Supporting children's participation in active travel: developing an online road safety intervention through a collaborative integrated knowledge translation approach.

Even though regular engagement in physical activity (PA) among children can support their development and encourage the adoption of healthy lifelong habits, most do not achieve their recommended guidelines. Active travel (AT), or any form of human-powered travel (e.g., walking), can be a relatively accessible, manageable, and sustainable way to promote children's PA. One common barrier to children's engagement in AT, however, is a reported lack of education and training. To support children's participation in AT, this paper presents the development of a comprehensive 4-module online road safety education intervention designed to improve children's knowledge and confidence regarding AT. Using a qualitative integrated knowledge translation (iKT) approach undertaken with community collaborators (n = 50) containing expertise in health promotion, public safety, school administration, and transportation planning, our inductive thematic analysis generated fourth themes which constituted the foundation of the intervention modules: Active Travel Knowledge: Awareness of Benefits and Participation; Pedestrian Safety and Skills: Roles, Responsibilities, and Rules; Signs and Infrastructure: Identification, Literacy, and Behaviour; Wheeling Safety and Skills: Technical Training and Personal Maneuvers. Each theme/module was then linked to an explicit learning objective and connected to complementary knowledge activities, resources, and skill development exercises. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

How Do Urban Environments Affect Young People's Mental Health? A Novel Conceptual Framework to Bridge Public Health, Planning, and Neurourbanism.

Childhood and adolescence are crucial periods for mental and social development. Currently, mental illness among young people is a global epidemic, and rates of disorders such as depression and anxiety are rising. Urban living, compared with rural living, is linked with a higher risk of serious mental illness, which is important because the world is urbanizing faster than ever before. Urban environments and their landscapes, designs, and features influence mental health and well-being. However, no conceptual frameworks to date have detailed the effect of urban environments on young people's mental health, and few studies have considered the growing role of digital and social media in this relationship, leading to calls for the development of holistic approaches to describe this relationship. This article synthesizes existing knowledge on urban places (both built and natural environments) and mental health in the public health and urban planning literature and examines the emerging field of neurourbanism (a multidisciplinary study of the effect of urban environments on mental health and brain activity) to enhance current practice and research. We developed 2 novel conceptual frameworks (1 research-oriented, 1 practice-oriented), adapted from Bronfenbrenner's socioecological model, that focus on the relationship between urban environments and young people's mental health. We added a digital and social media contextual level to the socioecological model, and we applied a multilayer concept to highlight potential cross-field interactions and collaborations. The proposed frameworks can help to guide future practice and research in this area.