Children, Youth and Environments

Inside this issue, you will find diverse scholarly work spanning across the globe. We start a thorough review of the Child-Friendly Cities Initiative across 24 countries spanning the last 30 years. Chatterjee navigates common criticisms to the initiative to demonstrate how this work has promoted public spaces for children. Next, we head to Honolulu, Hawai’i where Kong and colleagues explore the connection between place-based cultural education and well-being among Native Hawaiian youth as they engage in restoring a royal Native Hawaiian fishpond. In California, Derr and coauthors investigated how sustainability practices take shape and unfold in historically excluded schools who have won sustainability awards to reveal three domains of a sustainability-in-place model. Heading inland to cover the United States and Canada, Meltzer and coauthors investigated factors related to teenagers’ loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings suggest potential policies to help teens during similar crises. Returning to California, Minaravesh and coauthors investigated the development of fourth grader children’s environmental attitudes in the South Bay Region, a historically environmentally disadvantaged neighborhood that are rarely heard from in these types of studies. Findings from focus group data suggests children conveyed positive eco-perspectives despite unfavorable local conditions. Then we make our way east across the globe to Vienna, where Stark and coauthors conducted a case study connecting the influence of redesigning the infrastructure surrounding an elementary school on students’ mobility behavior. The issue continues with a report from the field in Thailand where Nunma and Kanki analyzed the Foundation of Child Development’s strategic mural creation to show how they facilitated child-centric activities in vibrant play spaces. We close our issue with two book reviews: Ellinger’s review of High-Quality Outdoor Learning: Evidence-based Education Outside the Classroom for Children, Teachers and Society, edited by Rolf Jucker and Jakob von Au, and Gull’s review of Naturally Inclusive: Engaging Children of All Abilities Outdoors, by Ruth Wilson. Happy Reading!