Overcoming Teacher Burnout in Early Childhood

Strategies for Change

Ellen M. Drolette

• Publisher: Redleaf Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781605546100
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Professional Development

Caregiver fatigue and low morale is a problem in many early care settings. Overcoming Teacher Burnout in Early Childhood focuses on the many reasons why early childhood professionals can suffer from low staff morale that causes such a high industry turnover rate. Included are ways to motivate and inspire yourself and others to view their work in a way that is healthy, intentional, and creates a high-quality early childhood environment. Personal stories from the field highlight how educators have themselves stayed motivated. The conversational style offers opportunities for self-reflection and group work. Practical steps help caregivers find ways to refuel and bump up morale, providing the energy needed to tackle long-term strategies.

CHAPTER 1

Work-Life Balance

Christine’s Story: Struggling to Find Work-Life Balance

Christine worked at a large nonprofit child care program in an administrative role. When I first met her, her morale was low and she felt stuck in her job. She had been offered another position elsewhere at a lower wage but with much less stress. Christine loved her job and adored her students. She felt torn between staying or leaving.

Christine supervised two teachers. These teachers wanted her to fix things that she couldn’t fix. The program had rules restricting teachers during breaks and lunch. The organization did not have enough qualified teachers to fill all positions, so it constantly shuffled staff to comply across all its program locations. Because of these ongoing coverage issues, teachers could not leave the center during breaks or lunch. Christine’s staff often complained to her. But she had no control over the staffing regulations or the center’s rules. This problem was not only bringing down teacher morale, but it was also increasing stress on supervisors, who had to cope with the low morale but couldn’t do anything about its cause. Christine tried to boost staff morale by bringing the teachers their favorite muffins or doing yoga classes with them. Christine offered a shoulder for them to cry on. She listened, gave advice, and provided support.

But Christine herself felt unsupported. She admitted that she felt dumped on. Getting out of bed and going to work had become a chore. After working nine hours each day, she was taking classes four nights a week. She was feeling fried. Her fire was burning out.

Christine had an ongoing desire to make sure that children were getting 100 percent of the attention and support they needed from the teachers and that the teachers were getting what they needed from her. But, she wondered, what good are the staff to children if the adults are tired and overworked?

This situation was detrimental to Christine’s well-being. She explained, “I don’t have any balance of work and life. I barely have time to breathe. I also have a disabled brother who lives with us and needs a lot of care.” Christine said her saving grace was going to church weekly. Christine felt that attending church gave her time to clear her mind and start her week with a fresh perspective. She also tried to practice yoga. She knew she benefited from yoga, but she sometimes had difficulty getting there. She was exhausted. She faced a conundrum. She knew that going to yoga would help her, but she had so much to get done.

It’s Hard to Share from an Empty Cup

Stories like Christine’s are familiar to most early childhood educators. They are playing out all over the country. They are tales of low pay, family needs, flagging mental health, lack of self-care, low morale and confidence, frustration, and, in family child care, isolation. Educators have good days and bad days, but when work and life are out of balance, the bad days seem to take over.

We want to spend time with our own families, but we also need to meet our professional development requirements, run a business, take care of ourselves, and try not to miss work because finding a substitute is really, really hard. It is a harsh reality that everything outside of the actual care and teaching of children has to be done in the evening. How do we make meals for our family, exercise regularly, assess, plan, conference, clean, organize, learn, care, hug, love, and clean some more when there are only twenty-four hours in a day? It is a lot. We end up having to make difficult choices. Is it even possible to find a healthy balance as professionals in the field of early childhood care and education?

As an early childhood educator myself, I can relate to Christine’s struggles. I like to use the metaphor “my cup is full” when my sense of well-being has been boosted by having a good day with children, attending a decent training, listening to live music, or being the lucky recipient of a sweet gesture from someone else. That metaphorical cup can start leaking if my personal needs go unmet. For example, taking four nights of training in a week—or skipping my yoga class or my morning walk—drains my cup little by little. Before long, my cup is empty. There’s nothing left to give. That is when it becomes difficult to be a good spouse, parent, and friend. Something must change, because if this scenario continues, my personal and professional relationships will suffer.

