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What
You Can Do
“Work together”
Use Equal Life’s tools to design interventions with input from a range of professional disciplines, and to gain new insights into the urban exposome with sophisticated measuring and data analysis tools
"Act Local"
We recommend co-designing neighbourhood-level interventions with local people.
"Keep going"
Equal Life has identified many areas for further research – including the first ever potential biomarkers of child mental health. Next steps are to validate and expand these initial findings on biomarkers and investigate ethical implications.
Putting Equal Life’s findings into practice
What do children need to thrive and realise their potential?
What physical settings and social activities matter most for mental health and development, and at what age?
What role does sleep, stress, and self-regulation play?
The bigger picture matters
Sleep, stress, self-regulation skills and restorative activities play a crucial, “mediating” role between a child’s environment and their mental health.
As the middle step in the causal pathway between the environment and health, these factors act like a “volume switch” that can change, or modify, children’s mental health and cognitive development, for better or for worse.
Places matter
A child experiences “places” through the physical and social aspects of their home, school, digital world, leisure facilities, and neighbourhood, and the amount of time they spend there.
Psychological factors – such as children’s and families’ perceptions of place – for example, with regards to noise or safety, also affects mental health
Age matters
Equal Life’s life course approach highlights key exposures and vulnerabilities for each age group.
For example, we found that social factors affecting pregnant women can impact their children’s neurodevelopment and health outcomes. The family and home environment is particularly significant for under 3s, while after this age, the wider physical and social environment becomes increasingly important. The older the child, the farther they roam in the neighbourhood, and the more important access to greenspace becomes.
Equity matters
The concept of “exposome clusters” describes groups of children sharing physical and social exposures – such as living in an economically-deprived neighbourhood, and having a mother with poor mental health. We found that children belonging to more economically deprived clusters had worse mental health, showing the importance of social equity in child health outcomes.
“Every aspect of a child’s environment is potentially significant for their mental health and cognitive development.”
