Guest blog by Drew McGee, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Research Fellow & Consulting Research Scientist

It’s mid-afternoon in a preschool classroom, when energy is high and patience is thin. The room hums with play, but beneath the noise, a teacher’s nervous system is running on fumes. After a morning of constant demands and too little rest, her internal reserves are depleted. When a bin of blocks crashes to the floor, the sound jolts. A sharp reprimand slips out of the teacher before she can take a deep breath.

The children go quiet. They sense the change immediately — the subtle but unmistakable shift in the emotional “weather” of the adult they depend on. This moment isn’t about incompetence or a lack of dedication, but burnout.

For too long, we’ve treated educator mental health as personal or something separate from children’s outcomes or from their professional well-being. A private struggle. A secondary concern. My advisor, Sarah Watamura, often framed this as thinking about what we are told on a plane applies here as well: we’re told to secure our own masks first before helping others, not because adults matter more, but because someone gasping for air cannot rescue anyone else.

Yet in early childhood education, we routinely expect educators to provide emotional security for others before taking care of themselves.

The Science of Co-Regulation

Early childhood classrooms are powered by relationships. What looks like teaching on the surface is, at its core, continuous co-regulation.

Young children’s nervous systems are still developing. They do not yet have the internal circuitry to consistently calm themselves under stress. Instead, they borrow regulation from adults. Through repeated, attuned interactions (eye contact, warm tone, predictable responses), children’s brains learn to return to calm. These serve-and-return exchanges literally shape neural architecture.

Educators, then, are not simply instructors. They are biological stabilizers.

But co-regulation requires regulation. An adult whose stress response is chronically activated has fewer internal resources to lend. When educators operate in systems marked by workforce shortages, low wages, long hours, and lingering pandemic strain, the job’s baseline stress becomes unsustainable.

But burnout rarely arrives dramatically. It accumulates. Joy erodes. Patience shortens. Emotional numbness replaces engagement. Reactivity increases. Because classrooms function through relationships, depletion cannot be contained within the adult. It spills into the relational space as shorter responses, reduced eye contact, subtle withdrawal. Children are evolutionarily wired to detect these changes. They constantly scan for safety.

Developmental science tells us that children are exquisitely sensitive to emotional climate. When an adult is regulated, children experience stability. When an adult is chronically stressed, the relational rhythm begins to fray.

Serve-and-return interactions become less consistent. Tone sharpens. Predictability wavers. This stress spillover is the quiet transmission of dysregulation through micro-moments.

Over time, children may respond with heightened anxiety, increased challenging behavior, and may become withdrawn. Not because they are “difficult,” but because their nervous systems are responding to turbulence.

If the adult’s oxygen mask is slipping, the child feels it.

Conversely, when we stabilize the adult upstream, we reduce crises downstream. Supporting educator mental health is not a wellness perk or a soft add-on. It is core developmental infrastructure.

What Real Support Looks Like

Meaningful support goes beyond self-care rhetoric. It addresses systems.Supports like reflective supervision and mental health consultation create space for educators to process stress rather than absorb it. Peer coaching builds relational capacity. Organizational supports like adequate pay, planning time, and restorative breaks reduce chronic strain. These interventions do not “fix” teachers, but expand capacity.

The goal is not perfection. Children do not need flawless adults. They need adults who can remain present.

When educators have steady “oxygen” — emotional support, structural stability, professional dignity — classrooms feel calmer. Transitions are smoother. Children experience predictable safety. Neural pathways associated with regulation strengthen through repetition. Adult well-being is not peripheral to child development, but it’s the mechanism through which development happens.

Colorado’s approach to supporting early childhood educator well-being includes statewide mental health consultation programs that directly engage educators, research on burnout and workplace challenges, innovations through well-being-focused initiatives, and policy recommendations for systemic change. There is a growing emphasis on reflective support for adults, structural investments to reduce stress, and evaluation to strengthen and expand these supports over time.

If we want resilient children, stable classrooms, and fewer downstream crises, we must start upstream. We must treat educator mental health as infrastructure. When the adults who care for young children can breathe steadily, children don’t just get through the day.

They grow within it.

A supported educator has the cognitive bandwidth to pause instead of react, interpret “acting out” as communication, maintain warmth in hard moments, and repair after rupture. Research consistently shows that relationship quality is one of the strongest predictors of children’s social-emotional outcomes. When adult stress is stabilized, relational consistency increases. When relationships are stable, children thrive.