I have realized that sometimes my sanity and well-being need to take priority—even if it means a financial setback. I have also come to realize how important it is to be present in each moment. A children’s book titled The Three Questions by Jon J. Muth helped me understand the latter. It tells the story of a boy who wants to know how to always be a good person. He thinks that he’ll be able to do this if he can find the answers to three questions: What is the best time to do things? Who is the most important one? and What is the right thing to do? The story illustrates in a poignant way that now is the most important time, because it is the only time when we have any power. The most important person is the one we are with, for we don’t know if we will ever have dealings with anyone else. And the right thing to do is to do that person good.

Reflection

•  What does your week look like when your work life and personal life are in balance and everything is going well?

•  Are you using your time efficiently to meet your own needs as well as those of the people around you?

•  How do you deal with the reality that some decisions are out of your control?

•  If you are a supervisor, how do you handle the struggles teachers face in the classroom while coping with your own stressors? How can both roles be supported in your setting?

CHAPTER 2

Setting Priorities

Colleen’s Story: Prioritizing What’s Important

Colleen had been in the field of education for twelve years, in a variety of settings. She started her career as a teacher’s aide in a public school. Later she became a licensed middle school teacher. Colleen would go home each day from the latter job and cry over the enormous amount of papers that needed correcting, curriculum that needed creating, and documentation that needed recording to keep up with the pace her employer expected.

The pressure eventually became overwhelming. Colleen realized she didn’t share her employer’s priorities. After six years in the public school system, she left. She had her first child and entered the field of early education.

She started her new career path at a preschool. This preschool had a strong focus on foreign language development and math skills. Students learned addition and subtraction of double digits and other academic lessons that most kindergartners barely touch. The director and owner would hover when Colleen was teaching. Their hovering made her feel that they did not trust her teaching abilities.

Once again, Colleen realized that her priorities were different from those of her employer. She left the preschool.

Colleen decided to start her own family child care and preschool program. She had finally found her niche as an educator, but she still struggled with prioritizing what was important to her. Documentation was one of the tasks that brought her down. The amount of documentation she had to do as a business owner was similar to the paperwork she’d done as a public school teacher. She found the time required for this task to be burdensome. She wondered if the benefits of documentation were worth the stress and whether there was some way to lighten the burden.

When I started talking to Colleen and asked her about burnout, her thoughts went straight to preventing burnout for families in her care by relieving stress for working families and those in crisis. She had done a lot of work with the Strengthening Families Framework. Strengthening Families is an approach to working with families that’s meant to increase family strengths, enhance child development, and reduce the likelihood of child abuse and neglect. It is based on building parental resilience, social connections, and knowledge about child development and parenting; offering concrete family support; and building children’s social and emotional competence. Colleen said she’d noticed that she, like many early childhood educators, often thought she was helping families when in fact she might have been enabling them by giving them help all the time instead of encouraging them to figure out ways to solve problems themselves—and burning herself out in the process. Colleen admitted that in the early days of running her program, she gave too much. She realized this was contributing to her stress level, and she had to pull back to have energy for her own two boys. Colleen’s husband, a firefighter, was often gone on twenty-four-hour shifts. While they supported each other’s professions, there wasn’t enough give-and-take between professional and personal needs. Colleen saw that she could not continue to offer movie nights and date nights for families at the expense of her sanity.

Colleen told me about a day that was etched in her memory because it was one of those “worst days.” A child who disliked napping kept climbing out of the crib. She had no opportunity to deal with any dishes or messes or take a breather. At the end of the day, she was standing at the sink starting to wash dishes when her husband walked in. He said, “Wow, what a mess. I don’t know how you can stand this.” She burst into tears because she was at her wits’ end. Her husband realized the kind of day she was having about ten seconds too late. He backpedaled quickly.

Colleen was a vocalist. She used to participate in a vocal group every Tuesday night. It was her night to go out and sing, and she never missed it. She called it her “me night.” Eventually the group members decided that they needed to practice two nights a week. As a business owner, young mom, and spouse, Colleen found it impossible to commit to that. She had a hard time letting go of this activity. It was an important piece of her self-care.

Colleen noticed that when she started to feel stressed and burned out, she spent more time on her phone. Her phone let her disconnect and escape easily. She fell into a negative pattern of not being fully present.

