Children’s place attachments are developed through holistic experiences that integrate personal, social, and physical dimensions of place. As Grimshaw and Mates [53] argue, place serves as a site for emotional, physical, and social meaning-making. Children interact with these environments in developmentally specific ways: while younger children often focus on functional use, adolescents tend to emphasize symbolic and social meanings [54]. Across age groups, personal memories, embodied interactions, and subjective experiences form the foundation of attachment, contributing to children’s sense of stability, identity, and well-being (e.g [55]). Disasters introduce new forms of place-based memories, which can alter children’s ongoing relationships with their trusted and valued environments.

Personal engagements with place become particularly salient in disaster contexts, where affective meaning is often intensified. Children’s sensitivity to the emotional significance of disrupted environments can reveal interpretive details that may be overlooked by adults. For example, Parrott and colleagues [46] found that adolescent survivors of a multi-hazard disaster (flood, tsunami, landslide) in rural Indonesia described specific micro-sites within their school that held traumatic meaning- such as the cafeteria, where a lifeless body was found. Similarly, Sadeghloo and Mikhak [1] report that material damage to community spaces following disaster frequently evokes memories of social rupture, linking physical destruction to emotional loss. Such sense of loss, including the loss of trust and sense of safety in a valued environment, is particularly difficult for children (in post-disaster contexts) to psychologically regulate [56, 57, 58]. Such findings illustrate how children’s internal meaning-making processes interact with disrupted external environments, and how place-based memories can further alter children’s relationships with various environments and their social representations. Put simply, these bi-directional person-based processes contribute to recovery trajectories and inform how children relate to place in post-disaster contexts.

This relationship between children’s internal affective processes and their engagement with social and physical environments is particularly evident in school settings. Schools are often central to children’s social development, offering routine, structure, and peer interaction. In the aftermath of disasters, they may facilitate community recovery by restoring social connection, emotional safety, and group-based coping activities [46, 59]. Yet, schools can also become sites of risk, representing disrupted social ecologies, broken routines, or physical danger. These dual representations underscore the complex interplay between individual experiences and environmental context in children’s disaster recovery.

Beyond formal institutions, children also form attachments to informal and personal environments. The concept of found places encompasses small, self-selected settings (such as alleyways, footpaths, or boulders), illustrating the role of agency in children’s disaster recovery. These spaces often provide displaced children with a sense of ownership, safety, creativity, and social connection [15]. For example [24], describes how displaced children from an Indigenous group in Nepal formed strong emotional ties to a boulder overlooking their resettlement camp, describing it as the one space that “belonged” to them. Such places often become sites for peer gatherings and shared activities, fostering resilience through social interaction [23]. These examples further support the importance of recognizing children’s individual meaning-making processes and the situated physical and social affordances that support recovery.

In sum, this section highlights how contemporary literature reinforces the understanding that children’s place attachments are grounded in personal emotional processes, shaped by developmental and social needs, and expressed through interactions with both physical and social environments. Recognizing the multi-dimensional nature of these attachments is essential for informing child-centered disaster response and recovery frameworks that account for the complexity of children’s lived experiences. Building on this foundation, the following section shifts focus to process as the central domain of analysis, examining the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral mechanisms through which place attachments operate. We consider how these processes unfold within and across the three interconnected dimensions of place attachment and how they shape the outcomes children experience in disaster contexts.

Having explored the place and person components of place attachment in disaster contexts through a broad social-ecological lens, we now explore the process components of disaster experiences for children considering their cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses in both displaced and rebuilding contexts. It is important to note that while research has called for a strengthening of children’s perspectives in the disaster literature [21], the research landscape still suffers from a lack of children’s first-hand disaster accounts. For example, the impact on preschool-aged children is more likely to be looked at through the lens of the mental health of those around them, specifically their caregivers [28]. Therefore, this section will look at disaster outcomes from a children’s place attachment perspective where it has been available in the literature (largely in displacement and post-disaster recovery literature).

