When Supporting Families and Supporting Teachers Aren't Separate Problems
Why People, Positionalities, Processes, and Practice — and the Well-Being That Connects Them — Must Shape 2-Care From the Start
In 2003, I wrote a doctoral application essay about a three-year-old child in my class, Milo (a pseudonym). Milo was a sweet boy who was curious, so loved by his family, motivated by his peers, and just wanted to play. Soon after beginning school, my co-teacher and I started to notice his recurring fear of sounds, a desire to use words but uncertainty around which words to use and how to say them, and (like most children) a constant need for movement. We suspected he had some developmental delays and recorded observations of him navigating spaces, peers, and adults, while noting atypical behaviors in his proprioception, hearing, and language from expectations of that age.
It still haunts me nearly 23 years later that I did not know as a new early childhood teacher how to partner with his family to seek a referral, how to systematically promote social interactions between him and his peers, and to advocate for what we needed as a teaching team to fully support him and his family. In what I can only describe as an out of body experience, our director — in support of me as a teacher — asked the family to leave — effectively an expulsion — when his mom would not agree to seek a referral, something no one can require a parent to do … or should require a parent to do. I was devastated. We never saw Milo again.
What happened to Milo depended on whether the relationships between teachers and families, between children with and without disabilities, between programs and the systems surrounding them, were actually working, even when they were perceived to be supportive. When they weren't working, no amount of individual competence filled the gap.
I named three research questions in that essay.
I wanted to understand family-teacher collaboration.
I wanted to understand what interventions could improve social communication in young children in inclusive settings.
I wanted to understand the components that made inclusive models work.
Fast forward 23 years and I am still asking the same questions. Not because the field hasn't produced knowledge — it has — but because that knowledge still hasn't become the operating logic of how we build systems.
A blog from the Buffett Early Childhood Institute recently argued that child care policy is built around what providers need to survive rather than what parents actually face — and that until we start with how parents experience the system, policy will continue to fall short (Smith, 2026). Around the same time, RAND published findings from a survey of over 1,400 public pre-K teachers showing that educators experience work-based stress at nearly twice the rate of comparable working adults, that newer teachers were most likely to say they intended to leave, and that states considering pre-K expansion should think carefully about how they are supporting their newest teachers from the start (Steiner et al., 2025;Shapiro & Steiner, 2025). Both feel obvious and true. Both will likely be treated as competing priorities in 2-Care implementation — one for the family engagement team, one for workforce development. But you cannot design with families if teachers do not have the capacity to be in genuine partnership. These are not competing priorities. They are the same ecological problem viewed from two different positions in the system.
My prior pieces in this series laid out what each requires in concrete terms — the practice architectures of language, time, and power that make sustainable work possible. What I haven't yet named directly is why we keep failing to build them, and what the data from our study is beginning to show about the cost of that failure.
Building Ecologies
For fifty years, researchers have been telling us that what happens to a child depends on everything surrounding that child — not just what one teacher does in one classroom. Bronfenbrenner mapped this in 1979: a child's development is shaped by their family, their program, their neighborhood, the policies governing their school, the culture of the adults working with them. Odom and colleagues (2004) showed this specifically for inclusion — whether a child with a disability thrives in a general education setting depends on factors at every level of that child's world, not just on classroom practice. And yet when we design interventions, we keep targeting one piece at a time.
What Bronfenbrenner's model doesn't fully account for is culture. Vélez-Agosto and colleagues (2017) show us that culture isn't something out there in the wider world acting on children and families from a distance. Culture is in the room. It's in the words a teacher reaches for when she's trying to describe a child she's worried about. It's in what feels normal and what gets flagged as different. It's in every daily routine, every interaction, every decision practitioners make about children — often without realizing it. Culture isn't backdrop. It is the daily life of a program.
This is where it matters for inclusion — and for 2-Care. When we ask why teachers default to deficit language when they're worried about a child, we are not looking at a vocabulary gap that a training module can fill. We are looking at culture operating in the microsystem — professional cultures shaped by institutional histories, by who trained whom, by what counts as normal development and what gets flagged as delay. When we ask why Black and Latino children in New York City are referred at different rates, evaluated differently, and placed in inclusive settings at lower rates than their white peers, we are watching those same cultural forces at work in the microsystem. This is not an attitude problem. It is not a knowledge problem. It is an ecological problem, and it requires ecological change — which means changing the daily arrangements, the structures for reflection, the language and time and power conditions that either reproduce those professional cultures or create conditions for something different to grow.
