Understanding Early Childhood Educator Vulnerability

Over the last few weeks, I read several new articles on self-care for early childhood educators. There are many reasons educators need to be intentional in enacting self-care routines.

We know that our emotional health impacts the emotional health of the children in the classroom. We also know that our work comprises emotional labor – the need to connect emotionally to children to be effective in our work. In addition, educators are rewarded---for our warm presence with young children, caring for their physical, social, and emotional needs---and punished by societal views of the importance of the work---long hours, low wages, and lack of societal recognition. The widespread belief that early childhood education is simple and easy to do may compromise our emotional health. The complexity of early childhood gets misunderstood, and applications of K-12 models try to make simple what is deeply layered, creating tension and distrust between early childhood and K-12 systems.

I refer to the complexity of classroom interactions as the multiplicity of early childhood education. The concept is that early childhood environments are complex and layered in the interactions between children and adults based on environment, program type, and educational philosophy. Further, early childhood environments' complexity originates from highly individualized daily experiences between adults and children.

This push and pull can leave early childhood educators feeling vulnerable in their work. Educators' vulnerability leads to high turnover (up to 40% in some states), which further erodes our reserves as we stretch in our classrooms and programs.In early childhood education, emotional labor compounds the diversity of structures in which we work and prepare for our profession.

The divergent ways we enact our profession impact our collective voice in the extensive societal structure. Early childhood educators spend an extraordinary amount of time coming to agreements about the work we do. Much of our struggle to define who we are and what we do invites external agencies and systems to determine who early childhood educators are because we lack a collective voice.

Engaging in the work of early childhood education is to experience emotional vulnerability. We need to understand both the forces in our classrooms and programs and the larger forces of societal constructs to formulate a response and start to build structures that strengthen us emotionally to work with children. Once we have designs for our emotional health, we will move beyond emotional vulnerability into resiliency.

Share some of your thoughts about the emotional vulnerability of early childhood educators.