Mona Borjian Boroujeni, Seyed-Abbas Agha Yazdanfar, Neda-Sadat Sahragard Monfared,
Volume 12, Issue 3 (10-2024)
Childhood is the most important period of human life and children are the most precious wealth in any country. Childhood and its story, has always affected one's life in all aspects. The house and its immediate environment, the neighborhood, where children spend most of their time, have a significant impact on their health. That's a good reason for this place to be potentially able to cause a range of physical and mental problems for children, or, on the other hand, help them spend a healthy and energetic childhood. However, the design of these environments, often only based on the wishes and needs of adults, has made a set of alarming changes in children's daily habits; changes that make them more prone to problems such as depression, obesity, aggressive behavior, asthma, attention deficit disorder, heart disease, etc., by blocking them in a virtual space behind computers and in an artificial childhood. Since the number of apartment dwellers is increasing daily, more research in the field of residential architecture and child health should be done in order to create a favorable physical environment to raise healthy children. The upcoming research was done with the aim of prioritizing more effective design components for children's health in a residential complex and also answering the question that what the most important physical criteria for raising healthy children in residential environments are. For this purpose, a survey questionnaire was compiled for 4 groups, consisting of 100 children's architects, child psychologists, children's parents, and child educators after reviewing the sources by descriptive-analytical method, and was finally analyzed by Friedman's test and Shannon's entropy, which led to the most important environmental components of children's health in residential complexes in each group's point of view.
The results indicated that safety and security issues are the most obvious components that should be provided in spatial structures which are suitable for children. After these two obvious components, it can be said that while architects see play spaces as an educational-social-psychological-cultural context for children, to parents, sufficient light and a feeling of comfort about their child's physical development in optimal conditions is important. Psychologists also seek to expand children's bond with their peers and strengthen their interactions with others (in order to achieve basic life skills and achieve independence in self-management), and educators, as parents did, are concerned about providing enough light for the child's early development.
