Psychological Well-Being, Job Satisfaction, and Social Support among Family Child Care Educators

• In Event: Early Childcare and Schooling

Abstract

This study presents preliminary results from a national survey of family child care (FCC) educators’ well-being. FCC represents an important caregiving context, especially for families working non-traditional hours and those in rural communities. However, there are growing concerns about the declining number of FCC programs (Bromer et al., 2021) and the challenging work conditions and low wages among this population (e.g., Herman et al., 2021).

There has been a growing focus on ECE educators’ well-being (e.g., Kwon et al., 2021), given the instrumental role that educators play in young children’s development (e.g., Hindman & Bustamante, 2019) and the relation between well-being and instructional quality (e.g., Roberts et al., 2016). However, little of this research has included FCC.

A recent conceptual framework for home-based child care quality identified health and wellness and engaging with community resources as two components of quality (Blasberg et al., 2019). Social support may be especially important for FCC, given that educators often work alone and balance multiple roles (Herman et al., 2021). Given the unique nature of FCC, research specifically focused on FCC educators is needed to ensure programs and systems support their well-being.

This study explored two questions: 1) What are the associations between FCC educators’ stress, job demands, psychological distress, job satisfaction, and flourishing? and 2) Does well-being differ among educators who report meeting with other child care educators? We hypothesized that stress, job demands, and psychological distress would be negatively associated with job satisfaction and flourishing and that educators who report meeting with others would report higher well-being.

We developed a survey that included established questions and scales to measure well-being and capture educator and program characteristics. Measures included the Flourishing Scale (Diener et al., 2009), Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (Kessler et al., 2002), Child Care Worker Job Stress Inventory Job Demands subscale (Curbow et al., 2000), and the Early Childhood Job Satisfaction Survey-Short Form (Jorde-Bloom, 1988). We also asked whether educators met with others who cared for children as a potential indicator of having a peer support system.

We distributed an anonymous online survey link by email through several FCC educator mailing lists, including the National Association for Family Child Care mailing lists. After removing respondents who did not meet the inclusion criteria for this analysis, we had an analytic sample of 102 respondents. Their demographic characteristics are shown in Table 1.

Preliminary results showing the relations between well-being constructs are shown in Table 2. We found significant correlations between constructs in the expected direction. Notably, there was a strong negative correlation (r = -.70) between flourishing and psychological distress and a moderate negative correlation (r = -.51) between job satisfaction and psychological distress.

Using independent samples t-tests, we found that educators who reported meeting with other child care educators reported lower psychological distress, t(99)=-3.00, p=.003, higher job satisfaction, t(98)=2.301, p=.02, and higher flourishing, t(16.3)=3.25, p=.005 than educators who did not meet with others.

Next steps include examining educator and program characteristics that predict well-being and further exploring associations between well-being constructs.

Authors

• Alison Hooper, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
  Presenting Author

• Holly Hatton-Bowers, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

• Kyong-Ah Kwon, University of Oklahoma

• Laura Lessard, University of Delaware