Environmental Attitudes in Children: An Exploratory Study of Their Relationships with Future Perspectives and Values

The present study aims to assess the extent and direction in which future perception and human values are related to environmental attitudes in a sample of children. The participants were 406 Brazilian children, most of them female (56.3 %) with a mean age of 10.23. The results indicated that environmental attitudes of preservation were positively related to all factors of the future perspective scale and the excitement, suprapersonal, existence, interactive, and normative values. The utilization attitudes correlated with the promotion, suprapersonal, existence, interactive, and normative values, but were not significantly correlated with future perspective. The analysis of predictive power showed that optimism towards the future, suprapersonal, normative, and existence values predicted preservation attitudes, while promotion, existence, and interactive values predicted utilization attitudes. The results support the importance of human values and time perspective in environmental attitudes from childhood.