Child care is known as a thankless profession. After all, the required skill set is often downplayed, the pay is lousy, and the difficulties are numerous. To keep our best daycare providers in the profession, it is important to focus on the prevention of the burnout of daycare workers.
Scheduling Issues
Early child care workers are notoriously overworked and underpaid. The most obvious way to prevent burnout of daycare workers is to pay them higher salaries. Where this is not possible, however, easing up on the schedule of daycare workers can help. In some daycare centers, workers have virtually no downtime throughout the day. Although they can officially take a lunch break, this may seldom happen in practice. Ensuring that there is a rotation of workers, so that each worker has “off duty” time, and is able to take a full break during that time, can help to prevent burnout.
Communication With Parents
Daycare workers often feel that the parents of their charges look down on their jobs as menial and requiring little skill. One way for child care workers to develop pride in themselves and their abilities is to share what actually goes on in the daycare center with parents. For example in a toddler room, the child care workers may send home a weekly newsletter or send out a mass email to parents describing the various activities that took place during the past week. (Obviously, this technique may not work as effectively in a room of newborns or young infants.)
Communication Among Staff
Another way for daycare workers to appreciate how hard they are working is to communicate with their colleagues about the work that they do. Staff development meetings, related speakers, and even shared after-work activities, can give workers a chance to talk about the methods that they’re using and new ideas that they’ve heard of. This will not only help them to find solutions to problems they are dealing with regarding specific children, it will also help them appreciate the importance of their jobs.
Removing the Glass Ceiling from Child Care
No matter how good of a job a child care worker does, they may feel that there is no room for growth in her job. This feeling can lead to a lackadaisical attitude, and eventually to burnout. Burnout of daycare workers can be attained by removing the metaphorical glass ceiling that seems to block the workers’ career growth. For example, a daycare worker who has shown dedication towards her job can be given more of a management role. This may include training new daycare workers, interacting with parents or management of the child care center, or developing creative activities for the center to try. This will give workers an incentive to continue to hone their child care skills as much as possible, and will help to prevent burnout.