Research on the Relationship Between Childhood Place Attachment and Adult Well-being

In recent decades, place attachment, based on human-land relationship, has become popular in research. In the landscape field, ancient villages, tourist destinations, urban parks have been widely studied, but they are all in fixed places and lack consideration of the time-varying environmental change between childhood and adult settings. Compared with Western countries, this problem posed by environmental changes has been magnified given the unprecedented rate of urbanization in China, but it has long been neglected. Using a questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews in Zhejiang, through multivariate regression analysis, one-way ANOVA and thematic analysis, this study explores how childhood place attachment is related to the naturalness of the living environment and how childhood place attachment affects adult well-being differently due to the degree of environmental change. The results show that a higher degree of naturalness of childhood place can form a higher place attachment; and childhood attachments can directly impact adult well-being, but its influence is conditioned on childhood-adult environmental differences. This research illustrates the environmental adaption issues brought by rapid urban development and proposes a model of childhood place attachment and adult well-being, and the results are significant of expanding studies on the relationships between the natural environment and human health.