Teacher Wellbeing and the Ecology of Depletion
In 2019, I wrote a piece for Young Exceptional Children asking a question I had been avoiding. I had been avoiding it because naming depletion as the source of what looks like resistance means putting the accountability where it actually belongs — on the conditions, not the people. How much of what we call teacher resistance to inclusion is actually teacher depletion, spurred by the lack of a supportive ecology? That question still sits with me. And the Vélez-Agosto revision makes it more urgent — because if culture is in the microsystem, then the professional culture of depletion is in the microsystem too. The way exhaustion shapes what practitioners notice, how they talk about children, what they can offer in a family meeting — these are not individual failures. They are ecological conditions producing predictable outcomes: in referral data, in who gets evaluated and who gets told to wait and see, in the gap between what teachers want to offer and what the ecology allows.
The 2023 updated joint policy statement from the U.S. Departments of Education and Health and Human Services came closer than any previous federal guidance to naming this. It identified workforce shortages, low wages, inadequate training, and inequitable access for children of color as interconnected challenges — and called for examining how professional attitudes and beliefs shape placement decisions. It stated plainly that creating inclusive environments requires trust and collaboration, and that professionals need organizational support to examine how their own beliefs shape practice. What it does not say is that you cannot build that trust and self-examination in a workforce that is depleted, undersupported, and operating without the relational infrastructure that makes honest reflection possible.
The data on this is not ambiguous. Roughly a quarter of Head Start teachers meet criteria for clinical depression (Whitaker et al., 2015). Teacher stress predicts the quality of the emotional climate children experience — when teachers are dysregulated, classrooms become less warm, less responsive, less safe (Jeon et al., 2018; Jeon et al., 2019; Zinsser et al., 2014). And Jeon's ongoing work shows the relationship running in both directions: children's challenging behavior increases teacher stress, which erodes the conditions that help children regulate, which produces more challenging behavior, which increases the likelihood of referral and the likelihood of exclusion.
In a classroom this can look like a teacher who has not slept, who has no planning time, who coordinates with four specialists in 30-second hallway exchanges, who reaches for language to describe a child's development and finds only the words she was never taught to question — that teacher is not failing. She is depleted. And her depletion is not a personal condition. It is an ecological one, produced by the same absence of practice architecture that produces inequitable referrals, family disengagement, and teacher attrition.
A 2026 systematic review by Jeon and colleagues, synthesizing 345 studies across three decades, has now formalized what that room makes visible. Their Ecological Model of Holistic ECE Workforce Well-Being identifies relational well-being — the quality of relationships among educators, administrators, children, families, and colleagues — as a distinct and critical domain that has been largely absent from prior models and remains among the least studied in the literature. This is not a peripheral finding. It is an ecological confirmation that the relational infrastructure teachers need to do this work has been systematically excluded from how we conceptualize, measure, and support their well-being. You cannot build genuine family-professional partnership in a workforce whose relational well-being is neither named nor tended. A policy statement that calls for trust-building and self-examination without naming those conditions isn't describing a workforce. It's describing an aspiration.
The Current NYC Context
From 2021 to 2023, our team studied NYC preschool programs to understand how teachers navigate decisions about special education referrals and inclusion — examining program processes, observing classrooms, life mapping with teachers to understand how their own educational experiences shape their practice today, and listening to families describe navigating a system most of them didn't fully understand (Gupta et al., 2024). It took nearly a year to develop a research proposal that could navigate the NYC IRB process, and nearly another year before we could enter a single classroom, speak with a single teacher, or hear from a single family. That kind of timeline is what community-embedded research in this city actually requires. The full results are still being written up, and I want to be careful to name these as patterns we are sitting with rather than conclusions we have finalized. But the patterns have been difficult to set aside, and I think the field needs to hear them while we are still in this moment of building something new — with 2-Care launching in just seven months.
We found that teachers were caught in a bind between caring deeply and having no structural support for that care. One said: "That's where the emotions come into play and frustration, because definitely I really do want to help you. Not that I can't, but at the moment no one's allowing me to do that." Another reached for language she knew was inadequate and couldn't find anything better: "I don't know how else to describe it but for lack of a better word, she's slow... I don't mean to sound — I just don't know how to word it. She's a little bit behind but I don't know if it's just because she's not ready or if she actually needs help." A third described what coordination with specialists actually looked like in practice: "I have this child who has OT, PT, speech, special instruction — four different people coming to work with him. When do I talk to any of them? I see the speech therapist for 30 seconds when she picks him up. That's it. We're all just guessing what each other is doing."
We found that families were navigating something adjacent and equally exhausting. "I didn't even know I could ask for an evaluation," one parent told us. "Nobody told me that was a thing. I thought I just had to wait and see if he caught up." Another, already deep in the system: "I feel like I'm fighting all the time. Fighting to get him services. Fighting to make sure they're actually doing what they said they'd do. Fighting to get anyone to listen to me. I'm exhausted."
