How does the built environment affect children - their health, their behaviour, education and development? To support them, what do we need to consider and what do we need to do? Can our surroundings foster environmental and social awareness and responsibility? Based on Christopher Day's experiences designing schools and early childhood centres in the United States and Britain, this groundbreaking book sets out to answer these questions and to offer solutions. Children all too often find themselves living in alien surroundings designed with the needs of adults in mind, cut off not just from the natural environment but also childhood itself. Society's reaction - to cocoon children from the outside world or to resort to drugs to control behaviour - fails to address the fundamental causes of problems which lie in the environment not the children themselves.

Part 1 Part I: Environment for Children; Chapter 1 Design by Adults: Experience by Children; Chapter 2 Childhood: a Journey; Chapter 3 Developmental Needs: Challenge and Certainty; Part 2 Part II: Health: Physical, Developmental and Social; Chapter 4 Social Relationships and Place; Chapter 5 Issues of Health; Part 3 Part III: Environment as an educational aid; Chapter 6 Our Senses: Meeting the World; Chapter 7 Light and Darkness: Age and Situation; Chapter 8 Colour and Children; Chapter 9 Space: Shape and Quality; Part 4 Part IV: Places for children; Chapter 10 What Places Teach: Silent Lessons; Chapter 11 Welcoming Arrival; Part 5 Part V: Environment for Children; Chapter 12 Outdoor Places; Chapter 13 Environment for the Developing Child; Part 6 Part VI: Sustainability lessons from surroundings; Chapter 14 Learning to care for the Environment; Chapter 15 Making Nature's Cycles Visible; Chapter 16 Living with the Elements; Chapter 17 Levels of Life; Chapter 18 Learning Sustainability through Daily Experience; Chapter 19 Sustainable Schools; Part 7 Part VII: Environment to serve and inspire; Chapter 20 From Ends to Means;