Understanding the relationship between kindergarten teachers’ love for education and emotional support competence: a latent profile and network analysis

Teachers’ emotional support is an important positive psychological force in students’ growth, requiring no cost but exerting remarkable power. Early childhood is a key period for emotional education, making it crucial to enhance kindergarten teachers’ ability to provide positive emotional support. However, to date, no studies have been encountered that directly addressed this issue. The present study used various scales to examine 2,614 Chinese kindergarten teachers and assess their emotional support quality, prosocial motivation, sense of professional mission, and agreeableness. The goal was to explore the latent subgroups of emotional support provided by kindergarten teachers and their influence and offer valuable references for improving such skills. The results revealed the following. A latent profile analysis identified three distinct subgroups of kindergarten teachers’ emotional support competencyies: low, moderate, and high. A multinomial logistic regression analysis found that prosocial motivation, sense of professional mission, basic empathy, and agreeableness were all significantly positively associated with kindergarten teachers’ emotional support, with sense of professional mission and prosocial motivation being the strongest correlates. Interestingly, years of teaching experience did not show a linear increase in emotional support ability; rather, this variable was significantly positively associated with the transition from low to moderate levels of emotional support but not to higher levels. Further network analysis indicated that the item “I am passionate about teaching,” a notion related to professional mission, was the node most closely related to teachers’ emotional support ability. This suggests that improving kindergarten teachers’ emotional support should start with fostering a sense of professional mission and prosocial motivation, with a focus on cultivating a love for education.