Nurturing Practitioner Well-being

Early years practitioners and educators are the bodies and minds on the floor of our settings. Supporting children’s learning and development while meeting managerial demands requires a high level of personal well-being. Because practitioners juggle their own life baggage simultaneously, they must feel supported in the workplace. Consequently, nurturing practitioner well-being is essential for a healthy and responsive staff team.

The Invisible Weight and Demands on Educators

Early years is an incredibly demanding sector both physically and mentally. Therefore, it is no surprise that a lack of practitioner well-being is commonplace across the sector. Specifically, a happy workforce is a healthy workforce where people feel respected and valued. Furthermore, practitioners are considerably more likely to strive for professional development when their well-being is prioritised by leadership.

Our practitioners often put on a brave face so as not to impact the children’s experiences. However, from a leadership point of view, we should not encourage this to be the norm. Because faking a smile does not solve underlying problems, it can cause deeper-rooted issues in the long term. Ultimately, as Dr Allan Presland reminds us, early education is where confidence begins. Thus, we must ensure that staff well-being is treated with the importance it deserves.

Why Authentic Leadership Matters for Well-being

It is imperative that managers understand just how stressed their workforce is in order to provide adequate support. Instead of just a hamper of goodies, practitioners need proper support where they feel listened to and understood. Specifically, to promote children’s emotional well-being and self-regulation, we must be able to do this ourselves first. Therefore, leadership must lead the way in breaking the silence on mental health.

As a sector we pride ourselves on how communicative we are, yet when it comes to our practitioner Well-being and mental health, we’d much rather sweep it under the carpet, pretend and bury ourselves in the day-to-day – but in order for us to be role models for our children and support and promote children’s emotional well-being and self-regulation, we must be able to do this ourselves first.

As the people who work so closely with the youngest members of our sector, we must be emotionally and mentally available to these children - they need us to be ready to support and listen to them, and ultimately, if we’re not OK, then the children won’t be OK. Children are incredibly intuitive and even our youngest children can pick up on emotional energy, so if practitioners’ emotional needs are not being met and supported, then this will have an impact on the emotional well-being of the children they care for.

How Practitioner Wellness Impacts Children

Practitioners must be emotionally and mentally available to the youngest members of our sector. Because children are incredibly intuitive, they can pick up on emotional energy even at a very young age. Consequently, if practitioner well-being needs are not met, this will have a direct impact on the children they care for. Therefore, being okay with ourselves is a prerequisite for ensuring that the children are okay. Early years needs to lose the blame culture and the stigma surrounding mental illness. Specifically, a person can have a mental illness and still be perfectly fit to look after children.

Challenging the Stigma: Professionalism and Mental Illness

All we want for the children we care for is for them to grow and develop into happy, healthy human beings who are emotionally intelligent, available, kind and empathetic of others. This ultimately is also the very same thing we’d wish for our staff teams and colleagues, and so it must start from the top and be cascaded down, thus helping us nurture and support our children in developing essential emotional skills, and building the foundations for their future emotional well-being and self-regulation.

Creating a Culture of Emotional Intelligence

Children learn from their environments and the behaviours they observe in adults. Specifically, if they see leadership taking care of staff well-being, they will develop these kind behaviours themselves. Because we want children to grow into emotionally intelligent human beings, we must model this through open conversations. Ultimately, by prioritising well-being, we are transforming the lives of generations of children. Consequently, we build a society of kind and empathetic young people.

Did you find this blog on practitioner well-being usful? Take a look at some of our other well-being blogs here:

• Staff health and well-being
• Nurturing emotional well-being through mentoring

About the author:

Chloe Webster is an OFSTED Outstanding childminder with over 10 years experience in the sector, Chloe writes for a number of early years magazines and journals.