Abstract
Purpose: To examine how perceived neighborhood built-environment attributes influence parental license for children’s independent mobility, revealing the child-friendliness in Shanghai, China and what we can do to improve. Background: With Child-friendly City increasingly becoming global focus, children’s independent mobility, which is a major indicator of child-friendliness, is now found to be declining internationally. Due to the particularity of the group of children, parents’ permission has been proven to be an important factor restricting children’s independent mobility. Therefore, it is crucial to understand what it is that parent value about their neighborhood environment while releasing their license for children’s independent mobility, and how do these attributes come into play. Design: Exploratory cross-sectional study. Setting: Six typical neighborhoods varying in location and housing type from Shanghai, China. Subjects: Six hundred and fifty-five parents of 0- to 16-year-olds from six neighborhoods. Measures: Parental-reported questionnaires about safety concerns, environmental perceptions, facility satisfactions, improvement advices, permission on children’s independent outdoor activities around the neighborhood, and socio-economical information. Analysis: Perceived neighborhood built-environment attributes were scored and parental license for children’s independent mobility were calculated according to the questionnaire. Bivariate linear regression models were performed in IBM SPSS Statistics v24 to examine associations between parental license for children’s independent mobility and each perceived built-environment features of the neighborhood. All significant predictor variables were than entered into a multiple linear regression model. Results: Results showed that gender was a significant factor (β=-0.099, p=.008) among the other control variables (age, location and housing type). For general, parents paid great attention to the sufficiency of walking and cycling space (β=0.177, p=.000), the safety of travel environment (β=0.173, p=.000) and the safety level of children playing alone (β=0.107, p=.008). The sufficiency of facilities for parents (β=-0.156, p=.000) and the quality of streets (β=-0.112, p=.004) had negative effects on parental license. Predictor significant variables showed difference between genders. Parents of boys remained focusing on the safety of the environment while parents of girls payed new attention to satisfaction of housing conditions (β=-0.145, p=.008). The regression model for parents of girls were better than the one of boys in goodness of fit. Conclusions: Safety of the neighborhood environment and sufficiency of walking and cycling space may be the most important perceived environmental attributes that affect parental license for children’s independent mobility. The safety level may be a greater consideration for parents of boys than of girls. Creating safe and child-friendly travel environment around neighborhoods may be the focus of future work to make Shanghai a more child-friendly city. Space for children to walk and cycle needs to be provided and routes designed. Limitations are the use of parental-report and cross-sectional data. The study indicates current context of creating child-friendly cities in China to an extent. Keywords: Neighborhood; Built Environment; Perceived Neighborhood Built-environment; Children; Independent Mobility; Parental License; Parental Perceptions; Child-friendly. References (Partial): [1] Bringolf-Isler, B., et al. (2010). "Built environment, parents' perception, and children's vigorous outdoor play." Preventive Medicine 50(5-6): 251-256. [2] Foster, S., et al. (2015). "Suspicious minds: Can features of the local neighbourhood ease parents' fears about stranger danger?" Journal of Environmental Psychology 42: 48-56. [3] Smith, M., et al. (2019). "Children's Transport Built Environments: A Mixed Methods Study of Associations between Perceived and Objective Measures and Relationships with Parent Licence for Independent Mobility in Auckland, New Zealand." International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 16(8).
