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The emotional toll taken by working in the early years, while not new, has come to prominence following the Early Years Alliance making a hot topic of it last year. Their survey found that one in four early years practitioners is considering leaving the profession due to stress.
In 2016, I carried out a small study in a local nursery about the use of empathy in the profession. When discussing advanced empathy (see box) in a focus group, one of the practitioners said, ‘Having this kind of intense emotional connection with children can be tiring and leads to compassion fatigue.’ This got me thinking. In a Nursery Worldarticle in 2013, Geoff Taggart describes compassion fatigue within the early years as arising from ‘the daily experience of alleviating the suffering and dependency of others’. Perhaps having a close emotional bond with the children we work with leads to self-sacrifice, rather than job satisfaction.
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