Positive Relationships: Stress - Present tense

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Stressed? Tense? You’re not alone. Earlier this year, the National Education Union warned of an ‘epidemic of stress’ among school teachers, and according to the Office for National Statistics, the risk of suicide among primary and nursery school teachers between 2011 and 2015 was 42 per cent higher than the national average.

In 2016, Norwegian academic Mette Løvgren described childcare workers as having ‘the second-worst occupation for work-related health problems’.

Dr Løvgren added that ‘the consequences of workers being emotionally exhausted (and eventually burned out) include job withdrawal and lower productivity and effectiveness’.
So, if a less stressful working environment can have a positive impact on retention rates and provision quality, how can practitioners find support if they need it?

Harriet Thomas, a Master’s student in early childhood studies at Roehampton University, has launched website Early Years Green Room (https://eygreenroom.com) to support early years practitioners suffering from emotional stress at work.

The site is an anonymous ‘reflective space’ aiming to support practitioner well-being, reduce burnout rate and alleviate compassion fatigue.

Ms Thomas says that while she is aware of many face-to-face discussion groups, there is a large community whose main form of communication is online.

‘I thought about how we could get these people to talk about their feelings and develop reflective practice,’ she says. ‘I felt that there should be a safe space where people felt they could talk but not be judged.

‘Whereas Facebook and other social media sites are all about personal profiles, I wanted the Early Years Green Room to focus on the importance of anonymity.’

The ‘digital democratic space’ provided by the Early Years Green Room invites practitioners to share their experiences on a forum. The site provides links to articles and videos exploring aspects of emotional stress in early years work, and Ms Thomas is also looking to recruit mentors with several years’ experience in settings to provide advice and guidance for practitioners and create an ‘internal leadership community’.


SELF-ESTEEM

Ms Thomas says self-esteem is likely to be a large focus of the discussions in the Early Years Green Room.

She explains, ‘The role requires a high amount of personal self-regulation and huge commitment to remain emotionally available and positive. This can become a real burden if the practitioner does not feel valued or strong in themselves.

‘It is widely understood that the early years workforce is characterised as one that endures high stress and struggles with self-esteem. Practitioners are working in a low-status, low-paid job, sometimes up to 60 hours a week, while carrying all the emotional challenges of working with young children as well as often having to deal with the emotional management of other staff and their feelings.

‘We know that they often do not feel they have a voice. It is only when they feel they do, and that their voice has value, that they start to feel they have rights and can be an advocate, and that is when as a workforce they will start saying they should be paid more, that they deserve more.’

LIMITED RESOURCES

Dr Peter Elfer, principal lecturer in early childhood studies at Roehampton University, agrees that finding space for practitioners to share their feelings is vital.

‘Some heads and managers are brilliant at supporting their staff and tuning in to all the emotional work that staff do alongside the physical and intellectual work,’ he says. ‘But there is not any spare time in most nurseries, and finding time to give staff an opportunity to debrief, offload and reflect on their work is very difficult.

‘We have the “supervision” requirement in the EYFS and some heads and managers are very conscientious about implementing it. But it is also clear that it is very hard for many nurseries to accommodate this when they are fitting in so much else on very limited resources.’

Professor Sacha Powell of Canter­bury Christ Church University says that when working on the Baby Room Project with colleague Professor Kathy Goouch (see More information), she observed many examples of time pressures and tight budgets limiting the space for practitioners to find comfort or support.

‘We certainly heard examples of what might be called short-term stress, when practitioners were asking repeatedly to go to the loo as a means to escape the intensity of their work in the absence of alternative spaces and places to “switch off” such as staff rooms,’ she says.

‘Their conditions of work allow for few breaks and involve very long working hours and sometimes the babies set each other off crying. I remember one practitioner said she spent her lunch break sitting in her car so she could get out of the building without going off the premises.’

Professor Powell adds that some infant and toddler teachers she interviewed in ‘birth to three’ settings in the USA ‘talked about sometimes needing to step out or step back for a time and allow a co-teacher to step up while they had time to “breathe”.

‘They explained they did this because they wanted always to model good behaviour for the children and parents. In other words, they had to contain and hide their feelings to behave “professionally”.’


