The Rewards and Stresses of Teaching for Infant and Toddler Educators

Emerging work on educator well-being highlights relational well-being, a new construct reflecting, in part, the quality of educators’ workplace relationships, as potentially central for supporting educators. Relational well-being is understudied in the context of educators’ stressors, as are educators’ experiences in the relationships central to their work - those with children, families, colleagues, supervisors - which comprise their relational well-being. This qualitative study sought to advance our understanding of relational experiences and their impacts. Interviews were conducted with 22 infant/toddler educators from a Midwestern, U.S. state, most of whom worked in Early Head Start programs. Thematic analyses confirmed that educators’ experiences are simultaneously stressful and rewarding. Challenging and positive feelings coexist and are often inseparable, suggesting the need to consider both dimensions to better understand well-being. Novel findings included: 1) the framing of educators’ stressful and positive relational experiences as intrapersonal and interpersonal and the intersection of these dimensions; 2) educators’ explanations of the nuanced, challenging interactions with “upper” administrators with whom they had less frequent contact, and 3) educators’ intentional use of positive intrapersonal and interpersonal experiences to cope with stressors, and reduce the impacts of stressors on their interactions with children. Findings underscore educators’ intentional centering of children in their work and highlight educators’ use of rewarding experiences to sustain them and support responsive caregiving. The intentional use of rewarding experiences as a buffer may illustrate one path through which positive feelings relate to well-being. However, while this strategy was protective for children, it represented another layer of stress for educators.