We found that administrators were describing their own version of the same bind. They wanted to give teachers time to plan and coordinate. They didn't have coverage. Teachers were planning in hallways and texting each other at night. "It's not sustainable," one said. No one in those programs was wrong. The ecology was wrong.
The programs that struggled were not staffed by people who didn't care. They were staffed by people who lacked the conditions that make caring sustainable. And in that gap — referrals increased, inclusion faltered, families disengaged, and teachers left. These are not random outcomes. They are what ecologies produce when the practice architectures aren't there.
The Safe Haven Program: A Model
One program was different. The director had built what my January post described in the abstract: actual practice architectures. Teachers met with her biweekly to discuss every child. Before any parent meeting, she and the teacher prepared together — how to begin the conversation, how to reference observation notes, what follow-up would look like. She attended parent meetings to support teachers who might "freeze up a little bit." She held a clear developmental expectation: "Don't come to me before three weeks and tell me anything about a child needing an evaluation... it's not fair for the teachers, it's not fair for the children or their parents." She described her own role plainly: "We plan it so carefully... I'm just a support for them... Until I was doing it all the time, I felt the same way."
Families in that program felt the difference immediately. When a teacher noticed a child "acting out of character" on Friday and mentioned it at dismissal, the family was texting with the child's specialist that night — identifying goals, creating a behavior chart, implementing it Monday morning. "I know everything that's going on," one parent told us, "because they notice the small difference and they say something... not in a condescending, badgering way. It's like a, 'Hey, we want to help. What's going on? Let's do something.'"
What made this program different was not the goodwill of its staff — every program we studied had that. What made it different was the director's understanding, practical and deeply felt, that genuine collaboration between teachers, families, and specialists does not happen because people care. It happens because someone builds the conditions for it. The shared vision. The structured time to communicate. The deliberate preparation that allows teachers to enter difficult conversations with confidence rather than dread. These are not personality traits. They are organizational commitments — and research has long established them as the foundation on which inclusive practice either stands or collapses (Lieber et al., 2000).
The components that partnership research identifies — communication, trust, commitment, professional competence (Blue-Banning et al., 2004) — did not emerge from good intentions in that program. They emerged from structures a director built and tended, day by day, because she understood that culture lives in the daily routines, in the way time and attention are allocated, in the preparation that either happens or doesn't before a family sits down across from a teacher.
She shaped that professional culture from inside the microsystem — which is the only place culture can actually be changed. What she built, Jeon and colleagues would now call relational well-being infrastructure.
She just called it her job.
The Imperative of Building 2-Care Ecologically
In January I wrote about what partnership infrastructure requires for 2-Care and why it has to be built from the start. What I want to add here is the ecological argument underneath it — that the conditions we build for educators, the people, the processes, the positionalities, the practice architectures, and the well-being that mediates all of it, are inseparable from what families and children actually experience. Building those conditions is what the rest of this piece is about.
A teacher who is depleted, isolated, lacking shared language for developmental observation, and coordinating with specialists in 30-second hallway exchanges cannot be a genuine partner to families — not because she doesn't want to be, but because the ecology she is operating in doesn't support what real partnership requires. Workforce wellness is not a separate agenda from inclusion quality. It is inclusion quality. What practitioners can notice, name, and offer is inseparable from the conditions that either sustain or erode their capacity to do the work.
What we are describing is not a complicated problem with no handles. It is organized complexity — built from process, people, positionalities, and practice — with identifiable leverage points we already know how to investigate and address. Our preschool inclusion study was built around exactly these components because the ecological picture only becomes legible when you hold all of it together, with educator well-being as the thread that runs through and mediates what each component can actually produce. The question for 2-Care is whether we design with those leverage points in mind from the beginning, or discover them again through the next generation of children and families we underserve.
Recommendations for Building 2-Care Ecologically
The Safe Haven director showed us what is possible when one person understands the ecological stakes and has the authority and the will to build accordingly. The challenge for 2-Care is not to find a thousand directors like her — it is to build the conditions that make what she did replicable, sustainable, and visible enough to be named, studied, and spread. That means four concrete investments, each of which addresses a different leverage point in the ecology — and all of which have to be built together.
Create an Advisory Structure Guided by Positionality
An advisory structure guided by positionality looks different from a committee of credentialed stakeholders appointed from above. It places families, teachers, and administrators — the people actually living inside these ecologies — at the center of implementation design, because their knowledge of what these systems produce and what they fail to produce is not anecdotal. It is the most direct evidence available, and it is the kind of knowledge that shapes implementation from the inside rather than evaluating it from a distance.
