It's Nap Time

A few years after I left the program, I came back to visit and popped into the preschool classroom where my toddlers were now the oldest children in the program. Toddlers usually forget you when they move on, but I wanted to see how they had grown.

When I walked in the door, J and J were milling around near their cubbies. One of these children smiled vaguely as though he remembered me from a happy daydream — in fact, we had been very close. The other, took one look at me and was compelled to say, “I don’t take a nap anymore!” — in fact, we had also been very in tune, but not always joyfully.

How do I respond to the people I left behind when I left what had been my favorite job (aside from being a toddler teacher, which will always be number one) up to that point when I see them now? Once, in another life transition, my mom said, ‘someday you’ll only remember the good parts.’ That is hard to believe in the messy middle of any transition. But mostly now, I remember the good parts — the colleagues who shared commitments to building systems, the events we put on that reflected our bigger visions and better angels, the daily work of relationships that allowed me to come to good decisions. When I was falling apart, none of those things felt accessible.

In all my years as a toddler teacher, I ran a very tight nap routine. In this program, we had two toddler rooms with an adjoining door. Both rooms enrolled some children part-time who then went home after lunch. The smaller groups would then be combined for sleeping in one of the rooms, and then go back to the ‘awake’ room as they awoke, letting the sleepers sleep uninterrupted. The year they were all two, I was the lead teacher in the ‘sleeping’ room side.

One child generously (and I think somewhat fearfully) called me “The Night-Night Girl.” I do not think he knew my name. While many of the children had been in our program since infancy, several also joined when they turned 1 or 2 and so did not have a long history with us.

When they were all just one in our first year together, we simply set up the routine, and they gratefully fell into their exhausted sleep for the most part. We stayed in the same rooms, mainly with the same groups, the following year, and a few new two-year-olds joined us as the group size grew.

This child was one of those new children to the group, he had not gotten to know me aside from nap time because the two-year-old toddler rooms stayed fairly self-contained as the group of children in each room really became a small community.

When they were all one, we adults had to rely on one another to keep things on an even keel, sometimes popping over to support one another when it seemed there was a waterfall of tears on the other side of the pass-through door. Thank goodness we were over-staffed with a consistent floater between the two rooms!!

Again, because most of the children had been in these spaces, with these groups from the age of 12 months the year before, there were far fewer waterfalls of tears in the year they were two years old. Continuity of care is a miracle becuase it holds continuity of development.

One of the deep exhaustions that drove my burnout was the constant arrival of new people in government. Once, I was the newbie. I recall going to a conference and taking detailed notes that I then shared with my whole (probably exhausted by me) team who did share the commitment to effective systems-building. After almost a decade (and a global pandemic) I was the worn out one. One might say jaded. When we look tired, someone might want to offer help. It might not be the kind of tired that needs a relief from effort. It might be the kind of exhaustion that comes from fighting to be seen over and over, trying to explain the whole picture to people who only have one part. I was exahuasted from the being, much more than the doing.

Because the children had community in each of the two classrooms, they could rely on being seen most of the day. Those who have not spent their days with groups of toddlers may not know in their bones the ease, smoothness, and cooperation toddlers can be and become when afforded the time, leadership, and context.

The toddlers who were with us from 12 months old, for the most part, had also been together since early infancy in our infant room. They knew one another’s temperaments better, perhaps, than some of us teachers.

They knew, and stepped back, when one of their friends was having a bad day and needed the teachers’ laps more than they did.

They knew who would play trucks, who would run and jump, who would share a snack.

They could rest in this knowledge, trusting that when it was they who were having a bad day, they would be able to step forward and ask for the help of the teachers to co-regulate and get back to feeling loved and loving.

Letting go and going to sleep is a huge and vulnerable act that requires an enourmous amount of trust.

Trust the other children, trust the teachers, trust the space, trust that the drive to learn and explore will still be accessible to be fulfilled after nap.

For the children who joined us only for the toddler year (as well as for those who only attend 2 or 3 days a week), the intensity of this act of trust and need for a coherent story to hold it was multiplied.

I was exhausted. Letting go of aspects of work I’d cared for and cultivated for almost a decade, at first, was terrifying. How could I trust that anyone would “get” it and care for it — to both be the intent and do the doing? In fact, some of the newbies imagined they understood the whole thing when, in reality, they held only one tiny facet of the visible activities and tossed it around like a frisbee. Part of my exhausted burnout was that not even I could hold the whole story, it felt complex and almost unknowable, and I didn’t have the energy to tell it clearly.

