PerspectiveCan the Neighborhood Built Environment Make a Difference in Children's Development? Building the Research Agenda to Create Evidence for Place-Based Children's Policy
Section snippets
Where Children Live Influences Their Health and Well-being
Healthy development in the early years lays the foundations and sets the trajectories for children's ongoing physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development.1 From birth, the brain rapidly develops through ongoing processes where important neural pathways supporting complex skills are built on simpler ones developed early in life. With age, brain plasticity solidifies, making it more difficult for the brain to rewire and learn new skills.2 When children are exposed to stimulating and
Neighborhood, and Child Health and Development
Research exploring the relationship between neighborhood attributes and child development is not new, and there are numerous existing reviews on this topic.8, 9, 35, 36 However, most of these studies have explored the neighborhood setting in relation to factors seemingly unrelated to the built environment. These studies have traditionally focused on sociodemographic measures and include aggregated neighborhood-level measures, such as income, employment, occupation status, family structure,
What Is Known About Built Environment Effects on Child Health and Development?
To date, most of the available evidence related to the built environment and child health and development points to physical features such as housing density, neighborhood destinations, green space and nature, and traffic exposure. These are further detailed below.
Implications for Policy and Practice
Although healthy urban design and planning has an important role to play in transforming neighborhoods,123 redesigning the street network, or building new services and destinations, for example, may be difficult and costly to implement, particularly when it comes to retrofitting the structure of existing neighborhoods. Indeed, changing land use zoning regulations, building codes, and environmental changes are orchestrated by government policies and developers.124
Although it may appear
Acknowledgments
SG was supported by a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Career Development Fellowship (1082922) and HC by a NHMRC/National Heart Foundation Early Career Fellowship (1036350). BGC was supported by a NHMRC Principal Research Fellow Award (1004900).
References (138)
- et al.
The lasting impact of childhood health and circumstance
J Health Econ
(2005) - et al.
Built environment, physical activity, and obesity: what have we learned from reviewing the literature?
Health Place
(2012) - et al.
Urban liveability: emerging lessons from Australia for exploring the potential for indicators to measure the social determinants of health
Soc Sci Med
(2014) - et al.
The impact of neighborhood walkability on walking: does it differ across adult life stage and does neighborhood buffer size matter?
Health Place
(2014) - et al.
Associations between neighborhood resources and physical activity in inner-city minority children
Acad Pediatr
(2013) - et al.
Association between neighborhood walkability and GPS-measured walking, bicycling and vehicle time in adolescents
Health Place
(2015) - et al.
Environmental correlates of adiposity in 9–10 year old children: considering home and school neighbourhoods and routes to school
Soc Sci Med
(2011) - et al.
Classroom-based physical activity, cognition, and academic achievement
Prev Med
(2011) - et al.
Can the built environment reduce health inequalities? A study of neighbourhood socioeconomic disadvantage and walking for transport
Health Place
(2013) - et al.
Children's health-related quality of life, neighbourhood socio-economic deprivation and social capital. A contextual analysis
Soc Sci Med
(2003)
Sense of community and its relationship with walking and neighborhood design
Soc Sci Med
Is there a place for social capital in the psychology of health and place?
J Environ Psychol
Built environment and mental health
Playing it safe: the influence of neighbourhood safety on children's physical activity—a review
Health Place
Suspicious minds: can features of the local neighbourhoods ease parents' fears about stranger danger?
J Environ Psychol
Do you think that your local area is a good place for young people to grow up? The effects of traffic and car parking on young people's views
Health Place
Child pedestrian injury prevention project: student results
Prev Med
Objective and subjective features of children's neighborhoods: relations to parental regulatory strategies and children's social competence
J Appl Dev Psychol
The acquisition and integration of route knowledge in an unfamiliar neighborhood
J Environ Psychol
Children's spatial knowledge of their neighborhood environment
J Appl Dev Psychol
Freedom of movement and environmental knowledge in elementary school children
J Environ Psychol
Restorative experience, self-regulation, and children's place preferences
J Environ Psychol
Views of nature and self-discipline: evidence from inner city children
J Environ Psychol
The natural environment as a playground for children: landcape description and analyses of a natural landscape
Landsc Urban Plan
Access to urban green spaces and behavioural problems in children: results from the GINIplus and LISAplus studies
Environ Int
Walking to school: community design and child and parent barriers
J Environ Psychol
An integrated scientific framework for child survival and early childhood development
Pediatrics
Skill formation and the economics of investing in disadvantaged children
Science
Effect of active versus passive exploration on memory for spatial location in children
Child Dev
School Readiness
The Cost of Early School-Leaving and School Failure
The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design
Neighborhoods as a developmental context: a multilevel analysis of neighborhood effects on Head Start families and children
Am J Community Psychol
Assessing “neighbourhood effects”: social processes and new directions in research
Ann Rev Sociology
Spatial exploration and spatial knowledge: individual and developmental differences in very young children
Child Dev
Built environment correlates of walking: a review
Med Sci Sports Exerc
Human Development Report, 2011
Role of built environments in physical activity, obesity, and cardiovascular disease
Circulation
Reconnecting urban planning with health: a protocol for the development and validation of national liveability indicators associated with noncommunicable disease risk behaviours and health outcomes
Public Health Res Pract
The development of a walkability index: application to the Neighborhood Quality of Life study
Br J Sports Med
Understanding the drive to escort: a cross-sectional analysis examining parental attitudes towards children's school travel and independent mobility
BMC Public Health
Why parents drive children to school: implications for safe routes to school programs
J Am Plann Assoc
Child friendly cities
Urban research and child-friendly cities: a new Australian outline
Child Geographr
Creating child-friendly cities: reinstating kids in the city
Plann Theory Pract
World Urbanization Prospects: 2014 Revision
On children's independent mobility: the interplay of demographic, environmental, and psychosocial factors
Child Geographr
Encouraging walking for transport and physical activity in children and adolescents how important is the built environment?
Sports Med
Increasing children's physical activity: individual, social and environmental factors associated with walking to school
Heatlh Educ Behav
Spatial accessibility to physical activity facilities and to food outlets and overweight in French youth
Int J Obes (Lond)
Cited by (87)
Examining the Contribution of the Neighborhood Built Environment to the Relationship Between Neighborhood Disadvantage and Early Childhood Development in 205,000 Australian Children
2023, Academic PediatricsCitation Excerpt :The quintiled version of SEIFA-IRSD has also been used in other AEDC studies.17,21 Built environment measures were informed by an ongoing major ‘child liveability’ work program that draws from earlier reviews8,22 and the Kids in Communities Study, an Australian investigation into community-level influences on early childhood development in 25 communities across five states and territories. The Kids in Communities Study investigated factors in five community domains including the physical (built) environments.
Do neighbourhoods influence how parents and children interact? Direct observations of parent–child interactions within a large Australian study
2023, Children and Youth Services ReviewThe effects of genotype-environment interplay on psychopathology vary across development
2023, Encyclopedia of Mental Health, Third Edition: Volume 1-3Growing up amid conflict: Implications of the Developmental Peacebuilding Model
2023, Advances in Child Development and Behavior
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.