What About the Influence of Outdoor Quality on Preschoolers’ Cognitive and Social Skills?

Research Findings: Outdoor environments have recently become part of the early childhood quality puzzle, which has long been important to trace relationships between children's experiences in child care and their development. However, fewer studies have analyzed the extent to which the quality of these outdoor spaces relates to young children's social and cognitive outcomes. This study analyzed data collected from a randomized sample of 92 licensed child care programs and 405 preschool children located across North Carolina, United States. Multilevel analyses showed that outdoor environment quality was associated with children's abstraction and flexible thinking skills above and beyond global levels of classroom quality. Correlation analyses revealed that in outdoor environments with more natural elements, children displayed fewer behavior problems. Practice or Policy: Outdoor quality measures need to be more widely tested in relation to child outcomes. The influence of child care outdoor environment quality on children's development should to be more deeply understood through longitudinal designs and ecological theories of human development, which allow conceptualizing developmental change over time as a function of interactions between individuals and context.