The 2025 Child Care Business Trends Report from Procare Solutions found that 60.5% of centers struggle with hiring and retaining staff and 47.8% of centers are experiencing burnout and concerns of staff well-being.
The high pressure of child care work leads to burnout among staff. Coupled with rising responsibilities and emotional demands, this problem has reached critical levels in recent years. Burnout leads to increased sick calls. It also lowers the quality of care and leads to higher turnover rates.
Such pressure on existing employees and management is not sustainable for a healthy work environment, and staffing concerns were identified in the survey used to compile the report as two of the top challenges facing child care providers:
“We have to recognize we are at a crossroads and we need to do something different,” said Prerna Richards, founder of Together We Grow.
Teachers are overwhelmed by dealing with challenging children’s behaviors and must be trained to self-regulate themselves.
Prerna suggests simple methods such as deep breaths.
“It sounds so simple, but there’s so much neuroscience behind it,” she said.
Teachers need to identify how their stresses are being triggered, and that’s where mindsets and perceptions come into play – a fixed mindset makes it difficult to overcome a challenge.
Implementing retention strategies such as offering competitive salaries, providing professional development opportunities and creating a supportive work culture can enhance staff satisfaction and reduce turnover.
Staff Management Is Vital for Your Center to Succeed
Using software can help centers identify key needs in staffing ratios and compliance, view historical trends reports and determine areas for improvement in hiring and retention processes.
With Procare, your child care center can easily keep track of staff information, including availability/scheduling, immunization records, background checks and additional details of employment.
This makes it easy to build a network of qualified child care providers that can be accessed to fill full-time roles or to substitute for a full-time staff member who is sick or absent. Procare also helps streamline staff management activities such as time cards, payroll and calculating benefit hours.
Filling out paperwork with pen and paper is tedious. And it’s a pain for you to input all that information into your system. Procare can automate all of this for you. And you can store signed documents in one central location.
Child care administrators can use the Procare child care mobile app to communicate directly with staff members about scheduling changes, new policies and procedures as well as initiatives to improve operations and safety at the center.
Procare’s technology allows teachers and staff to sign in and out easily using a tablet. Timecards automatically are updated!
Professional Development Can Lead to Job Satisfaction
As ECE teachers today are asking for more training, the Procare Solutions survey showed that roughly a quarter of respondents have no plans to implement professional training.
Training provides staff with career growth opportunities that increase job satisfaction. Happy, skilled employees are more likely to stay longterm, saving the cost and time of frequent recruitment.
Families are more inclined to choose child care centers with highly trained staff, which is a boon for a center’s reputation.
Procare Professional Development provides child care organizations with over 120 training hours that offer Continuing Education Units (CEUs), as well as Child Development Associate® (CDA) pathways. Procare Professional Development makes training your team engaging, convenient and practical; while giving you everything you need to maintain compliance and elevate the quality of education you offer.
Procare Professional Development is approved in all 50 states. When your staff completes a course, Procare will provide instant certification and submit a record of attendance to your state registry on their behalf, if needed so that all training records are kept up-to-date!
Your teachers can all have access to the dedicated training they need to earn their Child Development Associate® certification, at no extra cost, aside from purchasing required materials and application fees paid to the CDA Council. This major benefit allows you to set your center apart and provide clear career progression for your staff.
Professional development training is readily available for all your teachers and staff. Each staff user can sign into Procare Professional Development on their own and browse and enroll in any of our 120+ hours of training courses, see how many CEUs they have and review any certificates they’ve already earned.
Want to learn more? Visit our website to help your staff be motivated while enhancing their skills!
