Why New Childcare Educators Quit: Burnout, Not Physical Strain, Drives the Urge to Leave

Childcare systems around the world are bleeding staff, and the people walking out the door fastest are often the newest hires. A study published in SN Social Sciences by Julie Lachapelle, Kathleen Bentein, Nathalie Bigras, and Geneviève Fortin of the Université du Québec à Montréal offers one of the most granular looks yet at why early childhood educators in the first nine to eighteen months of their careers start thinking about quitting. Drawing on the Job Demands-Resources model, the team surveyed 244 new educators working in both center-based facilities and home-based childcare settings, and traced a psychological pathway that runs from the daily grind of the job, through emotional exhaustion, to the intention to leave. The findings carry an uncomfortable message for policymakers scrambling to fill vacancies: the demands that push newcomers toward the exit are the ones that drain them emotionally, not the ones that strain their backs.

The Job Demands-Resources model, or JD-R, has become one of the most influential frameworks in occupational health psychology since Demerouti, Bakker, and colleagues formalized it in the early 2000s. The model sorts every feature of a job into two categories. Demands are the physical, cognitive, and emotional costs of doing the work, from heavy caseloads to difficult interactions. Resources are the psychological fuel that keeps people going, including autonomy, connection with colleagues, and the feeling of being competent at what they do. According to the theory, sustained exposure to high demands without adequate resources produces burnout, and burnout is a well-documented precursor of turnover. What makes the new study distinctive is that it applies this machinery specifically to newcomers, a population that previous research on organizational socialization suggests is uniquely vulnerable during the first months on the job.

The researchers measured four distinct types of job demands among the new educators: job-specific demands such as managing children’s difficult behaviors and communicating with parents, quantitative workload, emotional demands, and physical demands. On the resource side, they focused on the satisfaction of three basic psychological needs identified in self-determination theory: the need for autonomy, the need for relatedness, and the need for competence. The outcome of interest was turnover intention, the self-reported likelihood of leaving the job, which decades of organizational research have shown to be one of the strongest predictors of actual quitting behavior.

The results were strikingly patterned. Three of the four job demands, specifically job-specific demands, workload, and emotional demands, were significantly and positively related to emotional fatigue. The more educators felt overwhelmed by the intrinsic requirements of the job, the sheer volume of work, and the emotional labor of caring for young children, the more emotionally exhausted they became. Physical demands, by contrast, showed no significant relationship with emotional fatigue. This is a notable finding for a profession whose members have been described as educational athletes, lifting children, crouching at child height, and carrying equipment all day. The study suggests that while the physical toll of childcare work is real, it does not appear to be the mechanism feeding the psychological exhaustion that drives new educators toward the door.

The mediation analyses then connected the dots. Job-specific demands, workload, and emotional demands were each indirectly related to turnover intention through their effect on emotional fatigue. In other words, the pathway from a demanding job to the intention to quit runs through burnout. Educators who felt emotionally drained by their work were more likely to say they intended to leave. This mediated structure matters because it identifies the psychological lever that policy interventions need to target. Simply reducing one visible stressor, such as physical strain, may not keep newcomers in the field if the emotional machinery of exhaustion remains untouched.

The study also examined the resource side of the equation, testing whether the satisfaction of the needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence played a protective role. Self-determination theory holds that these three needs are universal psychological nutriments, and a substantial body of research links their satisfaction to engagement, well-being, and commitment at work. In the childcare context, an educator who feels free to make pedagogical decisions, connected to colleagues and families, and capable in her role should, in theory, be buffered against the corrosive effects of high demands. The study’s design allowed the researchers to test whether these resources shaped the sense of accomplishment educators derived from their work, and how that accomplishment related to their intention to stay or go.

One of the study’s most valuable contributions is its comparative design. By sampling 148 educators from center-based childcare facilities and 96 from home-based settings, the researchers were able to examine whether the same psychological dynamics operate across two very different work environments. Center-based educators work alongside colleagues within an institutional structure, while home-based providers often work alone in their own homes, facing isolation alongside the same developmental responsibilities. Prior research has documented that family childcare providers experience distinctive stressors, including professional isolation, ambiguous professional identity, and financial precarity. Testing the JD-R model in both contexts simultaneously is a methodological strength, because most previous studies have examined one setting in isolation.

The timing of the study amplifies its policy relevance. Quebec, where the research was conducted, has been aggressively expanding its subsidized childcare network, and the provincial government has identified early childhood education as a priority sector in its labor force initiatives. Yet expansion collides with a stubborn reality: the sector struggles to recruit and retain qualified educators, and turnover destabilizes the very quality that public investment is meant to deliver. Research on early childhood programs consistently shows that high staff turnover disrupts the stable relationships between educators and children that underpin healthy development. When experienced educators leave, the institutional knowledge, the relationships with families, and the pedagogical continuity all leave with them.

The study’s implications point toward interventions that go beyond recruitment bonuses. If emotional fatigue is the conduit through which job demands translate into turnover intention, then retention strategies must address the emotional architecture of the work itself. That could mean capping group sizes and ratios to keep workload manageable, training supervisors to recognize and mitigate emotional labor, and deliberately structuring newcomers’ first months to satisfy their needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence. Organizational socialization research suggests that the first year on the job is a critical window in which newcomers form lasting attitudes toward their profession, and the present study confirms that the demands experienced during this window are already shaping exit intentions.

For a sector that cares for the youngest members of society during the most formative years of brain development, the arithmetic is stark. Every educator who burns out and leaves represents not just a vacancy but a broken attachment for the children in that room. By pinpointing emotional fatigue as the mediating mechanism, and by showing that physical strain, however real, is not the driver, the Quebec team has given policymakers a precise target. The question now is whether childcare systems, under pressure to expand places quickly, will invest in the working conditions that keep the people they have already trained.

Subject of Research: Job demands, emotional fatigue, and turnover intention among new early childhood educators in center-based and home-based childcare

Article Title: Do job demands and resources experienced by new early childhood educators influence their turnover intention? A mediation model in center-based and home-based childcare

Article References: Lachapelle, J., Bentein, K., Bigras, N., & Fortin, G. (2026). Do job demands and resources experienced by new early childhood educators influence their turnover intention? A mediation model in center-based and home-based childcare. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 404. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01671-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01671-7

Keywords: early childhood education, turnover intention, job demands-resources model, emotional fatigue, burnout, childcare workforce, self-determination theory, organizational socialization, job resources, retention, Quebec childcare, mediation analysis