Early Childhood Educators' Emotional Labor and Well-Being

• In Event: Teacher Stress and Coping: Teacher Preparation and Professional Development for Students' Mental Health Needs

Abstract

Studies show that aspects of ECE quality, including continuity of care (Ackerman, 2008), as well as characteristics of interactions between children and teachers, such as emotionally sensitive and cognitively stimulating relationships (NICHD, 2006; Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000; Vandell & Wolfe, 2000; Zaslow et al., 2006), contribute to children’s developmental outcomes. However, early childhood care and education (ECCE) teachers have some of the highest turnover rates in teaching, which are linked to educators’ well-being including high job stress, feelings of isolation and lack of value, concerns for compensation and benefit (National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies, n.d; National Technical Assistance and Quality Assurance Center, 2009), and limited preparation for the emotional complexities of their jobs (Lee & Brotheridge, 2011; Levine, 2006). With efforts to bolster the comprehensive well-being of ECCE teachers (Hall-Kenyon, Bullough, MacKay, & Marshall, 2014) as well as quell growing attrition rates, research needs to attend to how teachers of our youngest children perceive, conceptualize and reflect on the emotional demands of their jobs in reference to their perceptions of their well-being (physical, emotional, social and financial) in an effort to inform practice and policy on how to support teachers’ well-being in the field as well as promote sensitive interactions with young children.

Despite associations between teacher turnover and aspects of well-being and teachers’ emotional practice, there is limited understanding on how these paradigms relate to support teacher-child classroom interactions. In this study we used a mixed methods approach to examine the well-being and emotional labor (a concept from organizational psychology that refers to the ways employees express or suppress emotions on the job to meet organizational goals) of 125 early childhood educators working in ECCE programs serving low-income children and families in the DC metro area, and how these influenced teachers' interactions with young children.

Quantitative analyses indicate: 1) ECCE teachers with greater purpose in life, an aspect of psychological well-being, created a more emotionally supportive environments for their students; 2) ECCE teachers’ experiencing less physical/mental distress had more positive display rules or understanding of how to show positive emotions to children; and 3) ECCE educators’ with higher psychological well-being were able to surface act—or show children positive emotions regardless of how they were feeling on the inside--more than teachers with lower psychological health.

Qualitative analyses of 40 ECCE teachers showed the importance of considering ECCE teachers' well-being comprehensively, to include emotional, social, financial, and physical well-being, which moves beyond previous work in this area that tends to solely consider stress and burnout as indicators of ECCE teachers' well-being. Emergent from our work is a heuristic model (see Figure 1) on how these various aspects of well-being interact to shape one another and teachers' emotional labor for support of teachers’ interactions with young children.

This work has important implications for policy and practice in the early childhood care and education field, especially as we support the daily stress and coping of ECCE teachers.

Authors

• Elizabeth Levine Brown, George Mason University

• Colleen Vesely, George Mason University