1995 / Black communities, Children, Development, Urban

Environmental Views and Values of Children in an Inner‐City Black Community

Citation

Kahn Jr, P. H., & Friedman, B. (1995). Environmental views and values of children in an inner‐city Black community. Child Development, 66(5), 1403-1417.

Link to file

In this study, researchers talked with 72 children in grades 1, 3, and 5 from a low-income, inner-city Black community to understand how they think and feel about the natural environment. The children were roughly 7, 9, and 11 years old. Researchers asked them whether they noticed environmental problems, talked about these issues with their families, cared about nature, and did anything themselves to help protect it.

They also explored how children judged environmental right and wrong. To do this, researchers presented them with a simple story about someone polluting a local waterway and asked whether they thought this was okay or not, whether the rule should apply everywhere, and why they felt that way.

Overall, the children showed a clear awareness of nature and environmental problems. Most believed that polluting water was wrong and saw it as a moral issue, not just a rule that could be ignored. That said, how strongly children expressed these views varied with age and cultural context.

When explaining their reasoning, children most often focused on how harming nature can hurt people—for example, by making water unsafe to drink or harming human health. Less often, they talked about nature as having value in its own right, independent of human needs.

Taken together, these findings suggest that even at a young age, children are thinking seriously about environmental issues and moral responsibility. The study also highlights how children’s moral thinking about the environment develops over time and is shaped by their social and cultural experiences, offering insights into how people come to understand their relationship with the natural world.

Abstract

72 children across grades 1, 3, and 5 (mean ages, 7–5, 9–6, and 11–4) from an economically impoverished inner-city Black community were interviewed on their views and values about the natural environment. Assessments were made on whether children were aware of environmental problems, discussed environmental issues with their family, valued aspects of nature, and acted to help the environment. Additional assessments pertained to the prescriptivity and generalizability, and supporting justifications, of children’s normative environmental judgments based on a hypothetical scenario that involved polluting a waterway. Overall, children showed sensitivity to nature and awareness of environmental problems, although attenuated by both developmental and cultural factors. Most children believed that polluting a waterway was a violation of a moral obligation. Children’s environmental moral reasoning largely focused on homocentric considerations (e.g., that nature ought to be protected in order to protect human welfare). With much less frequency, children focused on biocentric considerations (e.g., that nature has intrinsic value or rights). Findings are discussed in terms of moral-developmental theory, and the place of social-cognitive research in understanding the human relationship to the natural environment.