Stress in childcare: Screaming point

People who work with children are prone to various forms of stress, but they can learn to avoid it or turn it to positive effects, says Andrea Clifford-Poston

No-one is immune from stress and maybe this is why the word has become so popular. It is also possible, however, that stress is a word used nowadays with many different meanings. A grandmother who says she 'didn't have time to be stressed by childrearing in her day' probably found it just as difficult as her daughter does, but describes it differently. She was, she says, 'just busy'. What is the difference between ordinary 'busy-ness', hard work and stress?

When stress starts

One nursery I visited had increased its places for children with special educational needs from four to eight. Staff reacted with mixed feelings, pleased that their work was being recognised but anxious about 'the extra workload'. By the time I was present at a team meeting, two weeks later, people were feeling angry and frustrated. Most of the staff were afraid they wouldn't be able to cope and felt the decision had been 'foisted upon them'. They described feeling 'stressed' by the change in policy. In fact, they were anxious about the change in policy.

Stress occurs when anxiety sets in, usually expressed as a fear of being expected to do more than one feels capable of doing. It also occurs when people feel angry and frustrated about lack of power and resources. When a person is feeling stressed, it may be helpful to ask, 'What am I anxious/ angry about?' and 'And what can I do about it?' Identifying resources available will help to restore a sense of power. In fact, if stress is acted upon rather than merely thought about, it can benefit us by acting as a prompt to find better ways of managing our work.

Undervalued workers

People working with children seem particularly vulnerable to stress, although they usually enjoy their jobs. Why should this be?

On the whole, work with children is underpaid and undervalued. A lack of resources and sometimes poor working conditions are daily reminders to practitioners that their skills go unrecognised. Such conditions may make it difficult for them to hold on to the idea that their work is worthwhile, leading to anxiety and depression, which may be misconstrued as stress. The last few years have also been a time of policy changes in the early years, which can also cause stress.

Other stresses are more subtle. Many people who work with children do so from a sense of vocation. They knew from a very early age that this is what they wanted to do. They may have been influenced by family tradition - for example it is common to find several teachers in several generations of one family - but the overriding motivation is vocation.

Working with children may also be a 'remedy' for a difficult childhood. Practitioners may feel, rightly, that they have a heightened awareness of what it is like to be a child. They may also have a fantasy that by helping other children to have a good childhood, they are somehow eradicating the pain of their own. A nursery nurse, whose own childhood lacked affection, will cuddle babies because she knows they need it and enjoy it, but also as a way of cuddling the deprived baby inside herself. She knows what children need because she knows what she missed.

High expectations

As a result of this sense of vocation and the need to give others a good childhood, early years practitioners may have overly high expectations of themselves. Marie, a senior nursery nurse, was having lunch in a restaurant with a friend and her lively three-year-old, who threw a massive temper tantrum. Having run the gamut of her skills, the mother shouted at Marie, "You're the expert - do something!"

Being thought to be 'good with children' brings its own stresses. Marie immediately felt that she should produce some magic - which she couldn't - and consequently felt deskilled, hopeless and stressed. Her expectation of herself was that she should be able to handle a public temper tantrum in a calm and efficient way. She was stressed, not by her failure to calm the child, but by her expectation that she should be able to do so. That very expectation, it can be argued, was paralysing her skills.

The expectations of parents with children at a nursery can also be a cause of stress for the staff. The parents may perceive the practitioners as experts who can fill the holes in their parenting skills, and stresses arise when their expectations seem thwarted. If parents are critical, disagreeing with the practitioner over nursery practice, then this can also cause tensions. It may be better for a practitioner to take the line, 'Look, we don't have to agree about this, but we both want what is best for the child'.

Conversely, though most parents are happy when their child settles well into nursery and seems hopelessly in love with the adults there, they will also admit to some jealousy of their child's relationship with the staff. An inexperienced practitioner may need help to handle this situation sensitively.

Sharing children's pain

Children's feelings are very powerful by virtue of their primitive nature. Babies and toddlers tell adults how they feel by making adults feel the same, and this continues, to an extent, throughout life. We have all had the experience of the mood of a lively, happy group, sinking when joined by one depressed personality.

Our self image - the way we perceive ourselves as good or bad, lovable or unlovable - is a reflection of how we are treated by other people. So if a child has suffered a destructive or painful experience within the family, he is likely to bring that to nursery workers. Staff may feel helpless and angry in the face of his difficult behaviour. Faced with a difficult child, it is worth asking, 'How does this child make me feel?' What you are feeling is likely to be connected to how the child is feeling, and understanding how the child feels is the best route to successful management. When what is real to the child, is real to someone else, then he is linked to the world and meaningful relationships.

A practitioner, flooded and overwhelmed by the myriad of feelings projected on to her, may well feel stress. The skill lies in being able to process the feelings and to hand them back to the child in a meaningful way.

Children's projected feelings may also stir up the practitioner's own early childhood emotions. Adults working with children have to share the children's feelings in order to understand them, but if they cannot disassociate them from their own feelings, then they may end up being very critical of parents, particularly if they had a difficult childhood themselves. When practitioners understand their anger with their own parents, they are free to develop compassion and understanding for their children's parents, to whom they can become a valuable resource.