“Neighborhoods with more green space were much less likely to have substantiated child maltreatment, cases accepted for services and foster care placements. These findings are really promising for thinking about green space as a lever to reduce child welfare involvement.”
Dr. Yuan He’s work focuses on improving care for children and families impacted by addiction and child welfare involvement, and on neighborhood- and community-based interventions to reduce racial disproportionality in the child welfare system.
Here, Dr. He, a faculty scholar at PolicyLab, pediatrician, and medical officer of children’s health in the Division of Reproductive, Adolescent, and Child Health at the Philadelphia Department of Public Health explains a recent study she conducted on the association between greenspace and child welfare involvement.
Q: Your study looked at the associations between green space and child welfare involvement. What led you to explore this connection?
Yuan: As a pediatrician, I see how true it is that children’s health is shaped by their environment. So many things that we know are important for child health, which also influence adult health and whole communities, are shaped by how neighborhoods are structured.
Your neighborhood affects where you feel comfortable going and how you spend your time, and those things naturally shape your health. Are you able to go to a nearby grocery store and buy the food you need? Are you able to seek healthcare? Do you need to drive somewhere else? Even sidewalks influence whether people are walking outside, what they walk to and what they’re walking past. If you don’t feel safe leaving your home or walking to a park, for example, that limits your physical activity.
I was introduced to Eugenia South’s work, which has focused on the benefits of green space on mental health, physical health and feelings of community. She has created a robust body of literature around the question of, what can we add to the neighborhood built environment that can be protective?
We know that green space can reduce violent crime and positively impact self-reported mental and physical health. Beyond the individual calming effects, green spaces and parks can be a convening space—a huge driver for how folks come together as a community and become the village that helps take care of children.
As a parent too, I see how important it is to get my kids outside to let out energy, to entertain themselves and so I can breathe. Your family’s built environment and sense of safety interplay with how much you get to know your neighbors and build your social network, just by having a place to be outside. I started to imagine that that’s going to have downstream effect on whether children get involved in the child welfare system.
Q: What does research tell us about the effects of neighborhoods on child welfare involvement?
Yuan: You can’t talk about family separation without recognizing that structural racism is embedded into it, both individual and systematic. At a structural level, we know that the biggest risk factors for child welfare involvement—poverty and community violence—disproportionately impact people of color.
Community violence increases stress at an individual, household and neighborhood level, and those are risk factors for child welfare involvement in both the reporting and behavior pathways. That draws you back to policies, both historical and current, that have led to racialized segregation and racialized surveillance.
There is research showing that different racial makeup—how racially concentrated certain neighborhoods are—has an impact on the likelihood that children in that neighborhood will be reported. Also, if the neighborhood is lower-income and disadvantaged in a certain way, the likelihood that somebody is concerned that a child is being neglected increases.
Some literature has also demonstrated that when social bonds break down, you see less trust and more reporting behavior. Instead of calling a neighbor to ask, “Hey, do you need help over there?” someone might instead call the child welfare hotline.
Q: What did you learn from your study?
Yuan: We measured tree canopy—how much a neighborhood was covered by trees—and total green space, which combined both tree canopy and parks. We split neighborhoods into four groups: less than 10% green space, 10 to 20%, 20 to 30%, and greater than 30%.
We specifically looked at three outcomes. First, substantiated maltreatment cases where there was an investigation and some evidence of maltreatment. Second, cases “accepted for services,” where the investigation led to a family receiving child welfare services. And third, foster care placement, where a child was removed and placed in care.
We found a very strong link between both tree canopy and total green space and all three child welfare outcomes, even when controlling for neighborhood factors including poverty. Neighborhoods with more green space were much less likely to have substantiated child maltreatment, cases accepted for services and foster care placements.
You can say the relationship could be related to other things, because the neighborhoods that have fewer trees are more likely to be poor, for example. Structural racism underpins all of these factors. We try to control for that using an index that combines various pieces of socioeconomic status.
Even when we control for those factors, we still see this impact of green space on substantiated child maltreatment and cases accepted for services. Though this was a cross-sectional study, so it’s hard to say if there is a cause-and-effect relationship, we did see a dose-dependent response—meaning, as there were more trees and parks, the likelihood of either of those outcomes decreased. This suggests there could be something causal. It’s exciting to think that the trees and the parks could actually have an independent effect, beyond just being associated with higher-income, “nicer” neighborhoods.
These findings are really promising for thinking about green space as a lever to decrease substantiated child maltreatment and cases accepted for services.
Q: You found that race was also significantly associated with child welfare involvement. What does that tell us?
Yuan: There are limitations to what conclusions we can draw, but we did see some association between race and likelihood of having any of these child welfare outcomes. At the same time, when we looked specifically at neighborhoods that were predominantly Black, we still saw that same green space association. That’s exciting because it suggests that even though race impacts the likelihood of child welfare involvement, there’s real promise in green space as a mechanism to address structural racism in the neighborhood built environment.
Q: What did you learn from the community advisory group about the impacts of green space?
Yuan: It was so important to involve community members with lived experience to validate and challenge our findings. We created a small community advisory group that included someone who had experience in the foster care system and is now an advocate; a parent and peer advocate for impacted parents; and a service provider from a community-based organization. We brought our findings to them and asked, ‘Does this resonate? What do you think could be driving this?’
Their feedback echoed how green space is such a need for families, and especially children who might have behavioral concerns or special needs. Sometimes it’s as simple as walking out the front door. Everyone is just a little calmer.
They also spoke about maintenance and feeling cared for. If you live in a neighborhood with a park that’s in disarray, you constantly feel like, “No one really cares about us. No one cares about this neighborhood.” That impacts how you feel day-to-day, and also how you feel about your home and about your sense of place. Beyond having parks, maintenance makes people feel invested in.
Q: What do your findings suggest for future research, and how might they inform policy directions?
Yuan: We’re planning a quasi-experimental study to ask: if you take a neighborhood that didn’t have a lot of greening before and then green it, what are the effects on child welfare involvement? That can hopefully create a stronger basis for the cause-and-effect relationship.
In Philadelphia’s IGNITE Study, Gina South and Atheen Venkataramani’s team is creating a dataset of pre- and post-green neighborhoods, and we’re planning to link that with child welfare outcomes. If that relationship is strong enough, it could push policymakers to see green space as a lever to reduce child welfare involvement—which many people are interested in from both a health and cost-savings perspective.
Outside of the study, we need to think broadly about resources and not just at the individual or household or neighborhood level. Families need the ability to address basic needs, but they also need neighborhood and social resources. Especially when it comes to child welfare involvement, social connection and the ways we have structured our environments may be just as important as access to cash, food and other needs. It’s important to know that it’s not one investment over another.
Interview by Mahima Golani