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Children who spend their early childhood years in a home that passes the ‘kitchen-window test’ have better life outcomes, even after controlling for other factors.Laura Proctor/The Globe and Mail
If Canadians are asked to describe the ideal home for a middle-class family to raise kids, they might picture a suburban detached house with a backyard, garage, and perhaps even a stereotypical white picket fence.
What children actually need to thrive, however, is more complex. While there’s evidence that kids can do well in different types of housing, they still need easy access to green spaces – something that’s often overlooked when addressing this country’s housing crisis.
Let’s back up a bit. It is true that children who grow up in a stereotypical white-picket-fence home tend to have better outcomes in areas such as academic performance, social behaviour and earnings in adulthood – but that often has little to do with the home itself.
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Instead, it’s because families who buy those homes tend to be wealthier, less likely to be single-parent households and more likely to have stable employment. Decades of peer-reviewed academic research show that when you strip away those factors, most, but not all, advantages of growing up in a detached home disappear.
One advantage that remains is the developmental value of having green space next to the home. A 2007 review of nearly 100 studies found that children living without access to outdoor space engage in more solitary, restricted play, which slows their development of social and other skills.
Further studies, including one that tracked children’s development in Scotland, found that access to green space doesn’t have to be a backyard, but it should be close enough for a child to play independently, without requiring a parent to take them to a nearby park.
Proximity matters: The Scottish study found little evidence that having green space in the neighbourhood, but not next to the home, provided developmental benefits for young children.
The “kitchen-window test” asks whether a child has a space to play that can be seen from, and ideally heard from, a kitchen window. Children who spend their early childhood years in a home that passes the kitchen-window test have better life outcomes, even after controlling for other factors.
However, a detached home is not needed to pass the kitchen-window test. Townhomes, including stacked townhomes, multiplexes and housing types rarely seen in Canada – such as European courtyard apartments, where low-rise apartment buildings are arranged around a central courtyard – can also pass that test.
Furthermore, many Canadians believe that green space for children matters – and that you don’t need a detached home to get it.
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The Missing Middle Initiative is part of a coalition of housing stakeholders called the Homes and Growth Coalition, dedicated to ending Canada’s housing crisis. Last month, one of our coalition members, Montreal-based research firm Data Sciences, conducted a poll of more than 4,000 Canadians to help us better understand how they view the crisis, what they think housing-policy goals should be and how governments can design and implement housing policies.
As part of the research, Data Sciences showed respondents pictures of six different homes and asked what types of families each would be appropriate for, from seniors living on their own to multigenerational families.
Not surprisingly, for a young family with two children, four different low-rise units scored well: Nearly 90 per cent of Canadians said a two-storey single-detached home was suitable, while one-storey bungalows and large and small townhome units received lower, but still relatively high, scores.
By contrast, only 30 and 23 per cent of respondents found mid-rise and high-rise apartments suitable for this family, respectively. However, if the couple did not have children, the appropriateness scores jump to 75 per cent and 73 per cent.
The survey also asked what features would make any form of housing unsuitable for this couple with kids, with 49 per cent choosing “no outdoor space of their own,” showing that Canadians intuitively understand the importance of green space and the kitchen-window test.
Homes that were “far from work or school” were also found to be unsuitable (53 per cent), indicating that both a lack of green space and excessive isolation are viewed as harmful for families.
This poll shows that creating child-friendly neighbourhoods depends on moderation. Policymakers must ensure families with children can afford housing with some green space, away from excessive traffic or noise. On the other hand, they must also ensure families don’t have to travel long distances to get it.
In our cities, it is simply not economically realistic to meet these green-space needs with only detached homes. Unfortunately, the types of homes that can meet these needs can’t be built under Canadian rules, from multiplexes that violate municipal zoning rules to European-style courtyard apartment complexes, which are illegal under provincial building codes.
Our politicians need to catch up with academics and everyday Canadians and legalize new housing types that give our kids independent space to play.
Mike Moffatt is the founding director of the Missing Middle Initiative and co-host of the Missing Middle podcast.