So, for this child, I became the “night-night girl.”

What does that mean?

I was one-dimensional to him; I had only one role, and truly, I did not have a relationship with him beyond seeing him to his spot and ensuring he had his blanket.

Sometimes I think this is how the general public sees early care educators — one-dimensional automatons who just feed, diaper, clothe, and put the children to bed. Just as the public might see us in the one-dimensional role of “teacher” and reduce this to quizzing children on inane things like colors.

Those of us who’ve lived these days with toddlers know better. To care is to educate, and to educate is to care for babies and toddlers. There is always only ever a whole child, no part is separate or “taught” in isolation. This is never more clear than at nap time.

Transition from inside to outside. Transition from outside to handwashing to lunch. The pushdown of the preschool routine called circle time. Naptime.

None of these are going to go well if anyone expects every toddler to do the same thing at the same time. Chaos is most likely to ensue if we hold an expectation like this. As much as possible, we try to avoid every putting the children in situations like that and setting them up to fail.

Part of letting go of the work I loved felt like letting go of my care for things that mattered to me, that in fact do still matter to me. It felt like letting go of the bigger vision of making a difference. But the work had also come to feel chaotic, the chaos of always rushing, never finishing, never getting to the goal. My better angels could no longer be reached.

But setting up the routine so each child does the same thing each day that they did all the previous days — that is setting individual children and the whole group up for success.

Just like all routines in the toddler room, when there is a predictable nap routine, everyone eventually follows it.

Each child has their own understanding and story about nap time.

For this little boy, it was “go to the night-night girl and lie down,” while for the child who had to tell me she no longer naps, it was “gear up a for a fight I’ll never win, but try anyway to hold onto my autonomy.”

There could be no more deciding or considering decisions. Rest had to come. It became all I could do. The only story left was the story of “let it go.” It turned out that there were only a few things that had to be passed on—not all the chaos. Looking back through my notebooks from those years, it seems that I was trying to do the same thing for almost all of those years. I had the same goals all the time. Build systems that mirror the fact that babies are already fully human.

“Routine” may sound like “do it the same” but in the toddler room, it really means to do it predictably. Do it so it can be ‘read’ by the children and eventually taken on and owned. Do it so the children know what to do and what to expect.

And it means, individualize for each child. The little boy who called me the night-night girl had joined our pod of classrooms as a two-year-old. Most of the rest of the group was already in a routine from the previous year, so it was easy for all of us to weave him in.

That didn’t make it easy for him to weave in. When a routine runs smoothly, it becomes a part of who you are, and it seems as if another adult could pop into the room. Each toddler needs and deserves being held in mind and understood as a full human. If we had assumed this little boy could already ‘read’ our routine, we would have set him up to fight. The routine is not just what we can see, not just making it visible and understandable to a toddler. It is also believing in his right to be believed, to understand.

We had to hold his mind in mind as well as our own minds in mind.

One of the saddest stories from the burnout experience is that some people who held my mind in mind and seemed to think I just needed to fit into the routine of living in a toxic work environment where we just did what was told and expected. And maybe that is the only holding in mind they had ever experienced so they didn’t have another way to be. Luckily, I am not a toddler, and I had the power to leave. But when I see them again, I tell them “I don’t take naps anymore!”

Looking back, I don’t think the child who told me that she no longer takes naps got all that she needed from me. Now I think perhaps I was trying to make her fit into our routine rather than meet her. If I were to go back and coach myself, I’d ask me about what I thought her experience was like, what the experience was like for the rest of the group, and what I most wanted for everyone.

There were other mistakes. I most wanted all the children to take a nap. And most days, in every setting I taught in over 15 years, they all did. But naptime was the time I made the most mistakes. Wanting and expecting something to be consistent maybe became a heavy focus to balance with wanting each child to have a good day and experience responsive care.

No matter how many times the data show that making toddlers fit never works, I kept trying!

And perhaps as I forgive myself for the mistakes I made as a toddler teacher, I can begin to forgive all of us for our part in the years where I fell down into burnout. I and those around me were also doing the best we could with the best of intentions. We all held a piece of the vision for a better world and all worked toward that. Our better angels were always nearby even when we couldn’t access them. They are here now, too. What I’ve learned as I write about healing from burnout is that healing is always available to all of us.

Healing is Always Available.

And under every layer of healing, something else arises that is ready for healing next.