Build Reflective Structures From the Start
Reflective structures — biweekly teacher-administrator conversations about individual children, protected time for family communication and specialist coordination, pre-meeting preparation as standard practice — are the mechanisms through which professional culture actually gets shaped. They create the conditions for practitioners to develop shared language for developmental observation, to coordinate across roles in something more than 30-second hallway exchanges, and to tend the relational well-being of teachers, families, and children over time rather than assuming it is happening without the space for it.
Create A Community-Embedded Research Structure
A community-embedded research structure positions researchers as partners in building the ecological conditions from the beginning, rather than evaluators who arrive after patterns are already set. The New York City Early Childhood Research Network (ECRN) already exists as working infrastructure for exactly this kind of partnership — stewarding relationships between researchers, practitioners, and the communities they serve. When ECRN is resourced and positioned to steward the applied research agenda for 2-Care from the start, it offers a model for what it looks like when research and practice are genuinely building together rather than running on parallel tracks.
Create Pathways in Higher Education That Count This Work as Scholarship
Higher education pathways that recognize publicly engaged research as scholarship make it possible for faculty to enter genuine partnership with school districts, programs, and networks like the NYC ECRN without putting their careers at risk. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently created such a pathway to tenure, evaluating societal impact alongside traditional scholarly metrics (Pomerantz et al., 2025). New York City's institutions have the opportunity to follow — and to go further — building the kind of tenure and promotion structures that allow the ecological knowledge produced through community-embedded research to count, and to accumulate, in ways that can actually move the field.
From Ecological Thinking to Ecological Building
As we finish writing up the results from our preschool inclusion study, I find myself sitting with a set of questions I can't resolve from the data alone. When inclusion falters in a program, how much of what we observe as practitioner attitude is actually practitioner depletion? When families disengage, how much of that reflects a rational assessment that the program was not designed for real partnership — that their engagement wasn't genuinely wanted? When referral rates differ by race in programs that describe themselves as inclusive, what is culture doing in the microsystem — in the daily language practices, the professional habits of noticing, the institutional norms about whose development looks typical — that produces those patterns? If we built the ecological conditions for 2-Care from the start — reflective supervision, shared language for developmental observation, protected time for family communication and specialist coordination, professional cultures that invited practitioners to examine their own positionalities — what would become possible that is not possible now?
In 2003, I wrote three research questions into a doctoral application essay. Twenty-three years later I am still asking the same questions, and some more:
When will we as a field start thinking ecologically — not in theory, but in how we actually build systems?
When will research silos open enough to welcome the perspectives, cultures, and ways of knowing that actually drive how ecologies function?
When will teachers be honored with the conditions their work requires — as the people meeting children and families at every moment of every day?
When will administrators be trusted to lead the cultural work they are already doing?
When will higher education create pathways that reward faculty for advancing communities — not just careers?
When will the field ask, honestly, whether the research is actually moving anything forward — and have the courage to build differently when the answer is no?
2-Care launches in seven months. The applied research agenda is ready. We know the leverage points: the people and their positionalities, the practices, the processes, the relational well-being of the workforce that mediates and moderates everything children and families actually experience. When we attend to all of it together — as the ecological system it is — 2-Care can become what it has the potential to be. The question is whether we will do that now, before this expansion inherits the same conditions that have constrained every expansion before it.
References
Blue-Banning, M., Summers, J. A., Frankland, H. C., Nelson, L. L., & Beegle, G. (2004). Dimensions of family and professional partnerships: Constructive guidelines for collaboration. Exceptional Children, 70(2), 167–184.https://doi.org/10.1177/001440290407000203
Bronfenbrenner, U. (1994). Ecological models of human development. In M. Gauvain & M. Cole (Eds.), Readings on the development of children (2nd ed., pp. 37–43). Freeman.
