About Prescription for Play: Our Mission & Founders

About Prescription for Play ®

Prescription for Play® is a Childhood Health and Development Initiative that seeks to restore active, outdoor play as an essential foundation of childhood health, development, and well-being.

Grounded in biology, research, and lived experience, Prescription for Play® honors play as the way children are naturally designed to grow, learn, regulate, connect, and thrive.

In a world increasingly shaped by sedentary routines, overscheduling, and technology-driven childhoods, Prescription for Play® empowers parents, educators, advocates, caregivers, and professionals to protect and prioritize play as a sustainable, lifelong human need — supporting the well-being of children, families, and future generations.

Prescription for Play® emerged from dialogue among pediatric health and wellness professionals, researchers, educators, caregivers, and parents to get back to what nature intended for optimal child development.

Our Story

Prescription for Play® began with a shared recognition: something essential in childhood is quietly disappearing.

We are members of the pediatric health and wellness community — clinicians, educators, parents, caregivers, and advocates. We have witnessed firsthand the alarming impact of sedentary routines, overscheduled lives, and technology-driven childhoods on children’s health, regulation, and resilience.

But before we were professionals, we were children.

We remember what it felt like to move freely, to imagine endlessly, to climb, fall, recover, and return to play again.

Those experiences were not incidental — they were formative.

Pediatric dentist Dr. Hila Robbins and speech-language pathologist Nicole Archambault came together through a shared conviction: play is not optional. It is a biological necessity.

Prescription for Play® exists to restore active, outdoor play as a foundational element of childhood health and development — across families, schools, communities, and professional systems.

Prescription for Play ® belongs to all of us.

And we invite you to join it.

Quote graphic: Nature isn't a place, it's a partner in development — Prescription for Play

Hila Robbins, DMD, FAAPD

Co-Founder & Partner in Play

Hila Robbins, DMD, a board-certified specialist in pediatric dentistry based in Los Angeles, CA, was inspired to work with children by her own journey of personal discovery that continues to this day. Drawing upon her own experiences with various—and surprisingly common—childhood health and wellness issues, she developed an integrative, developmental, “whole-body” philosophy and a multidisciplinary, biological approach to the practice of pediatric dentistry.

From early thumb-sucking to a childhood lisp, a tongue crib, and challenges with breathing and swallowing, Dr. Robbins remembers what it was like to be a young dental patient—and what it must have been like for her mother as well.

Dr. Robbins’ expertise has helped her to become an internationally recognized and award-winning pediatric dentist, thought leader, and speaker. She is also a former UCLA faculty member, and accomplished author, co-writing and editing numerous publications on pediatric dentistry and childhood development.

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Nicole Archambault, EdS, MS, CCC-SLP, CYMHS, CSSC

Co-Founder & Partner in Play

Nicole is a pediatric speech-language pathologist and educator whose work bridges neuroscience, child development, myofunctional sciences, airway health, and whole-body well-being. With more than two decades of clinical experience, she has worked across medical, educational, and interdisciplinary settings — witnessing how deeply movement, breathing, sleep, regulation, learning, and relational health are intertwined in the developing child.

Her advocacy for play is also deeply personal, shaped by her own childhood experiences of movement, outdoor exploration, and embodied freedom — experiences that continue to inform her belief in how children are designed to grow.

Throughout her professional journey, Nicole has seen how modern childhood often drifts away from the biological foundations that support resilient development. Her leadership in advancing biologically aligned childhood practices has been recognized nationally and internationally.

As Co-Founder of Prescription for Play®, Nicole advocates for restoring active, outdoor play as a developmental essential — reconnecting children and communities to movement, challenge, imagination, and connection as pathways to lifelong health.

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