Shaping Summertime Experiences Opportunities to Promote Healthy Development and Well-Being for Children and Youth (2019) / Chapter Skim
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5 The Effects of Children's Circumstances on Summertime Experiences
5 The Effects of Children's Circumstances on Summertime Experiences
Pages 135-168
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From page 135... ...
In this chapter, therefore, we review the contextual and individual factors that affect their summertime experiences, including family structure, parental influence, and community environments (see Box 5-1)
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• Some communities are finding success in leveraging their existing resources -- such as buildings, transportation, and partnerships with com munity organizations -- to increase access to summer programming. • Only very limited populationwide data are available about the general pattern of circumstances and experiences that children and youth have during the summertime.
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From page 137... ...
. Rural populations may have less of the total population than suburban and urban communities, but within rural communities, children and youth under age 18 represent nearly the same proportion of the population -- between 22 and 23 percent -- as in other county types (Pew Research Center, 2018b)
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28% 28% 19% 12% 10% 6% 4% United States AMERICAN INDIAN ASIAN AND PACIFIC ISLANDER BLACK OR AFRICAN AMERICAN HISPANIC OR LATINO NON-HISPANIC WHITE TOTAL TWO OR MORE RACES FIGURE 5-3 Children living in areas of concentrated poverty, by race and ethnicity, in the United States, 2013–2017. NOTE: In this figure, areas of concentrated poverty are defined as those census tracts with overall poverty rates of 30 percent or more.
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. Housing mobility, urban planning, and community development policies may mitigate disparities by supporting healthy community development, access to educational opportunity, access to healthy foods, and safer neighborhoods (Ludwig et al., 2011; Pollack et al., 2014; Thornton et al., 2016)
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metropolitan areas, with 40 percent of Black children and 32 percent of Hispanic children living in very-low-opportunity neighborhoods, as compared to 9 percent of White children. This inequity is even more extreme in some metropolitan areas, especially those with high levels of residential segregation (Acevedo-Garcia et al., 2014)
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. Children living in poverty are also likely to have a greater than average need for high-quality summertime experiences that provide opportunities for healthy development, but they may be less likely to have access to such experiences and opportunities as a result of economic barriers.
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. The proportion of children in single-parent households is substantially higher for Black children and American Indian children than for other racial subgroups (Kids Count Data Center, 2017b)
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. Employment status may also affect parents' involvement in the summertime experiences of their children.
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. • Racial/ethnic minority children are overrepresented both in foster care and in the juvenile justice system relative to their share of the popu lation (Child Welfare Information Gateway, 2017; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2019b; National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, 2001)
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Other factors, such as parents' language, culture, or immigration status, may also be important considerations that impact children's summertime experiences. Children in many rural communities experience very limited access to summer programming for a variety of reasons, including difficulty for parents and caregivers to offer supervised time while also working, limited programmatic offerings, and geographic isolation.
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Parental Supervision and Interaction The extent to which children are supervised during the summer -- a factor closely related to household income -- is another major consideration with regard to children's summertime experiences. For example, Redford and colleagues (2018)
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found that in cases where their parents reported living near a busy road, foot travel by children and youth within their neighborhoods was reduced compared with those not living near a busy road. A 2000 study of children's perceptions of their neighborhoods found that children living in neighborhoods with a high incidence of violence did not feel safe playing outside and had less trust in law enforcement (Farver et al., 2000)
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. LGBTQ youth are also over-represented in the juvenile justice system.
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. Social and structural factors such as differential access to clean water, violence-free neighborhoods, law enforcement contact and surveillance, safe outdoor play areas, high-quality enrichment activities, adequate healthy food, and other environmental features shape the environments in which children and youth live and can lead to disparities in outcomes.
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may also influence time use in ways that impact child outcomes by reducing children's and youth's outdoor physical activity. Many low-income communities and communities of color lack the features that promote physical activity and can help prevent childhood obesity, such as bike lanes, sidewalks, safe playgrounds, trees, and appeal BOX 5-5 Rural Settings and Summertime Children living in rural areas have higher rates of obesity compared with children living in urban areas (Johnson and Johnson, 2015)
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. One approach that incorporates the aforementioned strategies is to provide summer physical activity and nutrition programming and meals for children at public school spaces, which are eligible to serve as feeding sites as a part of the Summer Food Services Program (SFSP)
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In addition, eligibility criteria for communities to participate in the program require at least half of the children in the area to be low-income. Thus, in areas where poverty is less concentrated or in rural communities, it may be difficult to establish feeding sites (Food Research & Action Center, 2018)
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. Children and youth with special health care needs have chronic health conditions -- physical, mental, and developmental -- that require services beyond what most children generally require and have implications for summertime experiences (Family Voices, 2019; McPherson et al., 1998)
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However, there is some literature from which we can infer how these influences may operate during summertime. As noted earlier in the report, disparities have been documented in the social and emotional skills that children have when they first enter formal schooling, disparities that track with socioeconomic status and related social conditions (Greenberg and Weissberg, 2018; Halle et al., 2009; Reardon and Portilla, 2016)
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. • A 2017 report by the National Indian Child Welfare Association sug gests that AIAN children are disproportionately represented among children in foster care, particularly in states with the largest AIAN pop ulations (Akee and Simeonova, 2017; National Indian Child Welfare Association, 2017)
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From page 156... ...
. While social conditions may affect youth's development of social and emotional skills, these skills also have important benefits for youth exposed to trauma and chronic stress, as social and emotional skills can help buffer the negative effects of stress and trauma (The Aspen Institute National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development, 2019)
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. SUMMARY The reviews and supporting evidence presented in this chapter provide a compelling case that family structure, parental education and employment, the built environment, community resilience and adaptive capacity, and public safety and law enforcement contact all affect summertime experiences for children and youth.
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CONCLUSION 5-3: Sources of risk (e.g., racial and ethnic discrimina tion, special health care needs, LGBTQ+ status, trauma history, justice or child welfare system involvement) can heighten inequities in access to summertime experiences that affect health, development, safety, and learning.
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. CONCLUSION 5-7: Systems where the state plays an active role of supervision or custodial responsibility for children and youth, including local policing systems and juvenile justice and child welfare systems, have an enhanced obligation to improve their practices by applying positive youth development principles in their interactions with chil dren and youth.
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. Nutrition-related policy and environmental strategies to prevent obesity in rural communities: A systematic review of the literature, 2002-2013.
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Memo submitted to the Committee on Summertime Experiences and Child and Adolescent Education, Health, and Safety. Farley, T
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Master's thesis, East Tennessee State University. Quoted in Interactions between Youth and Law Enforcement: Literature Review, Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2018.
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. The unfair criminalization of gay and transgender youth: An overview of the experiences of LGBT youth in the juvenile justice system.
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id=372. National Indian Child Welfare Association.
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. Rural Communities: Best Practices and Promising Approaches for Safe Routes.
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. Physical activity-related policy and environmental strategies to prevent obesity in rural communities: A systematic review of the literature, 2002–2013.
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. Active living for rural youth: Addressing physical inactivity in rural communities.
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