Georgia Cronshaw, a PhD candidate at University College London, shares her research on neighbourhood greenspace deprivation and how its associations with children’s developmental outcomes may differ by ethnicity.
Think back to your childhood. When you picture yourself playing outside, what do you see? Trees, grass, and open fields? A local park? Or roads, concrete, traffic, and tightly packed buildings?
For many of us, the environments we grew up in felt ordinary at the time. But those surroundings may have mattered more than we realised. Growing evidence suggests that greenspace can play a role in children’s mental health and development.
In some ways, this idea is not new. Long before greenspace became an area of interest in research, people were already noticing that parks, gardens, and open spaces seemed to do something important for us.
Literature captured this intuition long before public health did. In Mansfield Park, Jane Austen writes:
“To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure is the perfect refreshment.”
Also in the nineteenth century, these ideas were beginning to shape the built environment itself. In 1858, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won the competition to design New York City’s Central Park, imagining it not only as the “lungs” of the city, but also as a space that could support the wellbeing of its residents.
What is much newer, however, is the academic effort to test these ideas systematically.
That matters because we are now living in an increasingly urban world. More than half of the global population already lives in urban areas, and this figure is expected to rise to around 70% by 2050. Children make up a substantial share of this population, meaning that growing numbers of children will spend their early lives developing, learning, and socialising in urban environments.
As urbanisation has increased, so too have concerns about its health implications. Across the UK, policymakers, researchers, and the public have shown growing interest in the role of greenspace in supporting health and development.
Greenspace is often discussed as beneficial for reducing stress, supporting mental wellbeing, and even helping attention. But not all children are equally positioned to experience these supposed benefits.
Inequalities in access to and use of greenspace are increasingly well documented, and they often overlap with wider socioeconomic disadvantage. Children from more disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to have less access to greenspace, or access to spaces of lower quality. But these inequalities may not be structured by socioeconomic disadvantage alone.
In the UK, children from minority ethnic backgrounds are also more likely to live in areas with lower greenspace access and usability of greenspace. This makes ethnicity important to consider when asking whether greenspace relates to child development in the same way for everyone.
However, relatively little research has examined whether children’s greenspace associations differ across ethnic groups, leaving an important gap in our understanding.
What we did
To explore this, we used data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), hosted by the UK Data Service, following children from ages 3 to 11 in urban England.
Large cohort datasets like this are often one of the easiest ways researchers can explore relationships quantitatively at population level. They make it possible to move beyond broad assumptions and ask more specific questions, not only about whether neighbourhood greenspace matters for child development, but whether those associations look different across groups and over time.
While cohort data cannot capture everything about how children experience their environments, it can provide an important step in identifying patterns that may otherwise remain hidden.
For this cohort, ward-level greenspace data was linked to the MCS. Since many minority ethnic children live in areas with limited greenspace, exposure was measured using a binary indicator, distinguishing wards with very low greenspace coverage (under 20%) from those with more, allowing for clearer comparisons across ethnic groups and accounting for uneven representation in greenspace-rich areas.
We used the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire to explore mental health (emotional symptoms, peer problems, conduct problems, and hyperactivity/inattention) and age specific cognitive ability measures for our outcomes.
The analysis controlled for a variety of socioeconomic factors, to explore whether ethnic differences persisted beyond economic disadvantage.
What we found
There was some evidence that associations between greenspace deprivation and child developmental outcomes differed by ethnic background, although many effects were small.
Among White children, greenspace deprivation was linked to higher cognitive scores at age 7 and a steeper decline in conduct problems. In contrast, Indian children in deprived areas had worse mental health at age 7, while greenspace deprivation slowed behavioural and cognitive improvements in Pakistani and Bangladeshi children compared to White children.
Several other ethnic groups showed little clear evidence of similar patterns. The differences remained even after accounting for socioeconomic factors.
The findings suggest that greenspace deprivation may be associated with less favourable developmental outcomes among some South Asian groups, although the pattern differed between Indian children at baseline and Pakistani and Bangladeshi children over time.
Understanding the complexity of the issue
It is important not to interpret these findings as meaning that ethnicity itself determines developmental outcomes. Rather, ethnicity may reflect how children are differently positioned within wider social and structural inequalities.
Greenspace-deprived areas are not all the same: they may differ in quality, safety, accessibility, use, neighbourhood conditions, housing, local services, or urban density. These factors may shape how green spaces are encountered, whether they feel usable or welcoming, and the extent to which children are able to benefit from them.
At the same time, this also highlights the limits of cohort data: while it can reveal patterns, it cannot fully capture how children experience these environments in everyday life, limiting our mechanistic insight.
Nevertheless, this work suggests that greenspace exposure may not operate in the same way for all groups. Even after accounting for socioeconomic disadvantage, children from South Asian backgrounds living in greenspace-deprived areas tended to show less favourable outcomes than White children living in similarly deprived areas.
Why this matters
This work adds to a growing body of research suggesting that greenspace should not be treated as a single, uniform public health resource. Providing parks and urban nature is important, but so is understanding whether everyone benefits from these environments equally, how, and under what broader conditions, can urban environments be designed more equitably.
For policymakers, urban planners, and public health professionals, this means that thinking about more than the physical provision alone, considering its use, access and quality.
While my work using the MCS did not directly examine greenspace accessibility or use, the findings are consistent with the idea that wider social and environmental contexts may shape how children experience and potentially benefit from greenspace. Addressing these questions using cohort data may be one part of tackling wider inequalities in child health and development.
This work was supported by the Bloomsbury Colleges Studentship. You can read the published work and complete list of co-authors online.
Meet the author
Georgia is a PhD student at University College London in the Department of Psychology and Human Development.
Her research focuses on how aspects of the built environment shape child mental health and cognitive development from early to middle childhood. Through her work, she aims to better understand how everyday surroundings influence developmental outcomes, and how these associations may differ across populations.
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