Clinical trial NCT04815252: Mindfulness Intervention for Early Childhood Educators
Official title: Testing the Initial Efficacy of a Mindfulness Compassion-based Intervention to Support Wellbeing Amongst Early Childhood Professionals
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: COMPLETED
Phase: NA
Conditions: Stress, Psychological
Stress, Physiological
Keywords: Mindfulness
Early childhood educator
Intervention
Burnout
Lead sponsor: University of Nebraska Lincoln
Sponsor class: OTHER
Collaborators: name: Department of Health and Human Services
First posted: 2021-03-24
Enrollment: 120
Sex: ALL
Minimum age (years): 19
Standard ages: ADULT
OLDER_ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: no
Allocation: NON_RANDOMIZED
Intervention model: PARALLEL
Intervention model description: Participants are assigned, based on childcare center, to the intervention or waitlist control group.
Primary purpose: PREVENTION

Brief summary: This is a randomized trial of the 'Cultivating Healthy, intentional, Mindful Educators' (CHIME) intervention designed for early childhood educators. The intervention aims to enhance wellbeing, emotion regulation, and sensitive, responsive caregiving among educators by providing them with mindfulness, compassion-based techniques to alleviate stress and respond to emotional challenges in the classroom. The intervention ultimately aims to enhance children's self-regulation through sensitive, responsive caregiving. Measures of teachers' emotional regulation, wellbeing, and stress physiology will be collected pre- and post- the 8 week intervention and compared to a waitlist comparison group. Measures of child self-regulation also will be collected to assess the relation of teacher stress, wellbeing and emotion regulation to child self-regulation.

Detailed description: Across varied disciplines, the science is clear that early relationships and the quality of early care are central in achieving positive language, cognitive, and social development outcomes for young children and investments made in early childhood pay for themselves. Early childhood education is a critical context for fostering stimulating, responsive, and sensitive caregiving as a substantial number of children under the age of 5 years spend time in childcare settings, with 64% of children aged 3 to 5 years enrolled in non-relative care outside the home. While great efforts are made to improve the children's social emotional well-being in child care environments, less attention has been given to early childhood educators' (encompassing of early childhood teachers') own well-being. Research that has been conducted finds early childhood educators experience high levels of distress, including high levels of depression and burnout. Additionally, previous research finds school age teachers feeling overworked and overstressed show an altered hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and higher levels of teacher burnout is related to elevated cortisol levels in elementary school students.

The current study will test the efficacy of an 8-week compassion and mindfulness based stress reduction program for early childhood educators, as well as characterizing relations from early childhood educator wellbeing to child self-regulation. Teachers will be assigned at the center level to an intervention group or a wait-list comparison condition, with the wait-list group receiving the intervention after the 8-week study. Pre- intervention, teachers in both groups will complete survey measures of their wellbeing, mindfulness, and emotion regulation; emotion regulation tasks; and assessments of stress physiology in the classroom. Teacher-child interactions will be observed and children's self-regulation will be measured. Post-intervention, the same teacher measures will be collected.

Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

Teachers/educators:

* Providing care to children aged birth through 6 years
* Participating in, or are signed up to eventually participate in, the 8-week "Cultivating Healthy Intentional, Mindful Educators" (CHIME) intervention
* English speakers
* 19 years of age or older.

Children:

* Aged 3-6 years
* Enrolled in a preschool setting with a teachers enrolled/signed up to participate in the CHIME study.
* English or Spanish speakers

Parents:

* Have a child aged 3-6 who is enrolled in a preschool classroom of a teacher participating in the study.
* Speak and read English or Spanish and
* Legal guardian
* 19 years of age or older.

Exclusion Criteria:

\*Not participating/enrolled to participate in CHIME

Primary outcomes:
measure: Change on the Cognitive and Affective Mindfulness Scale Revised
timeFrame: Week 1, week 9
measure: Change on the Self Compassion Scale - Short Form
timeFrame: Week 1, Week 9
measure: Change on the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire
timeFrame: Week 1, Week 9
measure: Change on the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale
timeFrame: Week 1, Week 9
measure: Change on the Emotion Stroop
timeFrame: Week 1, Week 9
measure: Change on the Modified Emotional Exogenous Cuing Paradigm
timeFrame: Week 1, Week 9
measure: Change on the Short Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Measure
timeFrame: Week 1, Week 9
measure: Change on the The Early Childhood Job Attitude Survey
timeFrame: Week 1, week 9
measure: Change on the Job Demands scale
timeFrame: Week 1, week 9
measure: Change on the The Effort/Reward imbalance scale
timeFrame: Week 1, week 9
measure: Change in Salivary Cortisol
timeFrame: Week 1, week 9
measure: Change in the Heart rate variability
timeFrame: Week 1, Week 9
measure: Change in Classroom Assessment Scoring System Emotional Support score
timeFrame: Week 1, week 9
Secondary outcomes:
Other outcomes:
measure: Child self-regulation task
timeFrame: Week 1
measure: Behavioral Rating Inventory of Executive Function - Preschool
timeFrame: Week 1
Locations:
city: Lincoln
country: United States
facility: University of Nebraska-Lincoln
state: Nebraska
Study officials:
affiliation: UNL
name: Caron Clark
role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR
affiliation: UNL
name: Holly Hatton-Bowers
role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR
References:
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