Creating a Safe Haven for Children: The Effect of Parent-Child Attachment and Parenting Strategy on Children’s Risk Perceptions to Climate Change


 Children’s climate change risk perceptions including their attitudes and mitigation behaviors, which are crucial to protect themselves from the consequence of climate extremes. However, recent studies have not identified the complex interplay effects between children’s climate change risk perceptions and their family relationships. This study explored the effects of parent-child attachment, parenting strategies as well as their co-influence on children’s risk perceptions to cope with climate changes through investigating a pilot disaster education program in China. Data was collected from 1,710 children aged 8–12 in 45 primary schools in Sichuan Province in 2018. We used Ordinary Least Square Regression and Principal Component Analysis to evaluate the effects of parent-child attachment, different parenting styles and their co-influencing mechanism on children’s risk perceptions. The results found that frequent parent-children interactions had significantly positive effects on children’s risk perceptions, and these effects were more significant in the single-raised children than the children raised by two parents. We further established a conceptual framework for understanding the different parent-child attachment patterns for children’s climate change risk perception based on a mathematical quadrant between frequent parent-child interactions and available attached figures, and found children’s risk perceptions are varied attributed to different patterns of parent-child attachment. Theoretical implications related to climate change and practical implications for family and community mitigation were discussed.


Introduction
Climate change risk perceptions are regarded as individual's cognition or beliefs across multi-domains, including natural hazards, risk exposures, and health behaviors, as well as the internal and subjective sense of risks regarding their consequence, probability, severity, and vulnerability (Slovic 1987 preparedness behaviors could be cultivated through disaster education, which are also crucial to protect themselves from climate change such as sea level rise, extreme weather patterns (e.g., heat waves or storms), changes of ecosystems, and public health problems (IPCC, 2014). Additionally, rather than passive victims, children could also learn fast and transfer their knowledge and perceptions in support to increasing resilience of their families and communities where they live in (Lawson et  . This broad parenting environment should not only considered mother-child attachment, but also considering the effect of attachment relationships with different parenting strategies and multiple caregivers, including fathers, grandparents, foster parents, and other extended relatives. Attachment theory provides a developed theoretical framework for understanding parent-child relationships and children's social emotional development (Anisworth et al. 1989;Bowlby 1976), it assumes that children who experience responsive care and acquire hazards-related knowledge from their caregivers are more resilient when coping with problems. Additionally, existing literature found the co-in uential mechanisms of parent-child attachment and parenting strategies may exist, as parenting strategies can in uence the quality of attachment, the quality of attachment may also in uence some parenting strategies (Karavasilis 2003;Brumariu and Kerns 2010). It has been noted that shifts between secure and insecure patterns often coincide with changes in parent-child relationships and parenting contexts (i.e. child-rearing style and children's left-behind status) ( However, there has been little consideration of how attachment patterns might moderate and differentiate children's ability to adapt to speci c occurrences (e.g. climate extremes, natural disaster, school performance) (Coleman 2003;Kerns et al. 2011), neither has considered the role of parent-child attachment in different parenting strategies in response to natural disaster and climate extremes.
Moreover, though existing research has classi ed parent-child attachment into different patterns based on the frequency of interaction between parents and children, there has been no conceptual framework for understanding the different parent-child attachment patterns for children's climate change risk perception, neither has considered the availability of responsive attachment caregivers, especially in many developing countries where thousands of children are left-behind and severely lack parental companionship.
Due to the large population and frequent disasters, China generally suffered high disaster mortality especially in some disaster-prone areas such as Sichuan province where occurred earthquakes and mudslides frequently (Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters 2017). But in Sichuan province and many rural areas of China, there were a large out ow of working parents to cities, which leading to millions of children were left behind by their parents at hometown who may extremely lacking in secure parents-attachment and enough cares from their parents (Zhou et al. 2015;Jiang et al. 2019;Jia et al. 2010), which is a good case to study the relationship between parent-child attachment and children's climate change risk perceptions. Thus, we investigated this pilot disaster reduction program conducted in Sichuan Province in 2018 to analyze the effect of parent-child attachment on children's climate change risk perceptions.
Thus this study has four objectives: (1) to describe the impact factors of children's climate change risk perceptions, including socialdemographic characteristics, parent-child attachment, and different parenting strategies; (2) to identify how the effects of parent-child attachment on children's climate change risk perceptions vary in different parenting strategies; (3) to reveal the co-in uencing mechanisms of parent-child attachment and parenting strategies on children's climate change risk perceptions; and, (4) to establish a conceptual framework of parent-child attachment patterns for children's climate change risk perceptions.

