Child Opportunity Index: A Multidimensional Indicator to Measure Neighborhood Conditions Influencing Children's Health

One in two children worldwide experience some form of societal exclusion. Poverty, conflicts, poor education, exposure to communicable and non-communicable diseases, limited access to public health services, climate and environmental changes, forced migration, and partial or absent access to the internet are considered important drivers of inequality. Socioeconomic circumstances in which children are born and welfare contexts in which they grow are often extremely different from each other. Neighborhoods play a crucial role in providing a socioeconomic environment that can prevent community-level disparities. Access to child care centers, safe kindergartens, schools that offer high-quality standards from early education through high school, healthy and safe food, low levels of air pollution, and local availability of parks and playgrounds available in the upper-middle-income neighborhoods are all important elements that ensure that children have good quality alternatives where necessary and a safe transition to healthy and productive adulthood, compared with children living in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods. The Child Opportunity Index (COI), developed about ten years ago by the Diversity Data Kids organization with the endorsement of the US National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments (NCSSLE), provides a useful method to measure and map the quality of resources and conditions that are needed for children to develop their potential in a safe and healthy way in the neighborhoods where they live. Over the past decade, COI has been utilized mainly by US research groups to assess different kinds of local situations or contexts. However, its use is uncommon in other countries. This commentary, prepared by the Social Pediatrics Working Group of the European Association of Pediatrics/Union of European National Pediatric Societies and Associations (EPA-UNEPSA), briefly discusses COI and its possible application in different socioeconomic contexts globally. The purpose is to draw the attention of pediatricians, social workers, and teachers to this important tool and to discuss whether, when adapted to different contexts in different countries, COI could be a useful means of assessing the quality of local neighborhoods.