Types of green spaces and the development of anxiety, depression, and ADHD in rural, low-income communities

Project Summary/Abstract The mental health of children in the United States is a national emergency, with notable and accelerating rates of anxiety, depression, and ADHD. Recent research suggests exposure to natural environments (green spaces) reduces risk for these disorders, alleviating stress, restoring emotional and physiologic resources, providing opportunities to build regulatory skills through risky play and physical activity, and reducing harm from environmental stressors, such as heat. The benefits of green spaces may be even greater in low-income areas, buffering or mitigating the impact of physical and social stressors, and serving to reduce mental health disparities. Green spaces offer the potential for novel, community-level support to offset risk for anxiety, depression, and ADHD, yet evidence-based guidelines on the timing and types of exposures that are beneficial are unclear, as well as the benefits of green spaces for children outside of urban areas. The paradox of high greenness but poor mental health in rural, low-income communities highlights the need to determine the factors that alter the relative impact of green spaces. The current proposal seeks to address these gaps, establishing 1.) the buffering role of green spaces on anxiety, depression, and ADHD risk in low-income, rural communities, 2) whether the relative benefits of green spaces are consistent across childhood, 3.) whether different types of green spaces (general vegetation density, proximity to public parks or residential exposure to woodlands, grasslands, or croplands) convey similar benefits, and 4.) whether green spaces buffer children from poverty-related adversity in these communities. Drawing from 18 years of observational, survey, and medical record data gathered from The Family Life Project, a population-based study of 1,292 children born in low-income, rural communities, the proposed project will derive new, remotely-sensed, geospatial measures of types of greenspaces around children’s residences, and integrate these measures with extensive child, family, and home data from 2 months to 16-18 years of age to address critical questions about the types and timing of green space exposures that offset risk for anxiety, depression, and ADHD. Findings could inform national policies and feasible interventions to protect and promote green space exposures in ways that maximize benefits for population-level mental health, and direct future research on the mechanisms through which exposure to nature offsets future mental health risk.