Children, Disasters, and Place Attachment: A Contemporary Framework for Understanding Crisis in Context

This article critically examines the disaster literature from the past three years (2022-2025) to evaluate the relationship between place attachment and children's experience of disaster response and recovery.

Place attachment offers a systematic lens through which we comprehensively map our understanding of the factors that shape, and are shaped by, lived experience of disaster amongst children. We outline why specific consideration of children's health and wellbeing is significant through this lens, and further consider place attachment in relation to factors identified across relevant bodies of literature. Findings are synthesized across three interdependent, cyclical dimensions: (1) disaster context, including type, location, infrastructure, and planning, (2) children's holistic experiences of place attachment, including emotional, physical, cultural, and identity-based connections; and (3) disaster outcomes such as displacement, recovery, and rebuilding. We propose suggestions for future research, particularly emphasizing the need for an expanded evidence-based, conceptual framework that builds on the model presented in this paper.

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