The Determinants Of Children’s Environment

Children’s Environment

The environment for children describes as all the components of the place in which children grow, work, and play. It means everything around an individual that encircle and influences all life on earth, including the air, food chains, the water cycle, plants, animals and other humans. Environment controls and effects young people's mental and emotional wellbeing as well as their physical health.

All children have an intrinsic motivation to interact with their environment but this ability to interact with surrounding is dependent upon their likelihood and resources that the environment provides them to engage in and perform their roles. Children build an understanding and knowledge about themselves and others through their interactions with events and resources of the environment.

Place Preference:

Place preference defines as the children’s favorite (important, liked, and valued) or unpleasant (disliked) places in their everyday surroundings. Children prefer or liked that place above all other places that’s why it is special for them. A beloved or liked place conveys happiness to children when they are at that place and they feel unhappy or distressed to leave; they prefer it not only for the fulfillment of physical needs but for their own intrinsic quality.

Studies show that children’s favorite places are those that bring out positive responses and a sense of attachment and these spaces also support and improve children’s emotional and cognitive growth, development of self-reliance and self-esteem, academic improvement, and social competence among peers. An adult feels the strong emotional bond with their favorite place because it brings those beneficial experiences that give support to the self-regulation of emotions. Factors effecting favorite place selection:Malinowski and Thurber (1996) define several intervening variables that affect the choice and evaluation of a favorite place:· previous exposure to different environments· Rural versus urban upbringing· Parental limitations on environnemental exploration· Vicarious familiarity with diverse environments through the media· Peers’ preferencesPlace Preferences and Emotions:`

Studies show that strong emotions are attached to child’s favorite place. These places provide feelings of privacy, control, and security and also fulfill the need to be alone and escape from social pressure. At these places, a child can feel safe, better and get things in perspective

Freedom and control are important for teens in their favorite outdoor places and adolescents like solitary places, places for social interaction and they valued natural settings in residential areas. On the other hand, some places can bring the negative feelings like fear and danger in children toward their environment (Hart, 1979; M. H. Matthews, 1992). These feelings are associated with some unwanted or unhappy experience at those places.

Children’s favorite place selection by age and gender:

Some studies have reported age differences during childhood and adolescence in the frequency of selecting natural or private favorite places (Pihlstrom, 1992; Sommer, 1990). 7 to 9 year olds prefer natural settings such as play grounds as their favorite places. Home settings, sports locales, and shopping centers or shopping streets were the most preferred settings by 12 to 15 year olds. For 17 year olds nature sites along with streets is the most popular choice. Boys tend to favor outdoor places, whereas girls tend to favor indoor places.

In sum, it is suggested that emotions should be regarded as one factor among several others in the explanation of place preferences. Further evidence of the importance of emotional matters can be found in investigations of restorative experiences and self and emotion-regulation in favorite places.

Restoration in favorite places:

Children’s and adults favorite places are linked with being relaxed, calm, and comfortable, forgetting worries, relaxation from everyday life and these places give emotional release and restorative experience. Natural environments often provide restorative experience.

Negative antecedents such as stress or attention deficit, natural settings produce larger physiological changes toward relaxation, for example, in muscle tension and blood pressure, and larger reductions in negative feelings such as fear, anger, and sadness, and they effectively hold attention and produce higher levels of restorative experiences label fascination, being away, coherence, and compatibility.

Environmental self regulation:

Adolescents regulate their own development by selecting and shaping appropriate outer contexts. For example, leisure time place preferences can be seen as one strategy of coping with developmental tasks such as forming a personal identity or peer-group relations

Self-regulation implies that the psychological influences of any external factor such as sensory stimuli, visceral processes, or social norms are processed according to an individual’s conscious or unconscious mental activity following certain basic principles of motivation.

In the context of environmental self-regulation, emotion-regulation implies that emotions are affected and modulated by some external regulator or factor such as a particular place (cf. Dodge & Garber, 1991). For example, people are sensitive in terms of emotional states and mood to particular locations and entering or moving through a place may induce changes in a person’s mood (Kerr & Tacon, 1999; Staats, Gatersleben, & Hartig, 1997).

The concept of emotion regulation—as well as self-regulation—is not a synonym for control, suppression, or elimination of emotions. The concept of regulation is neutral in this sense, and it can refer to enhancement or maintenance as well (Izard & Kobak, 1991). In summary, emotion regulation includes not only intra, but also extra organism factors by which emotional arousal are redirected, modified, and modulated in emotionally arousing situations (Cicchetti, Ganiban, & Barnett, 1991).