STAYING PROFESSIONAL

Ms Thomas says the Early Years Green Room site has sparked discussion about practitioners feeling they may have to hide their feelings to remain professional, especially in the case of dealing with appropriate loving relationships with children, or ‘professional love’.

‘People can feel uncomfortable discussing professional love because of the issues around safeguarding,’ she explains. ‘But there are many challenges within the idea that you care very deeply for children but it is entirely professional. We want to open up dialogue about what these feelings are about and why they are powerful.’

Dr Elfer agrees that forging relationships with children naturally creates complex emotional responses in practitioners.

‘When practitioners talk, it is clear how many positive emotions of joy, love and satisfaction there are. But the work can be very tough and demanding too – it can be painful to get attached to young children and then have to say goodbye, again and again, as groups of children arrive and then move on to the next room or to school. Yet that is what the “key person” approach expects.

‘A small number of children can be very demanding of attention, and meeting their needs while treating all children fairly can be challenging too. And then there is the very tiny proportion of children who, at one time or another, can really “get under our skin”.’


A PROBLEM SHARED

Dr Elfer suggests practitioners run the risk of making themselves more stressed by keeping these emotions bottled up.

‘I think the “nearly invisible” danger is that stress manifests itself when staff, perhaps not at all consciously, find themselves “distancing” themselves from children,’ he says.
‘This does not mean they are not vigilant about physical safety, supporting play and so on, but for children who are upset or distressed, they may find themselves emotionally keeping their distance.’

In his research on the work of early years practitioners, Wilfried Datler of the University of Vienna has acknowledged ‘how hard and disturbing it is, to be confronted so intimately with the […] often catastrophic emotions of very young children’.

‘From this point of view, the care­givers’ reserved behaviour can be understood as an expression of their desire to protect themselves from becoming overwhelmed.’


WORK DISCUSSION

Groups such as the Early Years Green Room could encourage more practitioners to air some of these emotions in a safe space.

‘Work discussion’, a method of learning developed by the Tavistock Clinic, involves small group discussions of experiences of work among professionals.

This is the principle on which the Early Years Green Room is based, and will be the subject of new research by Dr Elfer.

‘Funded by the Froebel Trust, we are doing a large piece of research to look at the contribution of work discussion, a model of professional reflection or supervision that is careful to include attention to emotional experience at work,’ he explains.

‘We have just finished the fieldwork and are now working on the findings. We want to know what staff who participated thought about the experience, whether it was helpful to them, whether parents and carers were aware of any differences and, most of all, whether it supported practitioners in their day-to-day interactions with children.’

However, Ms Thomas says she feels sharing emotions is becoming increasingly difficult for staff within their own workplaces. ‘Higher stress and anxiety leads to lower retention, but the use of temporary staff makes building strong and consistent relationships difficult,’ she argues.

With this in mind, the Early Years Green Room attempts to provide an online version of work discussion, building towards a planned well-being conference this autumn. Ms Thomas says she is also looking at introducing a ‘well-being day’ to nurseries, and hopes to make the Early Years Green Room a recognised service in the UK for developing reflective practice.

‘That would in turn mobilise an early years community to feel more empowered to raise their voices to the crucial importance and value of their role in society,’ she says.
‘Supporting their well-being allows them to feel stronger and more optimistic, to work more effectively and feel more autonomous. We want to make sure practitioners feel empowered to go back into the setting and feel their best.’

MORE INFORMATION

• Elfer P (2017) ‘Subtle emotional process in early childhood pedagogy: evaluating the contribution of the Tavistock Observation Method’, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, (25) 3
• Datler W, Datler M and Funder A (2010) ‘Struggling against a feeling of becoming lost: a young boy’s painful transition to day care’, Infant Observation, 13 (1)
• Goouch K and Powell S, Baby Room projects, http://www.canterbury.ac.uk/education/our-work/research-knowledge-exchange/research-centre-for-children-families-communities/baby-room/about.aspx 
• Løvgren M (2016) ‘Emotional exhaustion in day-care workers’, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal,
• 24 (1)
• www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/suicidebyoccupation/england2011to2015
• https://eygreenroom.com