When you go to most early childhood centers on a Tuesday morning, it’s calm chaos in the best way possible. Little kids were yanking on shoelaces and preschoolers were arguing over a block. In the background, an adult was kneeling at eye level and keeping everything together. Often, you won’t see what takes place after work. The boss was in the back office by himself, looking at a staffing spreadsheet. At 10 p.m., the assistant director was answering emails from parents. The person in charge of the program who hasn’t had a real lunch break in three weeks.
Burnout in early childhood education is something that has been talked about before. For years, researchers and advocates have been sounding the alarm about the mental health of teachers, and for good reason. Studies show that early childhood educators are more likely than most other professionals to be depressed and stressed out all the time. That is a big problem by itself. But below the surface of that bigger crisis is a smaller, more specific story that hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention: what’s going on with the program managers, directors, and leaders who run these everyday?
The McCormick Center for Early Childhood Leadership polled 90 new administrators who were taking part in a program to help them become better leaders. The numbers were shocking, but not to people who have spent time in child care centers. More than half said they were emotionally or physically worn out at least once a week. Seventy percent said they often thought about things that stressed them out at work when they were not working. Almost three quarters said they often put other people ahead of themselves at their own expense. It’s not a sign of a bad attitude or not being able to manage your time well. They show that there is a problem with the structure.
This is made even more complicated by the fact that most of these administrators got their jobs in ways that almost guaranteed they wouldn’t be ready for some parts of the job. Most of them had a lot of experience working with kids and teaching young kids, like in a classroom. But running a program is not the same thing. These are skills that aren’t usually taught in early childhood degree programs: managing people and money, coaching and supervising staff, and making long-term plans. Administrators are expected to deal with them right away, often without a mentor or enough training, and often while still having to teach in the classroom on top of everything else.
One could make the case that leadership pipelines for young children are not producing the people they’re supposed to. One of the things that makes someone a great director is that they are great with kids and families. Then all of a sudden, they have to handle payroll, deal with staff conflicts, and try to keep a team together that is already very busy, all while getting very little help from the systems or organizations above them. Nick Taylor, CEO of Unmind, put it very simply: managers are given very different tasks and then left to figure it out on their own without getting the training they need to do well. This is mostly true in the business world, but it’s almost exactly true in early childhood administration.
There is a lot more at stake here than just individual burnout. Over 1,100 teachers were polled in 2023, and the results showed that how teachers saw their director’s support was directly linked to whether they stayed or left. Leader support wasn’t just a nice-to-have; it was a sign that someone was likely to leave their job. And staff turnover quickly affects other places where young children are. Kids lose contact with adults they trust. Institutional knowledge is lost in programs. Enrollment goes down. Quality goes down. It gets harder to keep the ecosystem going as a whole.
Still, the administrators in the McCormick study weren’t cynical or out of it, which is something to keep in mind. Most said they often felt hopeful about their programs, and most said they still got excited about going to work. That shows why people work in this field and how much is expected of them in return. When you work with young children, burnout doesn’t always look like defeat. Sometimes it looks like someone is still there and still cares, but they are slowly running out of the resources they need to keep doing both.
The truth is that no effort to improve the quality of child care or keep teachers will work as planned if the people in charge of these programs are silently losing their jobs. Help from leadership isn’t a luxury. It’s possible that everything else hinges on it.
