Connectedness to nature in Hong Kong preschool children: Impact on parental perceptions of strengths & difficulties

Abstract

The urban environment makes connection to nature difficult, even though such connection has positive physical and psychological health benefits. Evaluating the perceptions pre-school children have of how well connected to nature they are is difficult, given the limitations of such children. Parent and/or caregiver perceptions of a child’s relationship with nature can be used as a suitable proxy for direct information from the child. A new 20-item parental perception of children’s connectedness to nature was developed from the Connectedness to Nature Index (CNI) for use with parents of preschool children in Hong Kong. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to establish the internal factor structure of the CNI-PPC (n=299) and relations to the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) (n=194) was tested in structural equation modeling. The CNI-PPC, with acceptable to good fit to the data, captured four major dimensions with 16 items: (1) enjoyment of nature, (2) empathy for nature, (3) sense of responsibility, and (4) awareness of nature. The SDQ was modelled using factor mean item parcels for each of the five SDQ scales and the total difficulties score. After removing all statistically non-significant paths, a well-fitting model was found in which CNI-PPC factors predicted SDQ scores. Three CNI-PPC factors influenced the SDQ outcomes: (1) the more enjoyment of nature children displayed the less overall distress and impairment they exhibited (β= -.51); (2) a greater sense of responsibility in children was associated with less hyperactivity (β= -.50), fewer behavioural and peer difficulties (β= -.62 and β= -.65 respectively), and improved prosocial behaviour (β= .77); (3) the more aware children were of nature, the fewer emotional difficulties they exhibited (β= -.64). Variance explained was large (range R2=.42 to .80). Thus, CNI-PPC factors have meaningful and substantive associations with the strengths and difficulties parents perceive in their children, indicating that the CNI-PPC is a valid and reliable instrument to measure children’s connectedness to nature when they cannot respond for themselves. Further, this simple tool can help researchers/practitioners to better understand how connectedness to nature affects child psychological functioning and wellbeing.