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Natural outdoor environments provide important settings for children to engage in physical activity. It is unclear if these relationships also exist in preschool aged children. We examined associations between amount and type of neighbourhood vegetation and blue space, proximity to the beach and preschooler's device-measured movement behaviours.
Dog ownership has been suggested to be positively associated with children's physical, social, and emotional development. This study investigated the effect of a mobile health dog-facilitated physical activity intervention on young children's social-emotional development and attachment to the family dog.
Parental severe mental illnesses (SMIs), including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder (MDD), can impact children's well-being, yet existing meta-analyses are limited in scope and methodology and do not comprehensively assess cognitive and academic performance in offspring across SMIs.
To examine the longitudinal effects of dog ownership and dog walking on self-reported and objective measures of physical function in mid- to older-aged adults.
This paper provides the conceptual framework for a new review series that bring together the global literature on population approaches to nurturing relational health across the first three years of life. Early relational health is defined as ‘the everyday interactions that happen between children and their carers across the many settings in which they live and grow.
Retail food outlets are commonly located in close proximity to schools, providing students with opportunities to purchase and consume food enroute to or from school. These outlets are typically unhealthy and disproportionately clustered near schools, and this trend has been increasing over time. While quantitative studies have established associations between school food environments and adolescent dietary behaviours, little is known about how school personnel perceive and experience their impacts.
Policy interventions to increase physical activity in early childhood education and care (ECEC) services are effective in increasing physical activity among young children. However, a large proportion of ECEC services do not have nor implement a physical activity policy.
Daily physical activity is critical during the early years of life for facilitating children's health and development. A large proportion of preschool children do not achieve the recommended 3 h of daily physical activity. Early childhood education and care (ECEC) services are a key setting to intervene to increase physical activity. There is a significant need for ECEC specific physical activity policy, including clearer guidelines on the amount of physical activity children should do during care, and strategies for implementation of these guidelines.
Limited research exists on the pathways through which physical activity influences cognitive development in the early years. This study examined the direct and indirect relationships between physical activity, self-regulation, and cognitive school readiness in preschool children.
The environmental influences on early childhood development are understudied. The association between vegetation cover (i.e., trees, shrubs, grassed areas) in four key behaviour settings and socioemotional functioning was investigated in 1196 young children (2–5 years).