The Teacher Your Child Bonds With Today — Will They Still Be There in Spring?

Reading time: 5 min · Spring Mandarin Immersion Preschool · Albany, CA

There is a question most parents never think to ask during a preschool tour.

Not about curriculum. Not about ratio. Not about meals.

It is this: How long do your teachers stay?

It turns out that question may matter more than almost anything else you ask. And a study just published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly — one of the most policy-cited journals in the field — helps explain why.

What the research found

A 2024 study by Markowitz, Cubides Mateus, and Weisner examined nearly 400 early childhood educators across Louisiana, tracking two outcomes: the quality of their interactions with children, and whether they stayed in their jobs over a one-year period.

The researchers measured educator wellbeing through two lenses — depressive symptoms and food insecurity — and then looked at how those wellbeing measures connected to classroom quality scores and actual observed turnover.

The findings were clear on one point in particular.

Educators experiencing moderate to high levels of depressive symptoms were 16 percentage points more likely to leave their jobs than their peers who were not. That held across all age groups — toddler and preschool classrooms alike.

For preschool-aged classrooms specifically, depressive symptoms were also statistically linked to lower quality in teacher-child interactions — particularly in the instructional and organizational dimensions of classroom life.

The conclusion the researchers drew: educator wellbeing is not a peripheral concern. It is a direct lever on the stability and quality of care children receive.

Why turnover is not just a staffing problem

When a teacher leaves mid-year — or between years — the loss is concrete for a child.

Research the Markowitz study cites describes it plainly: when teachers leave, children experience the emotions of losing a close adult while also losing important learning time as they build a relationship with someone new.

This matters everywhere. It matters especially in Mandarin immersion.

Language acquisition in early childhood is not a classroom transaction. It is a relationship. A child absorbs vocabulary, tone, rhythm, and meaning through thousands of small interactions with a trusted adult — someone whose cues they have learned to read, whose presence feels predictable.

Disrupting that relationship disrupts the language. A child who has spent four months building trust with a Mandarin-speaking educator does not simply pick up where they left off with a new face. The relationship has to rebuild first. The language follows the relationship.

What stability actually requires

The Markowitz study does not leave the question at "turnover is bad." It goes further, asking why turnover happens — and pointing to educator wellbeing as a meaningful part of the answer.

Early childhood educators in the United States face some of the most challenging working conditions of any professional group: low wages, limited benefits, high physical and emotional demands, and often minimal institutional support. The study found that over 20% of the sample showed clinically relevant levels of depressive symptoms, and nearly half reported food insecurity.

These are not abstract statistics. They describe the conditions under which the adults caring for children are operating every day.

The researchers argue that environments which actively support educator wellbeing — through compensation, working conditions, and genuine institutional care — are the ones most likely to retain the educators children need.

What this means when you are choosing a program

Most preschool tours are designed to answer the questions parents already know to ask. The building. The materials. The philosophy statement on the wall.

The stability question is harder to surface, but worth asking directly:

How long has your current educator been here? Continuity of a specific person — not just a program — is what matters to a young child.

What does your program do to support educator wellbeing? The answer reveals whether a program sees its educators as a cost to be managed or a foundation to be invested in.

What is your turnover history? A program that cannot or will not answer this question is telling you something.

What happens to my child's relationship with their educator if that person leaves? How a program handles this scenario — with what level of care and communication — says a great deal about its values.

How we think about this at Spring

Spring is a small program by design. We serve a maximum of eight children at a 1:4 caregiver-to-child ratio. That smallness is not incidental — it is the condition that makes genuine educator wellbeing and sustained relationships possible.

When a program serves eight children instead of forty, the adult who cares for your child can be known — their workday is not an endurance test, their attention is not rationed, and the relationship they build with your child can actually be sustained.

Our program is founded and led by a credentialed educator with a B.A. and M.A. in Child Development from San Francisco State University and 8+ years in licensed early childhood programs. She built Spring around the research on what actually matters in early care — and educator wellbeing and continuity are central to that.

The educator your child learns Mandarin from in September should be the same person narrating the garden in May.

That continuity is not guaranteed anywhere. But the conditions that make it more likely — small size, manageable ratios, genuine care for the adults in the room — are ones we build for deliberately.

Spring Mandarin Immersion Preschool is a Reggio-inspired Mandarin immersion program for children ages 12 months to 5 years, located at 1106 Evelyn Ave, Albany, CA. We are now enrolling for 2025–2026.

A licensed family child care home · DSS #013424115

Schedule a visit: springmandarianpreschool.org · (510) 332-8012

Source: Markowitz, A. J., Cubides Mateus, D. M., & Weisner, K. (2024). Linking early educator wellbeing to classroom interactions and teacher turnover. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 67, 283–294. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2024.01.008