Challenges Faced by Early Childhood Educators

Running head: CHALLENGES FACED BY EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATORS 1
Challenges faced by early childhood educators
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CHALLENGES FACED BY EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATORS 2
An educator to early childhood refers to a professional individual with relevant skills and
knowledge to teach children below the age of 8years. Children in this category of age have three
different types of development stages. This includes physical, cognitive, and social-emotional
kinds of development. As stated by Jayaraman, Fausey & Smith, L. B. (2017), in their article,
Developmental psychology, "infants and toddlers experience life more holistically than any other
age group." This means that children at this age can learn a lot of things in their environment as
compared to any other age bracket in human life. Early childhood education is the first social
agent that a child comes across. This phase is significant to the child's physical, mental, spiritual,
social, and psychological developed is supposed and be comfortable, while there are challenging
times.
To begin with, low teacher to pupil's ratio is a challenge facing early childhood educators
in Canada. The ratio of students to teachers refers to the number of students in relation to the
number of teachers in an institution, for instance, a ratio of 1:10 means that there is one teacher
for ten students. The reversal of the same is allowed as the as a teacher to student ratio. Finn &
Shanahan (2016), in their article Class Size, it's recorded;
"Smaller classes are widely believed to benefit all pupils because of individual attention
from teachers, and low-attaining pupils are seen to benefit more at the higher level, where
the content level is more challenging. Pupils in large classes drift off task because of too
much instruction from the teacher to the whole class instead of individual attention, and
low-attaining students are most affected. Students benefit in later grades from being in
small classes during early grades..."

CHALLENGES FACED BY EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATORS 3
The ratio is sometimes equated to the class size since most of the times only one teacher is in
charge of a class. The ratio of teacher to pupils should be considerate, and the lesser the ratio, the
better the outcome of teaching (Billinger, & McLachlan, 2017). .with meager ratio of teachers to
students that means that one teacher will have to manage a large number of pupils at the same
time. The negative part of this is that educators will not have closer contact with the child, and
this will lead to poor performance and low development processes. This challenge also
overworks the educators since they have to manage a vast number of pupils. The teacher may
develop an attitude and become lazy as a result of overworking and tiredness (Koc & Celik,
2015). Low ratio of teachers to pupils can be solved by the employment of more early childhood
educators by the ministry of education. The same problem can also be solved by balancing the
number of students in different centers; this is especially in cases where there is a disparity in
teacher to pupils' ratios in various centers.
A poor parent-teacher relation is evident to be a challenge facing educators in early
childhood. Children at childhood bracket of age are so delicate, and the educators should be more
careful when relating to such children. They are prone to physical injuries, infections, and
character change (Born, Jackson, Koroluk & Divaris, 2019). Children are the heart of their
parents, and they can't bear to hear that anything has happened to their children. Some parents are
reluctant to react to teachers instructions, leading to delaying on teacher's side .for examples, it's
common for a parent to be summoned by a teacher, so that they both discuss the issues affecting
the pupils but instead if the parent does not respond, it will lead to pending issues hence delay. In
their article "Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, by O'Brien, Rouse &. (2017), it's
recorded;