Gupta, S. S. (2019). Voices from the field: Why aren't we talking about teacher well-being with inclusion? Young Exceptional Children, 23(2), 59–62.https://doi.org/10.1177/1096250619846581
Gupta, S. S. (2020). Building practitioner resilience for change in EI/ECSE. Young Exceptional Children, 24(1), 3–15.https://doi.org/10.1177/1096250620913258
Gupta, S. S., Cheatham, G. A., Strassfeld, N., Zhu, X., Medellin, C., & Nagasawa, M. (2024). Examining the ecology of preschool inclusion in New York City: A mixed-methods study underway. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood.https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491241229229
Gupta, S. S., & Rous, B. S. (2016). Understanding change and implementation: How leaders can support inclusion. Young Children, 71(2), 82–91.https://www.jstor.org/stable/ycyoungchildren.71.2.82
Jeon, L., Kwon, K.-A., Byun, S., Charlot-Swilley, D., Domitrovich, C. E., Farewell, C. V., Ford, T. G., Hatton, H., Oh, Y., & Puma, J. E. (2026). A novel ecological model of holistic early childhood workforce well-being: The utilization of an AI-assisted systematic review. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 74, 199–210.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2025.09.007
Jeon, L., Buettner, C. K., & Grant, A. A. (2018). Early childhood teachers' psychological well-being: Exploring potential predictors of depression, stress, and emotional exhaustion. Early Education and Development, 29(1), 53–69.https://doi.org/10.1080/10409289.2017.1341806
Jeon, L., Buettner, C. K., Grant, A. A., & Lang, S. N. (2019). Early childhood teachers' stress and children's social, emotional, and behavioral functioning. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 61, 21–32.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2018.02.002
Jeon, H.-J., Kwon, K.-A., McCartney, C., & Diamond, L. (2024). Early childhood education and early childhood special education teachers' perceived stress, burnout, and depressive symptoms. Children and Youth Services Review, 166, 107915.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2024.107915
Kramer, A. (2026, January 8). Hochul plans to fund first two years of universal child care for NYC 2-year-olds. Chalkbeat New York.https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2026/01/08/hochul-and-mamdani-announce-state-funding-for-nyc-2-care-universal-child-care
Lieber, J., Hanson, M. J., Beckman, P. J., Odom, S. L., Sandall, S. S., Schwartz, I. S., & Wolery, R. (2000). Key influences on the initiation and implementation of inclusive preschool programs. Exceptional Children, 67(1), 83–98.https://doi.org/10.1177/001440290006700106
Odom, S. L., Vitztum, J., Wolery, R., Lieber, J., Sandall, S., Hanson, M. J., Beckman, P., Schwartz, I. S., & Horn, E. (2004). Preschool inclusion in the United States: A review of research from an ecological systems perspective. Journal of Research in Special Educational Needs, 4(1), 17–49.https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1471-3802.2004.00016.x
Pomerantz, E. M., Santos, R. M., & Bernhard, W. (2025, December 11). Making publicly engaged research count: A new pathway to tenure. Inside Higher Ed.https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2025/12/11/new-publicly-engaged-research-pathway-tenure-opinion
Shapiro, A., & Steiner, E. D. (2025, June 16). Pre-K teachers are stressed and say they want to quit. The 74.https://www.the74million.org/zero2eight/pre-k-teachers-are-stressed-and-say-they-want-to-quit/
Smith, L. (2026, February 4). If we want better child care policy, we have to start with parents. Buffett Early Childhood Institute at the University of Nebraska.https://buffettinstitute.nebraska.edu/blog/2026/02/if-we-want-better-child-care-policy-we-have-to-start-with-parents
Steiner, E. D., Shapiro, A., & Levine, P. R. (2025). Pre-K teacher well-being, pay, and intentions to leave in 2024: Findings from the American Pre-K Teacher Survey. RAND Corporation, RR-A3279-5.https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA3279-5.html
U.S. Department of Education & U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2023, November 28). Policy statement on inclusion of children with disabilities in early childhood programs.https://sites.ed.gov/idea/files/policy-statement-on-inclusion-11-28-2023.pdf
Vélez-Agosto, N. M., Soto-Crespo, J. G., Vizcarrondo-Oppenheimer, M., Vega-Molina, S., & García Coll, C. (2017). Bronfenbrenner's bioecological theory revision: Moving culture from the macro into the micro. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 12(5), 900–910.https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691617704397
Whitaker, R. C., Dearth-Wesley, T., & Gooze, R. A. (2015). Workplace stress and the quality of teacher–children relationships in Head Start. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 30(1A), 57–69.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2014.08.008
Zinsser, K. M., Shewark, E. A., Denham, S. A., & Curby, T. W. (2014). A mixed-method examination of preschool teacher beliefs about social-emotional learning and relations to observed emotional support. Infant and Child Development, 23(4), 471–493.https://doi.org/10.1002/icd.1843
Sarika S. Gupta, Ph.D. is the founder of Ecological Learning Partners LLC. For 25 years, she has worked at the intersection of research, policy, and practice in early childhood systems — as classroom teacher, instructional coach, technical assistance provider, university faculty member, researcher, and learning architect. Her contemplative mapping methodologies are designed to make the organized complexity of educational ecologies visible and actionable, coordinating across the people, processes, positionalities, and practices that determine whether systems actually serve the children and families at their center. She maintains a 17-year Iyengar yoga practice.
