Imagine a preschool director in a small child care facility in a suburban area of Ohio on a Tuesday morning. She’s answering a parent’s call, covering for a teacher who called in sick for the third time this month, mentally going over the licensing paperwork that needs to be completed by Friday, and attempting to recall the last time she had lunch before noon. She oversees a group of seven employees. She doesn’t have a deputy. Since last fall, she has not had a peer check-in. By all measures, she is exhausted, and the teachers who are observing her are making their own judgments about how long they want to stay.
This portrait is not an isolated one. It’s a reality that affects the entire industry, and the research is becoming more explicit about who is to blame. Around 30% of early childhood educators worldwide experience burnout, and up to one-third of those in the field actively plan to leave. These figures have endured for many years, engulfing successive generations of workers who came to the job with sincere dedication and departed exhausted. Although accurate, the conventional explanation—low pay, high emotional demands, and underappreciated work—is not comprehensive. Newer research is revealing something more specific: management failures, which are rarely discussed in the same sentence as the crisis they are causing, are exacerbating and, in many cases, creating burnout.
There is a real and well-established emotional labor component. Early childhood educators must constantly control their own emotional states. For example, they must remain calm during challenging family conversations, be patient with a two-year-old who is having a meltdown, and remain warm throughout eight-hour workdays that hardly ever provide a quiet moment.
According to Zero to Three’s research, 36% of infant-toddler teachers don’t have a set daily break, and 34% don’t have a place to unwind at work. Clinical supervision is a standard professional support for social workers engaged in similarly intense emotional labor. Most early childhood educators don’t. It’s not a coincidence. It is a reflection of a management culture that has traditionally viewed the emotional health of these employees as an individual rather than an organizational duty.
Teacher motivation declines in quantifiable and unsurprising ways when directors fail to set clear goals, do not involve teachers in decision-making, or do not offer structured opportunities for professional development. This finding is remarkably consistent across various research contexts, including studies in Malaysia, Australia, and the United States, indicating that the issue is neither cultural nor regional. It is structural. It is impossible for leaders who are overworked, alone, and underfunded to adequately assist those under them. Burnout spreads throughout the company. The children in those rooms quietly suffer the consequences of a director operating on fumes, which leads to a staff operating on fumes. These effects sometimes take years to manifest.
This is more difficult to overlook than it used to be due to the size of the workforce. Between 2020 and 2023, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a 5.9 percent decrease in the child care workforce. It’s not a statistical anomaly. At a time when demand for early childhood services is growing, universal preschool initiatives are gaining momentum in states like Oregon, and researchers are releasing study after study demonstrating how a child’s first five years of life shape almost everything that comes after, this industry is contracting. The aspirations of policy and the reality of the workforce are diverging. It’s difficult to ignore the fact that the organizations that publicly advocate for early childhood investment are occasionally the same ones that underinvest in the individuals who carry out that work on a daily basis.
An increasing amount of research suggests solutions that call for different management priorities rather than limitless budgets. Reflective supervision, which involves regular meetings between educators and supervisors to discuss their experiences and difficulties, has consistently been shown to reduce feelings of isolation and foster the kind of trust that keeps people in their jobs. The feeling of working alone that burnout thrives on is addressed by scheduled peer support structures, which are nearly free and allow coworkers to validate each other’s experiences and share useful strategies. Numerous studies have shown that professional development—real investments in skill development rather than merely compliance training—increases job satisfaction.
All of these solutions necessitate a change in management from doing to leading. Directors who spend their days pursuing paperwork and covering coverage gaps lack the time to create the kind of thoughtful, encouraging culture that keeps teachers on staff. It’s possible that this is the true core of the issue, not that the work is difficult, which it is, but rather that there are virtually no systems in place to assist those who put in a lot of effort. The epidemic of burnout is real. The proof that it didn’t have to be this awful is also present.
