Left-behind youth are not always bad! Relations between teacher autonomy support, narcissism, and prosocial behavior

Abstract

Prior research has widely demonstrated that children who remain in their original communities after one or both biological parents migrated (i.e., left-behind children) confront salient emotional and behavioral difficulties; however, an insufficient amount of research has been devoted to understanding their prosocial behavior. The current study extended prior research by comparing the prosocial behavior between left-behind children and their non-left-behind peers. Subsequently, this study examined the individual variations (i.e., narcissism and left-behind status) of the correlation between teacher autonomy support and prosocial behavior in a combined sample of left-behind and non-left-behind children. 738 youth (Nleft-behind = 246, Meanage = 15.77, 53.6% girls; Nnon-left-behind = 492, Meanage = 15.91, 55.1% girls) participated in the present research and completed a packet of well-established questionnaires. The results, after adjusting for sociodemographic characteristics, showed that the prosocial behavior of left-behind children did not significantly differ from that of non-left-behind children. Furthermore, the results based on linear regression analysis exhibited teacher autonomy support was positively related to prosocial behavior, and high narcissism buffered against the adverse effect of low teacher autonomy support on left-behind children’s prosocial behavior. The current study indicates that creating an autonomy-supportive atmosphere at school and facilitating left-behind children’s narcissism are paramount to promoting their prosocial tendencies.