Challenges in Early Childhood Profession: Community Involvement, Documentation, Job Satisfaction

This article discusses the challenges faced by early childhood professionals such as lack of community involvement, documentation, and job satisfaction. It also provides recommendations to address these challenges.

Running Head: ECEs
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Early childhood profession
student
5/21/2019

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Contents
Introduction.................................................................................................................................................2
Challenges in the early childhood profession..............................................................................................2
1 Community involvement:.....................................................................................................................2
2. Documentations...................................................................................................................................3
3. Job satisfaction....................................................................................................................................4
Conclusion...................................................................................................................................................5
References...................................................................................................................................................7

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Introduction
Early childhood profession is associated with the care and education provided by the
experts or specialist of early childhood facilities. Early childhood professionals are the one who
directly works with young kids from age one year to eight (Urban, 2008). One of the early
childhoods professional is childhood teachers. The early childhood professional has the abilities,
information, knowledge, characteristics essential to teach and initiate a program in order to
enhance the ability of the child to learn new things (Yoshikawa, Leyva, Snow, Treviño, Barata,
Weiland, & Arbour, 2015). The early childhood service providers or professional incept the
kid’s environment to make the safety of devices and material to keep them out of danger. While
providing early childhood services, the professional face many challenges (Winton, & Snyder,
2015). In this particular assessment, three challenges of the early childhood profession will be
discussed.
Challenges in the early childhood profession
1 Community involvement:
Community involvement in kid’s school matters is actually important for the
development of the child as the child feel more comfortable and confident when the parents are
involved in their study and spend more time with them (Castro, Expósito-Casas, López-Martín,
Lizasoain, Navarro-Asencio, & Gaviria, 2015). Most of the teachers recognised that the parents
do not view parent involvement as an essential part of childhood educations and see this as time
waste. Involving them in early childhood education and care programs become difficult for early
childhood professionals. In some developing nations, Most of the parents send their children to
school as they have to do their household works. They do not even aware about how important is

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early childhood development and that why they do not takes part in the school matters (Britto,
Lye, Proulx, Yousafzai, Matthews, Vaivada, & MacMillan, 2017). Ultimately this generates
difficulty for professionals to implement the early childhood education curriculum. Some of the
professionals experienced challenges related to the increasing demands of parents. For early
childhood professional, it is difficult to manage the increased parent's requests, queries, and
complaints. The teachers have lots of work to perform every day; therefore being interrupted
might hinder their routine plan (Castro, et al., 2015).
Recommendations; to address the challenges related to the lack of parent’s involvement, the
professional should encourage the parent to be involved in the programs. They should make
them understand that being involved in the early childhood education of the kid can enhance
their academic success rates (Erola, Jalonen, & Lehti, 2016). They must understand that being
involved in the early childhood development of the child can help them to have information
about the academic and intellectual development of the child. To solve the increased queries and
complaints the early childhood service providers must hire more professionals so that teachers
can do their work without much interruption (Britto et al., 2015).
2. Documentations
Early childhood professionals have to work on daily planning and assessment activities
for the child. They have to address different queries of parents and carers and children. Therefore
it is obvious that might be busy throughout the day. Paperwork is the new arising challenge for
early childhood carers. They have to document child learning progress to maintain high-quality
standards (Cumming, Sumsion, & Wong, 2015). Documentations have become a hot topic
among the professions as it causes frustrations and hinders them from being calm and effective
in service providing. During the day they have to make efficient documentation of child

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observations, develop daycare sheets, reports, forms and related templates. On the top of
keeping their eye on the kids and maintain the healthy relationship with the families, the early
childhood professional have piles of paperwork to manage on regular bases such as taking
attendance, recording the activities of children, lesson planning, meal planning and many more.
Every preschool educators or carer spends a minimum of 45 minutes per day in the
documentation, and they feel that this time can be better spent on other activities (Nolan, &
Molla, 2017).
Recommendations: although is challenging for the teachers to manage the documents as they
have to deal with other essential work throughout the day, but the must understand that
maintaining the documents is essential as it helps them to observe the child's development in
future. There are some Android applications that help them to record daily activities, prepress
reports of the child, planning daily tasks and recording the results easily (Schulz, 2015). One of
the examples of these types of apps is Himama. This particular app makes the documentation of
the child observations more efficiently and replaced the routine daycare sheets, reports, forms,
and the template with the automated digital everyday child care reports. These documents are
saved in the device and can be viewed in the future at any time. It also makes graphs and charts
associated with child development and compares the previous progression with current (Wilke,
2019).
3. Job satisfaction
As discussed previously early childhood care profession is an enjoyable but tough task to
do, as the professionals must become multitasking and have to be active throughout the day. This
can develop decreased job satisfaction issues. Although different professionals find this job
interesting, after some time the educators or carers may feel that their job is frustrating and there

