Abstract
Environmental changes significantly impact health behavior. Active travel behavior is mostly affected by increasing motorization, urban sprawl, and traffic safety. Especially for children, active and independent travel can contribute to physical activity, social and motor development, and other health-related outcomes. A reduced number of children engaging in independent mobility over the last 20 years demanded researchers to further examine the construct of children’s independent mobility. By examining relevant literature, this narrative review aims to provide the current state of knowledge on children’s independent mobility, and identify future directions in research, as well as practical implications. From a public health perspective, considering children’s independent mobility in intervention programs is recommended, since it is associated with numerous health and environmental benefits. To develop interventions, multilevel socio-ecological influences on children’s independent mobility are widely examined; however, evidence is limited due to heterogeneous measurements and a lack of high-quality prospective studies. To oppose the decline in children’s independent mobility, further analysis using comparable measures is needed to understand the determinants of children’s independent mobility and to enable international comparison.
Highlights
Physical inactivity is identified as a major risk factor for global mortality [1]
This narrative review established a comprehensive overview of children’s independent mobility (CIM) and identified current research gaps and future analysis to fully understand CIM
Associated with children’s personal development, as well as health and social integration in addition to environmental benefits, CIM is an important issue of public health
Summary
Physical inactivity is identified as a major risk factor for global mortality [1]. less than. Further benefits of children being independently mobile instead of motorized are low monetary costs for traveling and environmental sustainability through reduced car use, traffic volume, and air pollution. All these aspects implicate the identification of potential modifiable attributes to establish effective (health promotion) interventions. Following the goal of making the environment more child-friendly and to promote CIM, researchers of different fields (e.g., urban planners, health scientists, and sociologists) considered the construct of CIM [18,19,20,21] The aim of this narrative review is to provide a current state of research on CIM, practical implications, and future directions in research. Studies which evaluated either the relationship between CIM and health outcomes or the determinants of CIM were searched to establish a comprehensive narrative overview on this topic
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