Teaching is perhaps one of the most underappreciated jobs in our world today.
Teachers get to school before all the children and stay long after, grading papers and planning lessons. During the day, they are significantly outnumbered — according to the Public School Review, there are fifteen students for every teacher on average.
When COVID hit and schooling went online, the job didn’t get any easier. 46% of teachers said they feel extremely stressed out daily. In their first five years of teaching, 30 to 40% are reported to leave the profession.
Teachers are unhappy and stressed out, and that spells bad news for them and the children in their classrooms.
There are many residual effects of teacher stress on students they teach. Not all of them are recognized right away, but their mental health and ability to cope with stress directly impact their students’ mental health and ability to cope.
Here are a few ways that ineffective methods of coping with work stress for teachers can impact students’ well-being.
Teacher stress can affect the emotional regulation abilities of small children.
Children, especially in their prime developmental years, are learning how to regulate their own emotions. They look to their parents, siblings, and teachers as role models. But adults often battle with unhealthy coping mechanisms – binge eating and drinking, mindless consumption of TV, and more – as a result of workplace stress. Unhealthy ways of coping with work stress lead to emotional instability, which children pick up in watching their teachers. Not only does this lead to increased anxiety, stress, and aggression in teachers, but in their students as well.
Additionally, healthy development in children depends on quality interactions with adults. A teacher struggling with mental health may not be able to provide the positive, supportive interactions that young children require to develop the proper social and emotional skills. Consequently, they might act out and outwardly struggle.
Overwhelmed teachers cannot teach or provide support to their highest potential.
Can a drowning person help another drowning person swim to shore? So how is a struggling teacher supposed to help a student excel — struggling or otherwise?
Students already start off on unequal footing. Some start with every advantage in life and were able to start learning early. Others don’t have the same resources. Some children struggle with learning disabilities or behavioral problems at the onset of the year.
Teachers are already outnumbered and if they experience consistently high stress, they’re not able to effectively regulate their own emotions to educate and help students. This can impact their academic performance now and in the future, as young children need to develop an early foundation to learn literacy and numeric skills in the future.
The effects of teacher stress impact stability and consistency for children.
Remember: 30 to 40% of teachers leave the profession during their first five years of teaching. Increased turnover means that children often can suffer from an unstable environment; an extreme disadvantage for healthy child development, especially in their life. That’s on top of any instability at home: divorces, foster care, changes in school systems.
Instability causes unnecessary stress to a child. In response to stress, children will pick up coping mechanisms. They’re often unhealthy, and the effects can follow them well into adult life. Children need as much stability and consistency as they can get, especially in the adults around them. Extremely high teacher stress gives way to unstable, inconsistent children.
Teachers need support — and we can give it to them. Coping with work stress, and improving their resilience, will be reflected not only in our teachers but in our children as well. This may include building core capabilities they lack that adults use to manage life, work, and parenting. These capabilities include planning, focus, self-control, awareness, and flexibility, which fall under the umbrella of “self-regulation,” built upon a foundation of “executive function. These capabilities are then modeled to children and impact their future capabilities.
We overlook our teachers in so many ways — their well-being should not be one of those ways anymore. Supportive, responsive relationships in stable, safe environments support healthy development in the earliest years. Therefore, teacher well-being should be the highest priority in schools by building their capabilities and ability to nurture our children’s social and emotional needs.