Our cyclical framework understands disaster outcomes as continuously evolving over time, reshaping children’s evolving place relationships and future disaster contexts. Research consistently identifies disasters as risk factors that disrupt educational, social [46, 59], infrastructural, cultural, financial [24], and place attachment [17, 23] domains. Disaster recovery is, therefore, not a linear progression but a dynamic restoration of disrupted physical and social environments, unfolding over time and influenced by context-specific factors [60]. Within this framework, children’s place attachments serve as key mechanisms of psychosocial regulation, offering a sense of connection, agency, and stability during recovery [17]. As complex and layered as disaster recovery may be, we conceptualize it as the dynamic, multidimensional restoration of social factors and physical places that evolve over time and are informed by local contexts [59]. Children’s place attachments in disaster recovery play a vital role by providing children with a sense of community connection, social agency, and connection to place [17].

These processual dynamics are especially noteworthy in the context of displaced children. In 2024, UNICEF reported over 3.1 million children have been displaced due to natural disasters, and over 47 million have been displaced due to conflict and violence [61]. Displacement, defined as the forced movement from one’s home due to environmental or human-made disasters [62], can disrupt children’s place attachments and create identity confusion [23]. For example, Morrison [24] found that in displaced contexts, generational divides intensified as a result of youth reconsidering their cultural and familial commitments in favor of their personal ambitions and hope for rebuilding after disaster events. Youth were more likely to seek out youth-specific spaces that supported their shifting social aspirations, such as an increased emphasis on education and employment.

These behavioral shifts are closely tied to spatial processes: micro elements of place (e.g., solar-powered street lights expanding place access and found spaces) become crucial elements of the resettling and recovery process for displaced youth as they rebuild their sense of self and their connection to place. Weir and colleagues [23] further emphasize the effects of displacement on children’s place attachments, noting that displacement often leads children to navigate their sense of self in unfamiliar physical environments. Through social interaction and play, displaced children may take on a sense of ownership of their new location and, in doing so, forge new place attachments that serve as capacity-building factors in post-disaster recovery. These findings are increasingly important as gradual environmental degradation and protracted displacement sever children’s bonds to familiar environments (e.g., homes, playgrounds, and culturally significant sites) triggering profound mourning and heightened anxiety [12, 31].

Where relocation is not required, disaster recovery often takes the form of rebuilding, which also engages affective, cognitive, and behavioral processes. Crandon and colleagues [12] apply Bronfenbrenner’s [51] social ecological model to illustrate how attachments to home (microsystem), school (mesosystem), and cultural landscapes (macrosystem) function as buffers against acute and chronic stressors following disaster. Restoring these spaces facilitates emotional and social continuity, such as through reopening schools and playgrounds, or reviving cultural rituals in rebuilt environments. Pacheco and colleagues [46] similarly argue that schools, as familiar and symbolically meaningful places, can become physical markers of recovery. They provide structured environments for restoring routines, reconnecting with peers, and regaining a sense of belonging [59]. The rebuilding of community spaces is often the most effective means of fostering restoration of place ties, which directly aid in children’s recovery [1, 46].

Yet, the processes of rebuilding are not universally positive. Children’s affective and behavioral responses to rebuilding are nuanced and sometimes conflicted. In an extensive review, Carone and colleagues [25] found that individuals with strong place attachments may engage more thoughtfully in rebuilding, while others resist it, perceiving it as a threat to the integrity of their place-based identities. For children, rebuilding familiar environments may represent both recovery and risk. While it can foster a sense of continuity and emotional safety, it may also reintroduce distressing memories or challenge children’s evolving place meanings [17, 46]. These divergent responses highlight the importance of process-oriented understandings of recovery, that are also sensitive to children’s developmental stage, emotional needs, and (of critical importance) sense of agency.

Taken together, this paper’s review of current literature regarding disaster outcomes and children’s place attachments posits that children have far more agency in their own recovery than they are often credited for. By examining disaster outcomes through the process domain of place attachment, we found that supporting children in post-disaster settings should take into account their unique perspectives and apply a holistic understanding of disasters as cyclical events and place attachments as key mechanisms of recovery across physical, social, emotional, and individual domains.