Data and study design
To further access the health vulnerability of residents under climate change risk in western China, a disaster reduction education program targeted to residents and children was funded jointly by the Public Health Emergency Center of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the United Nations Children's Fund. This program was conducted in three pilot areas; Shifang City, Yuexi County, and Lu County. These mountainous areas are exposed frequent oods, mudslides, and landslides caused by heavy rain storms and the region's dense network of rivers.
The data collection was a part of the project on disaster risk reduction in western China, and the pre-designed questionnaire in this study was developed from the reports published by UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund 2015), with a special focus on children's risk awareness and preparedness to speci c climate change events. Only aggregated data was used and participants will remain anonymous. Sun Yat-Sen University has provided guidelines for this study procedures. Additionally, the datasets collected and analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on request.
During the survey, the primary school teachers were trained by the disaster education program to monitor the students to ll the predesigned questionnaire to assess their climate change risk perception. Due to children's limited cognitive ability, pictures and short videos were used to simulate speci c disaster scenes and guide children to complete the questionnaire. Besides, external validation including uni ed training for investigators and quality control after investigation were conducted to guarantee the quality of data collection. Speci cally, after the questionnaire is lled out by the investigator, it shall be checked by the quality control personnel with missing items, wrong items and logic errors, and placed on le after signed by the investigators and inspectors together. Besides, the Propensity Score Matching Method was applied in the statistical analysis to further control the sample selection bias and avoid the self-reported problematic associations.

Sampling and questionnaire design
A multistage strati ed random sampling method was adopted to recruit respondents. First, the project team randomly selected 45 primary schools from each township in these three counties, including Shifang City 16 schools, Lu County 20 schools and Yuexi County 9 schools. Then, for each school, a random class of grade 4 to grade 5 was selected and at least 50 students with age 8-12 were surveyed. Speci cally, if the class size is more than 50 students, 50 students are randomly selected to participate in the survey. If the class size is less than 50 students, the whole class will participate in the survey, and another class will be selected and some students will be randomly selected to conduct the survey.
In October of 2016, 2250 questionnaires were distributed in each of the three counties (i.e., Shifang City 800, Lu County 1000 and Yuexi County 450), after excluding 58 questionnaires due to data-quality issues, we nally collected the individual data of a number of 2192 (97.42%) students (baseline group). In October of 2018, another 1800 students (i.e., Shifang City 640, Lu County 800 and Yuexi County 360) conducted the survey, and we nally collected 1710 (95%) samples in these primary schools in 2018 postintervention. Additionally, we did not follow up the same students group because children's perception increased signi cantly with their age growing (Christiansen et al. 2018;Mudavanhu et al. 2015).
The questionnaire had several parts, including individual and family information (e.g., age, grade, gender, ethic, disaster experience and household income), climate change risk perception (the knowledge of climate change and its secondary disasters, including ood evacuation, gastrointestinal disease, respiratory disease, safety telephone identi cation, earthquake evacuation and emergency preparedness), and parent-child interactions and parenting strategy (children's left-behind status and child-rearing style).

Measurement
In line with Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment (IPPA) (Armsden and Greenberg, 1987, Xie et al. 2019), the measurement of parent-child attachment in this study included four dichotomous questions about children's attachment relationship with their parents: did they ask their parents for help in time; did they tell their parents about their crisis; did they attend disaster drills with their parents; and, did their parents pay attention to their demands. Responses were reconstructed as a continuous variable, ranging from 0 (almost no interaction) to 4 (very good interaction) in order to indicate the quality of the parent-child attachment. Parenting strategies included the child's left-behind status (left-behind or not left-behind) and child-rearing style (raised by parents together or single-raised, and non-parental caregivers), and both variables were constructed as two dummy variables. We further classi ed them into nine dummy variables to identify the parenting strategies (i.e. completely left-behind, non-left-behind, father works outside, mother works outside, raised by parents together, raised by father alone, raised by mother alone, raised by grandparents, raised by other relatives). Several control variables such as children's gender, grade, household income, and survey regions were included, and we also considered the confounding effects of disaster risk reduction programs, namely whether the child participated in any intervention programs at school (i.e. drinking water safety, food safety, personal hygiene, prevention of infectious diseases, emergency call for help, escape and rescue from climate extremes). The detailed descriptive statistics of all the study's variables are presented in the Table 1.

