Child development reflects interactions between personal characteristics and the physical and social environment. Psychology, however, lacks analysis of physical features that influence child development. In this article, I describe a preliminary taxonomy of physical-setting characteristics that can influence child development, focusing on environmental stressors such as noise, crowding, and chaos along with structural quality of housing, day care, and schools. Adverse outcomes associated with suboptimal physical settings during childhood include cognitive and socioemotional difficulties along with chronic physiological stress. Both direct effects on the child as well as indirect effects occurring via significant persons surrounding the child are described. Methodological limitations, particularly reliance on observational studies, are a weakness in the current literature, but increasingly more rigorously obtained findings yield converging evidence of the effects of physical settings on child development.

儿童发展反映了个人特征与身体和社会环境之间的相互作用。然而，心理学缺乏对影响儿童发育的身体特征的分析。在本文中，我将描述可能影响儿童发育的身体特征的初步分类法，重点关注环境压力，例如噪音，拥挤和混乱，以及住房，日托和学校的结构质量。与童年时期身体状况欠佳相关的不良后果包括认知和社会情感障碍以及慢性生理压力。描述了对孩子的直接影响以及通过围绕孩子的重要人物发生的间接影响。方法的局限性，特别是依赖观察性研究，