Abstract
This study investigated the effects of the proximity to city parks and the influence of residential greenness on children’s emotional and behavioral problems. This cross-sectional study included 1,468 mothers of children (ages 4 to 6) who were residents of the city of Kaunas, Lithuania. The mothers and their children were enrolled in the FP7 PHENOTYPE project study. The mothers reported on their parenting stress and their children’s mental health. Residential greenness was characterized as an average of the satellite-derived normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) in a 300 m buffer around each home address, and the proximity to city parks was defined as the distance from the subject’s residence to the nearest park. Linear regression models were used to investigate the association among the residence distances from city parks, greenness and children’s mental health problems. Farther residential distance from city parks was associated with worse mental health (except for the emotional problems subscale) in children whose mothers had a lower education level. More residential greenness was associated with worse mental health (more conditional problems and less prosocial behavior) in children whose mothers had a higher education level. These relationships have important implications for the prevention of emotional and behavioral problems in children.
Highlights
It is possible that we found significant relationships between mental health problems and proximity to city parks only in the lower maternal education group because these mothers and their children live in worse conditions and, are more affected by other stressors and are more vulnerable to negative and positive environmental exposures [14]
The current study found that more residential greenness was associated with more conditional problems and less prosocial behavior in the higher maternal education group, but there were no significant associations between hyperactivity and residential greenness
The mental health of children of lower educated mothers is associated with residential proximity to city parks, whereas the prosocial behavior of children of higher educated mothers is associated with residential greenness
Summary
Because of the high prevalence of children’s mental health problems [1,2], we assume that the current treatment of these problems and the intervention or prevention programs for such children are often not available or sufficiently effective To improve this situation, traditional mental health risk assessment (in which risk factors are primarily included from only one main area) [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8] must be expanded to incorporate and consider the combined exposure of a diverse array of environmental agents, such as exposure to the physical environment and social or family environmental factors [9]. Children’s age and gender are two of the most important individual factors [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
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