The first week of May was “Teacher Appreciation Week,” which falls in a month designated as “Mental Health Awareness Month.” This year, these two awareness campaigns have coincided with a mental health crisis that is destroying the field of early care and education (ECE). An astounding 46 percent of early childhood professionals suffer from depression. As a result of the pandemic, burnout is widespread, with 67 percent of early childhood professionals experiencing moderate to high levels of stress. A mass exodus from the field is currently underway, and the ECE field has lost 10 percent of its workforce since the start of the pandemic.
At the Policy Equity Group, we are lucky to have a trained school psychologist and two former early educators on staff who keep us connected to the classroom. We know that early educators operate like a command center for children, families, and administrators within the ECE setting. On a daily basis, early educators must be attuned to a child’s emotional needs, developmental milestones and curriculum needs, nutrition and feeding habits, as well as daily toileting and hygiene needs, while balancing the demands of administrators and desires of parents. Each early educator is responsible for multiple children while their own professional needs are crushed beneath a long list of demands that has only lengthened during the pandemic.
National awareness days, weeks, and months, are well-intentioned public relations campaigns. Parents sincerely and lovingly appreciate the work of their early educators, and the gestures of appreciation are meaningful to those receiving them. But if we are being brutally honest, for many burnt-out early educators, Teacher Appreciation Week can also serve as a bitter reminder of much larger problems that can’t be solved with a few days of recognition, and the emotional labor required to express gratitude adds to the stress and list of tasks educators are already managing.
Unfortunately, those who need to show true appreciation — our policymakers — fail to do so. The mental health of early childhood educators is highly related to the financial struggles associated with them not making a livable wage. Early educators are experiencing depression, stress, and burnout in large part because they are not being compensated in a way that is commensurate with their workload and value to society. As our country slowly attempts to recover from the pandemic, it is not providing the resources to confront these root causes of the mental health crisis among early educators — a crisis that is only getting worse. It is also important to note in the wake of the most recent attack on women’s rights, that poor compensation among a field that is overwhelming female with significant representation among people of color is yet another example of the country’s lack of gender and racial equity.
This early educator mental health crisis is affecting our nation’s youngest children. We know that the pandemic has profoundly affected child mental health, and the best way to support the mental health of children is through high-quality teacher-child interactions. Yet, we are not addressing the mental health of our early childhood educators despite the fact that they are the most important factor in ensuring positive outcomes for our children. If they are not provided the resources to address and maintain their own mental health, they cannot be expected to guide and support the mental health of our children.
So, what will begin to address the mental health crisis in early care and education? First, as a society, our policymakers must commit to fully financing the ECE system so that early educators are not only paid what they deserve, but also receive mental health supports as part of a larger benefits package. As individuals, the greatest act of appreciation for overworked and undervalued early educators would be to take the time to advocate for these supports. A single week of recognition needs to be transformed into 52 weeks of advocacy.
With the week of flowers, gifts, and proclamations behind us, let us continue this week and the weeks ahead to show appreciation to our early educators by getting them what they really need.