Paychecks don’t reflect a certain type of tiredness. Anyone who has worked in a toddler classroom for ten years will describe the experience before discussing the pay. It manifests in the shoulders, in the dreadful way educators discuss Sundays, and in the silent choice to quit a career they once cherished. The National League of Cities has been gathering data on this topic for the past few years, and the conclusion is unquestionable: cities can no longer ignore the fact that the people raising America’s youngest children are struggling financially.
Sitting with the numbers makes you uncomfortable. Depression rates among early care and education workers have been found to be about twice as high as those of low-income women nationwide, and their median pay in some states is barely above the poverty line. According to certain studies, over 40% of workers experience food insecurity. These are not anomalies. These are recurring patterns in North Carolina, Arkansas, Austin, and Seattle. It’s difficult to ignore how infrequently the combination of high responsibility, low pay, and ongoing stress is recognized as a public health concern rather than merely a peculiarity of the workforce.
Slowly, some cities have begun constructing their own scaffolding instead of waiting for federal fixes. During the pandemic, San Francisco ran a virtual mental health consultation program that allowed providers to contact a counselor regardless of where or when they were working.
It may seem insignificant, but for those who hardly ever had a lunch break, let alone a therapy appointment, it made a big difference. In an effort to treat self-care as a component of the compensation package rather than an afterthought, Washington, D.C. went one step further and combined its Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund with wellness stipends that cover things like gym memberships.
This is important for reasons other than the workers themselves. Children pick up on the emotional states of the adults in their environment, and a stressed-out, inexperienced, underpaid teacher is just not prepared to handle a meltdown in a class of three-year-olds. Researchers in South Florida discovered that when teachers received structured mental health consultation, both classroom safety procedures and kids’ self-regulation improved—not because the kids changed, but rather because the adults in their environment did. It’s a subtly convincing argument: helping adults is actually helping children.
While Hartford developed something more akin to a support community—a network for family child care providers that offers mentorship and business assistance in addition to the emotional infrastructure—Jacksonville adopted a different strategy, obtaining trauma-informed training during the pandemic’s peak. These programs aren’t particularly eye-catching. They read less like headlines and more like fixes. However, burnout and instability have long been the main causes of turnover in early childhood education, and lowering that churn is, to be honest, less expensive than continuously retraining new employees.
It is reasonable for skeptics to wonder if peer networks and wellness stipends can truly make up for wages that are still below $15 per hour in many cities. Most likely not completely. Underlying the wellness issue is still a wage issue, and access to counseling cannot completely replace a livable salary. However, the National League of Cities appears to be making a more specific and attainable claim: that mental health assistance is an essential supplement to fair compensation rather than its replacement. Less turnover and more stable classrooms are reported in cities that have tried both. For the time being, it is unclear whether other cities will follow; this will probably be determined over the coming years, classroom by classroom and child by child.
