While some people are tired from the work itself, others are tired from feeling like the work doesn’t matter to anyone above them. That’s the quiet story that’s been buried in a growing body of research on early childhood educators in the US. These are the people who spend their days building toddlers’ mental and emotional skills but come home at night wondering how they’ll pay their rent.
Many people in the field have known for years that the Mississippi Wages Survey from 2023 means what it says. The hourly rate for early childhood teachers is usually around $10.93. That amount goes up to about $11.66 an hour in big cities. In the country, it’s less than $10. The numbers here are not from the 1990s. In a time when people across the country are talking about childcare more than ever before, this is where things stand right now.
The problem with wage compression that the researchers found makes the results even harder to accept. There is a slight link between more education and better pay, but it’s not very strong. Teachers spend years getting degrees, doing practicums, and studying child development and curriculum theory, but those credentials don’t show up in any meaningful way on their paychecks. In a way, the system tells them that their knowledge is a nice bonus and not something that should be paid for. It’s possible that this dynamic is what makes people leave more than any single policy failure.
A 23-year-old early years teacher in Dublin named Chloe Knox made it clear at the start of a staff sector survey last year. She said, “They called me a babysitter.” “I didn’t study for four years to be called a babysitter.” It wasn’t just about money that made her angry, but that was a part of it. It was about what the low wages show: that people, and by extension, the government, don’t fully understand what early childhood educators do. She said that people have very different ideas about primary school teachers. Teaching kids ages 0 to 5 how to read, write, handle their emotions, and get along with others doesn’t have the same cultural weight, even though it may have a bigger impact on their lives.
The research proves that this isn’t a problem with how people see things; it’s a structural one. Geographic differences make the problem worse in ways that are hard to fix with a single rule. Educators in rural areas make a lot less than those in cities, but they still have to deal with a lot of the same professional and cost-of-living issues. The average wage in cities is higher, but in small urban areas, like the towns between big cities and rural areas, average pay is lower than you might think. The early childhood care job market doesn’t work like a straight line, and policies that try to make it that way miss where the real gaps are.
The word “burnout” comes up a lot in polls like this one. In a recent sector study, 70% of people who answered said they wanted to quit their jobs because they didn’t think they were being valued enough. That number is really crazy. These aren’t people who just happened to become professionals; most of them trained for their jobs and chose to do them. Seeing experienced teachers leave the field is a problem for more than just the job market. It’s not good for the kids who are left in the care of staff members who are always changing jobs and being tired.
Early childhood education seems to be in a strange place in the way people think about care work. People tend to lower their expectations of how much something should cost because it feels personal, close, and homey. The research shows that wage reforms, more money, and help with professional development are all steps that need to be taken. All of that doesn’t come as a big surprise. The fact that these concerns have been raised for such a long time and that action has been taken so slowly is very interesting. The teachers understand what’s wrong. They’re just waiting to see if someone in charge agrees with them.