Analytical Strategy
To identify the effect of parent-child attachment and parenting strategy on children's climate change risk perception, the collected data was analyzed using Stata14.0 software. First, in line with previous research, Principal Component Analysis was used to calculate the children's climate change risk perception scores in this study (Slovic 1987; Burns and Slovic 2012). The dependent variable was a continuous variable, so the Ordinary Least Square Regression was applied as a basic assumption in Model 1 to identify the effects of parent-child attachment and parenting strategy on children's climate change risk perception.
Second, to capture the indirect effects of parent-child attachment and parenting strategy on children's climate change risk perception, the baseline model was extended with two interaction items between parent-child attachment and parenting strategies in Model 2. We included two separate interaction terms between parent-child attachment and parenting strategies: parent-child attachment × children's left-behind status and parent-child attachment × child-rearing style. Additionally, to identify how the effects of parent-child attachment on children's climate change risk perception varies in different parenting strategies, the children's left-behind status and child-rearing style were rst divided into nine different caregiver subgroups and then regression analyses were conducted accordingly.
Third, to reveal the co-in uencing mechanisms of parent-child attachment and parenting strategies on the children's climate change risk perceptions, we illustrated how children left-behind status and child-rearing style modi ed the effect of parent-child interaction frequency on the children's climate change risk perceptions, respectively.
Finally, based on the previous attachment literature, we established a conceptual framework of parent-child attachment patterns for children's climate change risk perception based on a mathematical quadrant between frequent parent-child interactions and available attached gures. The parent-child attachment patterns were then classi ed into four types: securely attached, avoidant attached, ambivalent attachments, and disorganized attachments, and children's climate change risk perception were further accessed by categorizing different patterns.

Description of the impact factors of children's climate change risk perception
Children's climate change risk perception was synthetized from 23 questions touching on 6 aspects of the individual respondent's knowledge of climate extremes and their secondary effects: ood evacuation; gastrointestinal disease; respiratory disease; safety telephone identi cation; earthquake evacuation; and, emergency preparedness. The Cronbach's alpha of the principal components was 0.853, which con rms the reliability and good quality of the principal components. Table 2 shows the effects of parent-child attachment on children's climate change risk perception. Speci cally, the parent-child attachment had a signi cantly positive effect on children's climate change risk perception. In Model 1 (Coeff = 0.057; P<0.001) and Model 2 (Coeff = 0.065; P<0.001), the more frequent their interactions with their parents, the higher the children's climate change risk perception score.
Additionally, in Model 2, the child-rearing style had a signi cantly positive effect on children's climate change risk perception. Children raised by their parents together scored higher than children raised by a single parent or other relatives (Coeff = 0.122; P<0.05).
However, the interaction items between parent-child attachment and child-rearing style had a signi cantly negative effect. For children raised by parents together, they did not receive the same positive effects of parent-child attachment as their counterparts did (Coeff = -0.036; P<0.05).  .001), they did not receive the same magnitude of positive effects as their counterparts, whose coe cients were relatively lower than the other groups.  Additionally, caregiver's gender differences in uenced the effect of parent-child attachment on the children's climate change risk perceptions. For children whose fathers worked away from home (Coeff = 0.062; P<0.001) or those who were raised by their mothers alone (Coeff = 0.056; P<0.001), the better the parent-child attachment, the higher children's climate change risk perception scores.
However, those scores were not as high as children whose mothers worked away from home (Coeff = 0.093; P<0.001) or were raised by their fathers alone (Coeff = 0.139; P<0.001).

