Supporting the Emotional Well-being of Early Childhood Educators Working in Head Start

• In Event: Well-Being in Early Head Start and Head Start Programs: A Multidimensional Perspective

Abstract

High-quality early learning environments provide children with safety, enrichment, and stimulation and may particularly beneficial for vulnerable children and families (Watamura et al., 2011). Yet, recent national reports underscore alarmingly high rates of stress, burnout and turnover among early childhood teachers (Cassidy et al., 2019). High-quality early learning environments can be adversely impacted by early childhood teachers’ stress (Whitaker et al., 2015) and turnover. One of the major factors frequently mentioned as contributing to this high rate of teacher burnout is difficulty managing professional stress and negative emotions (Montgomery & Rupp, 2005). Strengthening the emotional well-being of early childhood teachers may be one critically important way of mitigating early childhood teacher stress and promote their well-being. Mindfulness based interventions and strategies are emerging as an effective means to address workplace stress and promote emotional wellbeing (Barlett et al., 2019; Lomas et al., 2018). However, effective interventions tailored to support the emotional well-being of early childhood teachers are needed. To address this need, the Cultivating Healthy Intentional, Mindful Educators (CHIME) intervention was developed. CHIME uses mindfulness techniques to foster social-emotional learning, compassion and emotion regulation in early childhood professionals.
Using an iterative development process, we conducted feasibility and acceptability evaluations to refine and develop CHIME and examined the promise of the CHIME intervention for promoting early childhood educators’ emotional and physiological regulation in two different pilot studies. The first pilot study examined the acceptability, feasibility and promise of CHIME delivered over 12 weeks (N=41) (96% women, M age=35.7 years, 88% Caucasian/White, 65% were parents) and the second pilot study examined the promise of the 8-week version of CHIME delivered to teachers working in Early Head Start or Head Start (N=60) (see Table 1).
Overall, participants were positive about their experience with CHIME with 97% agreeing CHIME was beneficial. In the first pilot there were also statistically significant positive effects on perceived distress, burnout, perceived control at work, sleep quality, and some aspects of mindfulness. For example, a paired-sample T test showed that their emotional exhaustion scores decreased post intervention (t33 = 2.36, p = .024), and their depersonalization scores decreased as well (t33 = 2.24, p = .032). For pilot study two, when examining pre-test data, emotion dysregulation mediated the association between mindfulness and mental well-being (.398, 95% bootstrapped CI = .198 to .605) and workplace depersonalization (-2.853, 95% bootstrapped CI = -6.199 to -.039) (see Table 2) but not workplace emotional exhaustion (-2.393, 95% bootstrapped CI = -7.193 to 3.840) or workplace personal efficacy (3.142, 95% bootstrapped CI = -.354 to 6.879). Additionally, there was a significant decrease in emotion dysregulation and a significant increase in mindfulness, mental well-being and resilience.
Using mindfulness to promote compassion and social-emotional learning may be an acceptable, feasible, and effective way to increase the emotional well-being of early childhood educators. We will share our next steps that include our data collection efforts evaluating CHIME with a wait-listed comparison group during the COVID-19 pandemic. Implications for policy, implementation challenges, and study limitation will be discussed.

Group Authors

Holly Hatton-Bowers, Carrie Clark, and Pearl Avari

Authors

• Holly Hatton-Bowers, University of Nebraska - Lincoln
  Presenting Author

• Carrie Clark, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
  Non-Presenting Author

• Pearl Avari, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
  Non-Presenting Author