Changing neighborhoods and child well-being: Understanding how children may be affected in the coming century

Given growing interest in the neighborhoods in which children live and interact, this article examines current findings and provides a developmental framework for the coming century. Our approach moves away from viewing neighborhood contexts as a form of "social address" to considering the processes through which neighborhood effects might operate on child well-being. Also emanating from this concern, the framework regards neighborhood influences on child development as well as neighborhood contexts per se as dynamic rather than static. Three models are identified: Institutional resources - the quality, availability, accessibility, and affordability of different resources in the community; Relationships - parental characteristics, support networks, and behavior and home environment attributes; and Norms/Collective efficacy - the extent of community formal and informal institutions present to monitor the behavior of residents as well as the presence of physical risk to residents. Building on these models, examples of research incorporating neighborhood change are provided using data on children followed over the first 8 years of life, including an investigation of the dynamics of neighborhood conditions (duration and timing) and an exploration of residential mobility patterns. Residing more years in an affluent neighborhood by age 5 was positively associated with children's IQ scores, and neighborhood affluence at birth and age 5 and neighborhood poverty at age 5 were associated with children's IQ and achievement scores at age 8. In terms of mobility patterns, a majority of families remained in similar neighborhoods over time with the biggest shift in families' circumstances occurring when children were young; most changes in neighborhood economic conditions centered around movements into and out of middle-income neighborhoods. Finally, the last section points to the importance of considering the role of neighborhoods in children's lives in the twenty-first century and identifies the research designs and methodologies scholars can employ to incorporate this developmental framework into their research.