Conditional effects of parenting strategies on parent-child attachment for children's climate change risk perception
The graphs in Figures 1a and 1b illustrate how children's left-behind status and child-rearing style modi ed the effect of parent-child attachment on children's climate change risk perception, respectively. Figure 1a shows the marginal effects of children's left-behind status across the full range of parent-child attachment. When parent-child interaction was less frequent, left-behind children had higher climate change risk perception scores. However, when parent-child interactions were more frequent, both left-behind and nonleft-behind children had much higher scores, and the gap between them narrowed signi cantly and was not as pronounced as when there were less frequent parent-child interactions.   Table 4, all four types of attached children share distinct differences in frequency of interactions with their caregivers and availability of responsive attachment caregivers, through which we conceptualized a framework of parent-child attachment patterns for children's climate change risk perception.

Discussion
Children need not be passive victims, but instead may contribute to disaster risk reduction activities. Involving children into disaster risk reduction and through fast learning, they can transfer their hazards-related awareness and knowledge to their families and neighbors, and therefore have the potential capability to change the disaster attitudes, awareness, and preparedness However, our study not only proved the positive impact of parent-child attachment, but also provided robust evidence on the parenting strategy among attachment gures, as well as illustrating how the broader family system interfaces with parent-child attachments.
Existing attachment literatures and frameworks focused mainly on mother-child attachment, and assumes that that mothers provide relatively more safe-haven support and fathers provide relatively more secure-base support to children in late middle childhood and This is the rst study that conceptualizes a framework for understanding the different parent-child attachment patterns for children's climate change risk perception. Our study not only provides evidence for the correlation between parent-child attachment classi cations and quality of observed parenting difference, but also conceptualizes a co-in uential mechanism between parent-child attachment and parenting strategy and through which conceptualized a framework of parent-child attachment patterns for children's climate change risk perception, and found that attachment relationships varied in the quality of the children's climate change risk perceptions (shown in Fig. 3). Previous research underlined the associations between attachment relationship and parenting with dyadic measures (Scott et al. 2011), while the present study further rated quality of parenting as two distinct and separate construct to avoid con ation with dyadic qualities of the relationship. We found that children's left-behind status and child-rearing style had different effects depending on the frequency of parent-child interactions, which were consistent with previous research (Zhao et  Other attachment gures such as grandparents, foster parents, and extended relatives also need to be considered. Future efforts might focus on helping children establish community networks that could provide in uence, commitment, and resources to facilitate their acceptance, application, and implementation (Peek 2008 . Therefore, the government should pay more attention to this vulnerable group and address the loss of parent-child interactions and use school interventions and community services to help them to understand the risks of disasters and make sure they are su ciently prepared (Zhou et al. 2015; Gao et al. 2010).
This study also has several limitations. First, it relies on self-reporting by children. Due to their cognitive immaturity and possible social desirability bias, they may have overstated their responses. Nevertheless, this is an acceptable approach to assessing children's attachment representations, their answers were scored based on the content of what they said and their cognition to hazard risks in a coherent and organized way. Second, though our study recognized the importance of the broader parenting context, only children's left-behind status and rearing style were included.
We could not consider all the possible attachment gures (i.e., foster parents, extended relatives), which await further validation.
Finally, we know less about the role of alternative caregivers in terms of children's long-term development. When studying the intergenerational effects of parent-child attachment and parenting strategy, it would be ideal if we could observe parents interacting with their offspring, then return two or three decades later and observe the toddlers of the rst wave now interacting with their own offspring.

Conclusion
As major participants in disaster mitigation activities, children should be engaged into disaster reduction programs. Our ndings suggest that a broader context of parent-child attachment and parenting strategies can help families and communities build up concerns for natural hazards, and frequent interactions between parents and children are essential for children's social, emotional,  Figure 1 The conditional effects of children's left-behind status and child-rearing style on parent-child attachment for increasing children's climate change risk perception: the marginal effects of children's left-behind status and child-rearing style. Note: --Solid line is for average marginal effects, ------Dash line is for 95% con dence intervals.

Figure 2
Conceptual framework of parent-child attachment patterns for children's climate change risk perception.

Figure 3
Children's climate change risk perception in different parent-child attachment patterns. Error bars show 95% con dence interval. Note: In Figure 3a, the patterns of child-parent attachment are based on parent-child attachment and children's left-behind status, while in 3b they are based on parent-child attachment and child-rearing style.