioners and researchers in patient-oriented research at British Columbia Children’s Hospital (BCCH). Methods An exp...

The potential for risky play and independent mobility to increase children’s physical activity, and enhance cognitive development and emotional wellbeing has been recognised for some time. The aim of this study was to describe the attitudes of New Zealand parents towards such risky play practices and independent mobility, the barriers preventing th...

Children’s play is increasingly controlled, costly and standardised. Risk aversion has resulted in attempts to eliminate all danger despite the limited health burden of play-related injuries and missing cost–benefit evidence. The current role and implementation of playground safety standards is a key inhibitor of stimulating play provision. Playgro...

Unintentional injuries are a major cause of hospitalization and death for children worldwide. Since children who sustain a medically-attended injury are at higher risk of recurrence, it is crucial to generate knowledge that informs interventions to prevent re-incidence. This study examines when, in the year following a medically-attended injury, pa...

Background: The familial environment can influence adolescents' risk for obesity. However, we do not fully understand the mechanisms through which parents can influence overweight/obese adolescents' dietary behaviours, specifically whether parenting practices (e.g., rules or routines) and/or their own dietary behaviours are associated with their o...

Background Parents play an important role in keeping children safe from injury. The Risk Engagement and Protection Survey (REPS) was developed and validated in measuring fathers’ attitudes towards protecting children from injury and allowing them to engage in risks. However, the validity of this two-construct instrument remains unestablished among...

Introduction Traumatic injury is a leading contributor to the global disease burden in children and adolescents, but methods used to estimate burden do not account for differences in patterns of injury and recovery between children and adults. A lack of empirical data on postinjury disability in children has limited capacity to derive valid disabil...

Objective: To understand the influence of the injury experience on current attitudes and beliefs about physical activity (PA) and the development of post-traumatic osteoarthritis (PTOA) in youth and young adults 3-10 years after a sport-related knee injury. Design: Qualitative study. Setting: University Sports Medical/Research Center. Partici...

This chapter investigates past and current perceptions of adolescents and how these perceptions influence policies and practices around the design of public spaces. It explores the need for and benefits associated with public spaces, including natural landscapes, for adolescents. The chapter positions adolescents as a distinct landscape user group...

Background: Children's risky play is associated with a variety of positive developmental, physical and mental health outcomes, including greater physical activity, self-confidence and risk-management skills. Children's opportunities for risky play have eroded over time, limited by parents' fears and beliefs about risk, particularly among mothers....

This chapter investigates past and current perceptions of adolescents and how these perceptions influence policies and practices around the design of public spaces. It explores the need for and benefits associated with public spaces, including natural landscapes, for adolescents. The chapter positions adolescents as a distinct landscape user group...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0191384.].

Worldwide, Indigenous people have disproportionately higher rates of transport injuries. We examined disparities in injury-related hospitalizations resulting from transport incidents for three population groups in British Columbia (BC): total population, Aboriginal off-reserve, and Aboriginal on-reserve populations. We also examined sociodemographi...