At present, the increasingly motorized and static urban lifestyle has led to a sharp decline in children’s outdoor physical activities. To promote children’s outdoor activities from the perspective of urban planning, it is necessary to understand the rules of urban built environment affecting children’s outdoor activities. This article chose the 6 – 18 years old children and adolescents in Shanghai as the object, and obtained the data of the children’s outdoor activities and their parents’ cognition on the built environment through online questionnaire survey. An analytical model including three decision stages of the children’s outdoor activities was established, using the Hurdle Negative Binomial model and Beta model, to analyze the total amount of children’s outdoor activities affected by urban built environment and its distribution between strenuous activities and moderate activities. The results show that the factors of the children’s personality, and the families and the communities they are from have a greater impact on the children’s outdoor activities than the built environment factors; the parents’ concern about safety, accessibility, and quality of outdoor activities facilities has significant impacts; creating an independent, relaxed atmosphere for children may be an important social factor to promote children’s outdoor activities.