Aug 19, 2026
Guest Author: Jessica Karpathios, RECE, BASc., Certified Forest School Practitioner, ECE Consultant
You drop your child off on a Tuesday and the educator who knows exactly how they like their morning oatmeal, who they miss when they're away, who catches them mid-fall, is gone. A new face is at the door instead. Nobody quite explains why. Your child asks about them for weeks.
If this has happened to your family, you are not imagining a crisis. You are living inside one.
Canada promised families something enormous with $10-a-day child care: that quality care would stop being a privilege and start being a right. It is one of the best ideas this country has built in a generation, and it is working in a lot of the ways it was meant to. But a promise this big depends entirely on there being enough people left to do the actual work of loving, caring for, and educating your children every day. Waitlists are not only a supply problem. Closed classrooms are not only a staffing gap on a spreadsheet. Behind both is a workforce that is being worn down in ways most families never see, and most conversations, articles, or Facebook posts about the sector rarely name in any detail.
I've spent fifteen years inside child care centers across this country, coaching and supporting the educators who show up for your children. I want to tell you what I've actually seen happening to them, because I think if families understood it, we might be able to build something different, together.
You see the turnover. The educator who leaves mid-year. The room that closes because there aren't enough staff to meet the ratio for the day. Even though there's a line of families waiting to get in. The exhaustion on the face of the person handing your child back to you at pickup. What you don't always see is why.
There is a particular kind of quiet that happens in a staff room in a child care centre. Not silence exactly. More like the sound a room makes after something has been held for too long and finally gets set down. Educators don't leave this work because they stopped loving your children. They leave because loving your children inside conditions that keep asking them to compromise that love becomes, over time, unbearable.
Researchers have started calling this moral injury, a term first used for soldiers ordered to act against their own conscience, later applied to doctors forced to choose between what their patients needed and what their hospitals allowed. A 2025 study out of the University of Queensland interviewed 57 Australian educators and found the same pattern living inside classrooms. Not exhaustion from too much work. Injury from being asked, again and again, to act against what they know is right for the children in front of them.
Moral injury isn't one dramatic moment. It's small and specific and it repeats.
It's an educator with 24 preschoolers and, legally, sometimes barely, enough adults to meet them, knowing that a child who needed to be held through a hard moment had to wait, because three other children needed her at the exact same instant. Imagine being responsible for eight 3 year olds for 9 hours a day and the triaging decisions that would need to be made about whose needs are the most important. It's a form due by five that the system treats as more urgent than the twenty minutes she wanted to spend really watching your child figure something out for the first time. It's noticing a child needs more support than the room can currently give them, and knowing the wait list for that support is measured in months, not days. It's being present for a family's hardest season and having no real space afterward to process what that asked of her emotionally, before walking back in the next morning to do it again.
None of these moments look like a crisis from the outside. Together, over months and years, they become one. This is who families are losing. Not people who couldn't hack it. People who cared so much that caring, inside conditions that kept asking more of them than the structure around them could support, became its own kind of harm.
Here is something families rarely see clearly: what educators are actually responsible for, measured against what they're actually paid.
A registered Early Childhood Educator carries legal responsibility for your child's safety, development, and wellbeing for eight or more hours a day. They are mandated reporters. They are held to professional college standards in many provinces, the same way a nurse or a social worker is.They have completed a diploma or degree specifically in child development and pedagogy. She is making dozens of judgment calls an hour that shape how your child understands themselves, other people, and the world that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives.
In many parts of the country, they are paid close to what a first job in retail pays. Not because their work matters less, but because the wage structures underneath this sector have never fully caught up to what we actually ask of the people in it. That gap, between the weight of the responsibility and the size of the paycheque, is not a minor detail. It is one of the clearest, most concrete drivers of moral injury in this field. It tells a deeply trained, deeply responsible person, in the most literal terms possible, that the value placed on their work does not match the value she is creating in your child's life. Educators feel that gap every single pay period, and it compounds everything else.