After describing her personal challenges, Colleen expressed grave concern for her profession as a whole: “The early childhood field, in general, is not in a good space. The field feels ‘battered down.’”

CAREGIVERS TEND TO BE PEOPLE PLEASERS. Many people who are caregivers—including early childhood educators—find themselves defined by their role. It ends up consuming their entire lives, from the moment they wake up in the morning until they go to bed at night, sometimes six or seven days a week. When you are a caregiver, a people person, and a giver, it is easy to forget that your work is not the only thing in your world and that you need to do other things too, to feed your soul.

In James Patterson’s novel Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas, a character says, “Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five balls. The balls are called work, family, health, friends, and integrity. And you’re keeping all of them in the air. But one day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls … are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered” (Patterson 2001, 20–21).

Hobbies that make you happy and activities that are important to you are essential to your well-being. Hobbies, sports, church, clubs, and so on can be crucial self-care tools. You might not realize the importance of such activities until you aren’t doing them anymore. You may start building up angst, and for some that leads to an internal combustion that manifests in a variety of harmful habits.

For example, when Colleen could not do her vocal group any longer, she filled that time with work or family obligations instead of self-care activities. When I became injured and could not participate in my running group, instead of finding another self-care activity to fill that time, I worked. Colleen and I—and all early childhood educators—need to be more mindful of how we are intentionally caring for ourselves. We need to set aside one or two nights per week or per month that are just for us.

When we’re burned out, it becomes almost impossible to model patience. Sometimes it is hard even to smile. It’s definitely hard to feel happy or to feel that we’re doing a good job at anything.

This is a common problem for educators. While families are the focus of our work, work cannot be the sole focus of our lives. It is essential for us as educators to continually assess our priorities and our level of burnout. While you are holding space for others, find a way to hold space for yourself too. That might mean tweaking your morning and evening routines so they include time to stretch and breathe. It could also mean evaluating how you spend your work time so you are prioritizing the work you feel is most important and minimizing the work that drags you down.

Colleen has been figuring out the best ways for her to keep her priorities in order. When I asked her how she keeps grounded, she talked about a philosophy of simplicity and “white space.” She said this philosophy helps her focus on what is essential in her life. She sent me an article that illustrated what the term white space means regarding the human psyche.

In this article, an interview with productivity expert Juliet Funt, Funt refers to white space as “the thinking time, the strategic pause that’s in between the busyness” (Miller 2017). As I dove deeper into Funt’s work around the idea of white space, I found myself inspired by the simplicity of this idea while simultaneously kicking myself for always working harder, not smarter. Funt says people no longer “value the idea of retreating into thought to find an idea that will turbo charge a business, or a company, or a project. That work is hard, and it’s very advanced, and it requires quietness, and we’re afraid of the quiet. Instead, we go to a new fuel source, the source of exertion, and we work hard, and we drive harder, and we log more hours, and we stay connected, and we feel as if exertion will replace the gems of thoughtfulness” (Miller 2017).

The idea of white space helped Colleen reflect on her priorities and streamline her paperwork duties. She established e-pay for tuition payments. This change has simplified her work life by eliminating the need to run to the bank.

Colleen mused, “There is only so much time in my life.” She said that she has had to identify what she likes and wants to do as choices, and that she m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Work-Life Balance
• Chapter 2: Setting Priorities
• Chapter 3: Coping with Setbacks
• Chapter 4: Compassion Fatigue
• Chapter 5: Leadership
• Chapter 6: Professional Development
• Chapter 7: Mental Health
• Chapter 8: Self-Care
• Chapter 9: Self-Worth
• Chapter 10: Regulations
• Chapter 11: Respect
• Chapter 12: Negativity
• Chapter 13: Saying No
• Chapter 14: Staff Management
• Chapter 15: Teaching Philosophy
• Chapter 16: Environment
• Chapter 17: Peer Networking and Mentoring
• Chapter 18: Empowerment
• Chapter 19: Playfulness
• Appendix A: Program Wish List
• Appendix B: Individual Professional Development Plan
• Appendix C: Physical Program and Classroom Improvements
• Appendix D: Discussion Questions
• References