Mindfulness Intervention for Early Childhood Educators

Summary

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Across varied disciplines, the science is clear that early relationships and the quality of early care are central in achieving positive language, cognitive, and social development outcomes for young children and investments made in early childhood pay for themselves. Early childhood education is a ...

Across varied disciplines, the science is clear that early relationships and the quality of early care are central in achieving positive language, cognitive, and social development outcomes for young children and investments made in early childhood pay for themselves. Early childhood education is a critical context for fostering stimulating, responsive, and sensitive caregiving as a substantial number of children under the age of 5 years spend time in childcare settings, with 64% of children aged 3 to 5 years enrolled in non-relative care outside the home. While great efforts are made to improve the children's social emotional well-being in child care environments, less attention has been given to early childhood educators' (encompassing of early childhood teachers') own well-being. Research that has been conducted finds early childhood educators experience high levels of distress, including high levels of depression and burnout. Additionally, previous research finds school age teachers feeling overworked and overstressed show an altered hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and higher levels of teacher burnout is related to elevated cortisol levels in elementary school students. The current study will test the efficacy of an 8-week compassion and mindfulness based stress reduction program for early childhood educators, as well as characterizing relations from early childhood educator wellbeing to child self-regulation. Teachers will be assigned at the center level to an intervention group or a wait-list comparison condition, with the wait-list group receiving the intervention after the 8-week study. Pre- intervention, teachers in both groups will complete survey measures of their wellbeing, mindfulness, and emotion regulation; emotion regulation tasks; and assessments of stress physiology in the classroom. Teacher-child interactions will be observed and children's self-regulation will be measured. Post-intervention, the same teacher measures will be collected.

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