See Beyond the Child’s Behavior to the Heart”: Examining Early Childhood Educator’s Experiences with a Mindfulness-Based Intervention to Reduce Psychological Distress and Workplace Stress

Educators are crucial to the development and learning outcomes of children in early childhood settings. However, early childhood educators are often stressed and experience lower well-being due to multifaceted teaching and non-teaching task demands. To address the national concern of a stressed educator workforce, recent efforts have included using mindfulness-based interventions with educators in K-12 settings. The current study examined how participation in a mindfulness-based intervention impacted early childhood educators’ mindfulness, self-compassion, psychological distress, and workplace stress. The study used a mixed-methods approach to effectively address the research questions. Using quantitative methods (1) changes in mindfulness, self-compassion, psychological distress, and workplace stress of the educators in the treatment group of the intervention were examined. Furthermore, the qualitative approach aimed to understand the impact of a mindfulness-based intervention on early childhood educators descriptively. Surveys from pre and post-intervention were analyzed along with open-ended responses and journal prompts. Results indicated: (a) mindfulness in educators increased from pre-intervention to post-intervention, (b) self-compassion was significantly higher from pre-intervention to post-intervention, (c) educators experienced significantly lower psychological distress at post-intervention compared to pre-intervention, and (d) positive impacts for some aspects of workplace stress. Qualitatively, educators perceived the intervention to be helpful in their personal and professional life in multiple ways. The findings added to the limited literature and show promising evidence of the effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions in early childhood education settings