Here is the part that should stop us cold, parents and educators alike: every child in this country is being raised, in part, by whoever is left standing after that erosion. When we lose the educators who stayed because they loved this work, we are not losing staff. We are losing the people who know your child's laugh, who notice the uniqueness of your child's personality, who your family is quietly depending on more than any policy document will ever fully capture.
The child care crisis in Canada is not a story about spreadsheets and staffing ratios that families can safely leave to someone else. It's a story about the conditions surrounding the people you trust with your most important person, and whether those conditions can actually sustain a long, fulfilling career.
Wellness days and appreciation weeks are lovely and they are not the fix, because this isn't a resourcing problem you can rest your way out of. If educators are being worn down at this scale, the response needs to match it.
That means wages that reflect what this work actually requires and what it actually asks of the people doing it. It means ratios built around what children need to thrive. It means funding that makes room for relationship and reflection, not only paperwork. And it means continuing to build on what $10-a-day started, so that quality and accessibility can grow together instead of one outpacing the other. There is real momentum here already. The next stretch is making sure the workforce underneath the promise is as supported as the promise itself.
Places where child care is funded and structured as core public infrastructure tend to hold onto their educators. It's not a mystery. It's a signal about what a society has decided matters, reflected back in wages, training time, and staffing ratios.
Broader change takes time, and educators are navigating this now, which means there's meaningful work leaders can do inside their own centers while that larger shift continues.
It starts with a director willing to say the true thing out loud, to educators and to families both. Not "we're just short-staffed," but "here is what this is costing the people caring for your children, and here is what I'm doing about it." Naming the reality honestly, instead of quietly asking educators to absorb it and smile through it, changes what happens next.
It looks like protecting real time for reflection, not as a perk, but as something as built-in as a fire drill, because educators carrying this much need space to process it with people who understand the weight. It looks like trusting the professional judgment of the person who spends more waking hours with your child than almost anyone besides you. And it looks like turning what educators witness every day into documentation and advocacy that leaves the building, so their insight becomes part of the larger conversation instead of something they carry home alone.
You are not powerless in this, and you are not separate from it either. Ask your center's director what staffing actually looks like, and believe the answer. Support the educators who show up for your child the way you'd want someone to support the person who cares for you at your most vulnerable, because that is functionally what they are doing. Advocate, alongside them, for the wages and funding that would let this promise hold fully, not just for your family, but for every family behind you on the waitlist.
There is a temptation, in a challenge this big, to pick a lane. Focus on funding or focus on culture inside centers. Wait for policy or change what's possible today. But families and educators don't experience this as separate lanes. They experience one continuous reality, and it needs attention on every end at once.
I think about the educators who stayed anyway. Not because nothing was hard, but because someone, a leader, a policy shift, a family who saw them, recognized what it was costing them and responded. That's the whole question, really. Not another appreciation week. The truth, spoken plainly, followed by support that matches the size of what these educators have been holding for all of us.
I know families are carrying enormous weight of their own right now, and that not everyone has room for more asks. So if none of the above is possible in this season, there's still this: look at the educator picking up your child in the eyes and say it plainly. "Thank you for all that you do for my child and our family." Say it as often as you mean it, and even on the days you're rushing out the door. It costs you nothing, and for someone carrying an injury most people never name, being truly seen is its own kind of healing.
Jessica Karpathios is a pedagogical consultant, Certified Forest School Practitioner, and founder of The Curious Educator Collective, where she has supported approximately 20,000 educators across Canada in pedagogical leadership and workforce wellbeing.
Sources
Shay, J. (1994). Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. Dean, W. & Talbot, S. (2018). "Physicians Aren't 'Burning Out.' They're Suffering From Moral Injury." STAT News.
Oberg, G. (2025). "Moral injury in teaching: the systemic roots of ethical conflict and emotional burnout in education." Educational Review, 78(3), 346–369.
