The LiiNK Center for Healthy Play is dedicated to promoting healthier, more active lifestyles through unstructured outdoor play, structured physical activity, and character development. Serving students from pre-K through 12th grade, we emphasize essential character skills such as empathy, honesty, respect, trust, self-esteem, and self-confidence to support physical, cognitive, and social-emotional well-being.
Beyond the classroom, LiiNK offers training and resources for educators, families, communities, individuals, and businesses seeking to create healthier, more active environments. From managing personal stress to incorporating outdoor play and movement breaks into the workplace, LiiNK provides practical strategies that encourage positive, lasting change.
Through partnerships with schools and districts nationwide, LiiNK continues to advance research, outreach, and evidence-based practices. By studying the impact of increased recess, outdoor play, and character development, LiiNK demonstrates how these essential elements contribute to healthier students, stronger communities, and more effective learning environments.
To advance sustainable healthy living in children and adults through cutting-edge research, innovative community-based programs, and dissemination of evidence-informed practices focused on the power of unstructured, outdoor play and character skills.
Developing a larger percentage of active, healthy, and resilient children who become active, healthy, and resilient adults.
For children, play is an essential part of learning. When children are given the freedom to play, they are constantly making decisions, solving problems, communicating, negotiating, creating and adapting. They are learning how to navigate both their physical environment and their relationships with other people.
Outdoor play also gives children something increasingly difficult to find in today’s highly structured world: independence. Instead of adults determining every activity and outcome, children have opportunities to make their own choices and experience the natural consequences of those choices. Those experiences can help build confidence, resilience, creativity and stronger social skills.
That’s why we believe quality play should not be treated as something schools provide only when there is extra time. It should be an essential part of every child’s day.
LiiNK research has identified positive outcomes associated with its approach across multiple areas of child development. The research has also examined improvements related to healthy body composition, movement patterns, standardized testing and overall physical activity. Basically, when children’s physical, social and emotional needs are supported, we create better conditions for learning.
of students achieve age-appropriate motor skills
increase in positive emotions during unstructured play
of recess time spent in physical activity
reduction in off-task behavior
decrease in overweight & obese bodyfat % in one year
higher scores on standardized testing by 4th grade
The LiiNK Project was created by Dr. Debbie Rhea, Professor of Kinesiology at Texas Christian University and Associate Dean of Research and Health Sciences in TCU’s Harris College of Nursing & Health Sciences.
Dr. Rhea’s work focuses on whole-child development and the role that movement, unstructured outdoor play and character development can have in creating healthier children and healthier learning environments.
Her work with LiiNK has received national attention, and she has published and presented extensively on topics related to health, physical activity, education and child development.
Under Dr. Rhea’s leadership, LiiNK has grown from an innovative research intervention into an initiative working with educators, researchers and community partners to rethink the role of play in children’s lives.
But LiiNK isn’t the work of one person.
It is supported by a multidisciplinary team of researchers, educators, trainers, field observers and collaborators who bring expertise in education, kinesiology, health sciences, child development, statistics and other disciplines.
