Chapter 5: Early Childhood Professionals’ Psychological Well-Being

Children rapidly develop physical, cognitive, and social-emotional skills and demonstrate high levels of developmental plasticity during early childhood years. For this reason, it is critical to provide high quality early learning experiences to promote development during these periods. It is well known that children attending high quality child care demonstrate better developmental and educational outcomes in their later life (e.g., Peisner-Feinberg et al., 2001). In the child care literature, the quality of child care has been defined by structural quality and process quality. Structural quality represents program-level regulations, such as teacher-to-child ratio, group size, staff qualifications, administrative practices, safety regulations, spacing and furniture arrangements, and/or availability of learning materials (Peisner-Feinberg et al., 2001). Process quality represents a learning process that happens in child care settings, which includes emotional support, instructional support, classroom organization, teacher-child relationships, and children’s engagement (Mashburn et al., 2008). In addition to structural and process quality, early childhood professionals’ psychological well-being, the basis of teachers’ abilities to create positive child care environments, is an emerging area in child care literature.