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is no growth at all (Skaalvik, & Skaalvik, 2015). It has also been recognised that early childhood
carer or educator do not make a lot of money when compared to the other professions. The
average salary of a childcare employee is nearly $21,710, which develops a lack of job
satisfaction among them. The low salaried linked to the early childhood education and care
position can make it difficult for professionals to feel confident in their career path and remain in
the same role over a long period (Castro, et al., 2015). Some of the studies conducted on the role
of educators in early childhood education and development identified that majority of care
providers feel that they work hard and they give their best in the job, but they are not getting
favourable appreciations money according to their efforts. And they may leave the job in the
upcoming day as they have to earn more money for their families (Yoshikawa et al., 2015).
Recommendation: the early childhood professionals must understand that there is a great chance
of growth in the similar job; all they have to do is perform regularly in childhood development
(Skaalvik, & Skaalvik, 2015). The higher authorities of childhood development centres hike the
salaries of ECEs and encourage them towards their work. The local and federal government must
increase must provide various opportunities for them to enhance other's interest in the same field
(Cumming, Sumsion, & Wong, 2015).
Conclusion
The early childhood professionals are the one who provides their services to the kids aged
one to eight years old. They have the skills, knowledge and characteristics important for teaching
kids and implementing childhood development programs. When providing services the ECEs
also faces some challenges such as lack of community or parent's involvement in the child's
education, dealing with documentation, and reduced job satisfaction. The parent involvement

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related challenges can be addressed by educating and encouraging them about the importance of
their involvement. To deal with document-related challenges the professionals can use android
application to maintain the documents of child development such as reports, sheets, templates,
and making graphs. Job satisfaction-related issues can be dealt with the help of government and
early childhood development centres by increasing the salaries of educators and care providers
and providing more growth opportunities in the same profession.

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References
Britto, P. R., Lye, S. J., Proulx, K., Yousafzai, A. K., Matthews, S. G., Vaivada, T., &
MacMillan, H. (2017). Nurturing care: promoting early childhood development. The
Lancet, 389(10064), 91-102.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673616313903
Castro, M., Expósito-Casas, E., López-Martín, E., Lizasoain, L., Navarro-Asencio, E., &
Gaviria, J. L. (2015). Parental involvement on student academic achievement: A meta-
analysis. Educational research review, 14, 33-46.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1747938X15000032
Cumming, T., Sumsion, J., & Wong, S. (2015). Rethinking early childhood workforce
sustainability in the context of Australia's early childhood education and care
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https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40723-015-0005-z
Erola, J., Jalonen, S., & Lehti, H. (2016). Parental education, class and income over early life
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Nolan, A., & Molla, T. (2017). Teacher confidence and professional capital. Teaching and
teacher education, 62, 10-18.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/310841386_Teacher_confidence_and_professional_
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Schulz, M. (2015). The documentation of children's learning in early childhood
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https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/chso.12112
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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13502930802141584
Wilke, A. (2019). Investigating the Influence of Technology as a Communication Tool for
Parents and Early Childhood Educators (Doctoral dissertation).
https://atrium2.lib.uoguelph.ca/xmlui/handle/10214/14972
Winton, E. C. T. P. J., & Snyder, P. A. (2015). Beyond the status quo: Rethinking professional
development for early childhood teachers. In Handbook of early childhood teacher
education (pp. 72-86). Routledge.
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Yoshikawa, H., Leyva, D., Snow, C. E., Treviño, E., Barata, M., Weiland, C., & Arbour, M. C.
(2015). Experimental impacts of a teacher professional development program in Chile on
preschool classroom quality and child outcomes. Developmental psychology, 51(3), 309.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-07618-001