The study was conducted by Kerime Meryem Ozmen and Ezgi Taştekin, researchers affiliated with the Department of Child Development at Ağrı İbrahim Çeçen University and Karadeniz Technical University in Türkiye. They recruited 545 parents of children aged three to six years, a developmental window in which children are forming their earliest attitudes toward the natural world but are still almost entirely dependent on their caregivers for environmental experiences. Participants completed a personal information form, a questionnaire measuring their views and behaviors regarding climate change and the environment, the Eco-Anxiety Scale, and the Parental Burnout Assessment. All procedures were approved by an institutional ethics committee and conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

Latent class analysis is a person-centered statistical method that identifies unobserved subgroups within a population. Rather than averaging everyone’s scores and treating parents as a single mass, the technique looks for patterns of responses that cluster together, revealing hidden types. The researchers estimated models with increasing numbers of classes using the software Mplus and evaluated them on statistical fit, classification accuracy, parsimony, and how meaningfully the resulting groups could be interpreted. A three-class solution emerged as the best overall balance of these criteria.

The three profiles were strikingly uneven in size. The smallest group, comprising about 13 percent of parents, showed low climate change concern and little environmental information-seeking. A second group, about 14 percent, displayed moderate climate change concern combined with a sense of connection to nature. The dominant group, accounting for roughly 73 percent of the sample in the primary coding scheme, was characterized by high climate change concern and pronounced environmental sensitivity. In other words, in this sample of parents of young children, deep environmental concern was not a fringe position but the statistical norm.

The most emotionally charged finding concerned eco-anxiety, the chronic worry about environmental degradation and its consequences for the future. Parents in the high-concern, high-sensitivity class reported significantly higher eco-anxiety than parents in the other two classes. This aligns with a growing body of international research showing that climate anxiety is not evenly distributed but concentrated among people who are most engaged with environmental information and most attuned to ecological risk. For this large subgroup of parents, caring deeply about the planet appears to come with a measurable emotional toll.

Parental burnout told a more complicated story. Total burnout scores, which capture the chronic exhaustion, emotional distancing, and inefficacy that can develop when the demands of parenting overwhelm available resources, did not differ significantly across the three classes. However, one specific component did: emotional exhaustion was higher among parents in the high climate change concern and environmental sensitivity class. This suggests that while being highly environmentally engaged does not necessarily push parents into full burnout, it may add a layer of emotional fatigue to the daily experience of raising young children.

The differences extended beyond the parents’ own inner states to how they were raising their children. The researchers examined two parent-reported environmental parenting behaviors and parents’ evaluations of their children’s environmental awareness. Parents in the high-concern class reported more frequently encouraging environmentally responsible behaviors in their children, such as conserving resources and caring for living things, and more actively supporting their children’s connection with nature. They also rated their children’s environmental awareness more positively than parents in the other classes did.

These child-centered findings carry particular weight given what developmental research has shown about the early years. Time spent in nature during preschool has been linked to a greater sense of responsibility for the natural world later on, and parents’ own connection to nature is a stronger predictor of children’s nature connectedness than visits to green spaces or neighborhood characteristics alone. The new study suggests that the parents most worried about climate change are also the ones most likely to be transmitting environmental values and experiences to their children during this formative period, potentially shaping a generation’s relationship with the natural world.

The authors emphasize that parents’ responses to climate change are not uniform and should be understood as a constellation of interacting processes: climate concern, information-seeking, nature connectedness, eco-anxiety, and child-centered environmental parenting. The person-centered approach they used highlights heterogeneity that would be invisible in traditional variable-centered analyses, which average across individuals and can mask meaningful subgroups. Previous latent class research on climate beliefs has similarly identified distinct profiles across entire countries, and this study extends that logic into the intimate domain of family life and parenting.

The findings arrive at a moment when climate anxiety among parents is attracting increasing scientific attention worldwide. Recent studies have linked parental climate anxiety to changes in parenting practices, and researchers have begun exploring how parents mentally process climate change when talking with their children and how eco-stress may relate to children’s emotional difficulties through pathways involving parental burnout. By showing that the majority of parents of preschoolers in their sample combined high climate concern with active environmental parenting, the Turkish study adds an important piece to this emerging picture: for many families, climate worry and hands-on environmental caregiving travel together, and the emotional cost of that combination deserves careful attention from clinicians, educators, and policymakers alike.

Subject of Research: Climate change concern profiles among parents of preschool children and their links to eco-anxiety, parental burnout, and environmental parenting

Article Title: A latent class analysis of climate change concern and environmental responsiveness among parents: associations with eco-anxiety, parental burnout, and environmental parenting

Article References: Ozmen, K. M., & Taştekin, E. (2026). A latent class analysis of climate change concern and environmental responsiveness among parents: associations with eco-anxiety, parental burnout, and environmental parenting. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1446. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10011-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10011-0

Keywords: climate change, eco-anxiety, parental burnout, environmental parenting, latent class analysis, preschool children, nature connectedness, Current Psychology, latent, class, analysis, climate