Linking social support to Chinese kindergarten teachers’ mental health: the mediating roles of emotional intelligence, emotional self-efficacy, and job burnout

With the development of society and the transformation of education, the mental health of Chinese teachers, especially kindergarten teachers, is deteriorating. Although numerous theoretical frameworks and empirical studies have been devoted to exploring factors (e.g. social support, self-efficacy, job burnout, et al.) in relation to individual mental health, limited studies have jointly examined the mechanisms linking these factors to mental health outcomes. This study aimed to apply the social cognitive model of job and life satisfaction to understand Chinese kindergarten teachers' mental health problems. A total of 1114 Chinese kindergarten teachers, whose mean age was 32.75 ± 8.36 and of whom 1073 (96.3%) were female, completed several measures concerning social support, emotional intelligence, emotional self-efficacy, job burnout, and mental health. The Harman single-factor test, descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, and structural equation modeling were used to identify key predictors and mediating pathways among these variables. The integrated social cognitive model of mental health demonstrated a strong fitness to the data across both the general sample and sub-samples categorized by teaching years and parenting experiences. Simultaneously, social support might serve as an indirect predictor of mental health problem, which was mediated primarily via job burnout, the chain links of emotional intelligence and job burnout, the chain links of emotional self-efficacy and job burnout, and the chain links of emotional intelligence, emotional self-efficacy, and job burnout. The mental health of kindergarten teachers fluctuates by a combination of social support, emotional intelligence, emotional self-efficacy, and job burnout. Therefore, constructing an emotional support system, improving teachers' emotional literacy, and integrating teachers' diverse learning experiences might more effectively promote their mental health.