Young Children's Ecological Footprint Awareness and Environmental Attitudes in Turkey

The study's primary purpose is to examine young children's environmental awareness regarding their ecological footprint and environmental attitudes. The participants of this study are 100 Turkish early childhood children who were 5-6 years old. The data was collected using the Ecological Footprint Awareness of Children (abbreviated as EKAY-O in Turkish) visual scale and some demographic questions. Descriptive statistics, thematic descriptive analysis, and word cloud were used during the data analysis. According to the descriptive results, children's ecological footprint awareness was low due to their low scores. The thematic descriptive analysis results showed that most of the children's attitudes were anthropocentric towards several environmental phenomena. The word cloud analysis results showed that children's mothers are an essential factor in children's ecological footprint awareness and environmental attitudes behavior. It has been concluded that while raising environmentally friendly individuals, the parents of young children are as important as the education they received at school. It has been suggested that early childhood teachers should give more time to parents' involvement while working with children through the environment and ecology.