Parental perception of child friendliness and its impact on residential location choice: A stated choice experiment

Child-friendly neighborhood environments are important for children’s physical and mental health development. Parents decide in which type of neighborhood their children live. Parents’ perceptions of child friendliness and preferences for residential location choice are therefore vital but have received only limited attention thus far. It is still unclear what the relative importance of the various residential location attributes is in parental perceptions of child friendliness, and to what extent parents consider child friendliness when making residential location choices in relation to residential location attributes.

This study aims to fill these gaps. The study conducted a stated choice experiment with 271 parents with a child aged between 7 and 12 year old in the Netherlands and analyzed the data using the Mixed Logit model (ML). The ML model estimation results indicate that, after house price, traffic speed limit has the largest relative importance on parental perception of child friendliness. Parents consider several attributes of child friendliness when making residential location choices, namely percentage of households with children, distance to nearest primary school, and traffic speed limit. Parents have higher preferences for residential locations in outer central urban areas and have only little preferences regarding distance to a playground. These insights can be helpful to create more child-friendly neighborhood environments.