Rooted: Enhancing Children's Wellbeing Through Nature Connection Workshops

Gavin Lloyd Young et al.
Fri, 17 Apr 2026 11:10:00 PDT

Our society is less connected to nature than previous generations, resulting in a push for research and interventions that seek to reconnect global populations with nature by establishing feelings of nature connectedness. Research suggests that developing a connection to nature in childhood is especially important for increasing well-being and pro-environmental behavior. Our project “Rooted” aims to investigate how nature connectedness in Missoula children might be associated with positive impacts like enhanced well-being. This project seeks to answer the question, “How might we creatively assess, develop, and maintain connectedness to nature in Missoula children in hopes of enhancing wellbeing?” Rooted filled a gap in Missoula programming by providing accessible, cost-free nature connection workshops at the Missoula Public Library for children aged 5–12. These four workshops encouraged emotional, cognitive, and experiential engagement with the natural world, helping participants build a lasting sense of connection. Our group assessed Missoula children’s connection to nature using the Connectedness to Nature Scale (CNS) (Mayer & Frantz, 2004) and wellbeing using the WHO-5 Well-being Index (Topp et al., 2015). We then analyzed our survey results, finding a positive shift in both nature connection and overall wellbeing among participants who completed both pre- and post-surveys. Our findings present an important assessment of the state of nature connection and wellbeing in Missoula children. Alongside these findings our work has also filled a gap in cost-free, accessible nature connection workshops to our community which enhance children’s wellbeing, at least short-term.