In episode PHQP_0023 Fit For Care, Jeff examines why early learning programs should consider adopting staff fitness standards, as well as making accommodations for staff who are unable to meet such standards when necessary.

Watch Now: PHQP_0023 Fit For Care

Welcome to the Playvolution HQ Podcast. I’m Jeff Johnson. Thanks for pushing play on with the show.

So, a little update, a couple, a handful, I don’t know, maybe a dozen episodes back, I was talking about a kid playing at taking the garbage out, doing all kinds of spins and twists and flips with the garbage bag. My wife, Tash, reported the other day that she saw an adult male doing kind of the same thing. He was doing curls with the garbage bag, one hand and then the other, as he walked it out to the trash receptacle from the house.

So, I like to see that it’s a, at least a multi-generational activity, that we humans find ways to entertain ourselves, even with mundane chores like hauling out the trash. So, topic, the only one for this episode, is caregiver fitness standards. I think a lot of people underestimate the physical demands of working in early learning programs.

Now, in the burnout work that I do, I talk a lot about the emotional labor that we do, dealing with the emotions and feelings of people that we interact with. But there’s also a lot of physical labor, if we’re going to do this work. There’s hefting and toting of kids up and down off of changing tables, and there’s moving of equipment, and there’s hopefully running and chasing around with kids outside and inside, and getting our hearts pounding.

And then maybe in emergency situations, there are things we need to do, and that requires a certain level of physical fitness. And I don’t know any kinder way to say this, but some early learning staff are not physically fit for the job of working in early learning. They’re incapable of meeting all of those physical demands, and to some extent, that’s okay.

This is a sensitive topic because of that, but look, accommodations and inclusion are really important around this topic. I’ve met over my 30-ish years working the field a number of caregivers who would fall short of the physical requirements for doing the job for one reason or another, and who are incredibly gifted in other areas of the work that I would want them not in the field. So I think for many people, accommodations can be made, and we want to include people in this profession with differing abilities.

And we do need some level of fitness for probably the majority of staff in the majority of programs for a number of reasons that we’ll get into. So I’m not trying to be a jerk talking about this topic, and I don’t want to exclude or forbid people from working in the field because they physically can’t do certain things, but I think it’s something we need to discuss. Sedentary adults encourage sedentary kids for one thing.

I’ve said it many times, we live in a world where human children have never been more sedentary than they are right now in 2025. And if we want kids to be moving more, it’s probably a good idea to surround them with adults who are moving more. And so programmatically, having more physically active, physically capable, physically interested adults is probably a good idea, just from a curriculum standpoint.

If we want kids to move, we need them to be around adults who can and do move. There’s also a relationship here to burnout, because over the years, I’ve written a couple books and done a lot of speaking and thinking about burnout in this profession. And I’ve noticed this kind of burnout fitness spiral, and it tends to happen to people because when you work in this profession, you do that emotional labor, and you start burning out.

Burnout puts blinders on you, and you get kind of this narrow focus, and you burn up a lot of emotional energy. And so a lot of times, the way we try to deal with that is we get home, and we want to just decompress at the end of the day. So we flop down on the couch, and we turn on Netflix, and we eat a bag of Doritos.

Or we do other things that are not necessarily good for us. And so my experience in talking to people, and my own experience, is that we fall out of any fitness levels we might have had as we spend time in this profession, and burnout takes over. I’m an example.

In the last few years of my work as a center director, when I’d been burning out for three-plus years probably, I was in the worst physical shape of my life in my early 30s, because I was just putting so much emotionally into the job that taking care of myself physically wasn’t really on my radar. And my experience is that happens to a lot of people in this profession who start experiencing burnout. And so not only do some people come into this work lacking the fitness level we might want for the work, but this work can also, I guess, drag you in a direction that makes you less likely to pay attention to those.

On the counterside of that, it’s one of the best things we can do to counteract burnout is to, in our own lives, be more physically active. Implementing exercise programs, whether you’re getting stronger physically, lifting weights, or whether you’re doing cardio or whatever it is, moving your body more, getting in better physical condition has an impact on your emotional state as well, your emotional and mental state. So that plays a part of it.

And so I think that all ties into the physical fitness standards of this profession. And the truth is, agreed-upon standards don’t really exist for what the physical abilities should be for people working in the early learning profession. Now there’s no limit to the number of documents that claim to tell you what we should be doing in our programs.

We’ve got accreditation programs, we’ve got quality rating scales, we’ve got state regulations, and most of those are telling us about where we should be as people and what we should be doing. And what the curriculum should be and what our medication administration process should be and all of that about how to do the job. But no place in most of those documents do they spell out the physical demands of the work.

And so because there aren’t any standards out there, it’s kind of hard for programs to know what to require, what to demand, what to expect, what to encourage from their employees. And so I think that’s a piece of the problem as well. So demands of the job.

And I mean this is basic stuff. There is a certain strength level you need to have to do this job well. Because you do need to lift things up and put things down and carry things and move things, and that requires a certain level of strength.

There’s mobility and flexibility. We need to be able to bend and move our bodies in certain ways. It’s important if you are an infant caregiver or a toddler caregiver to be able to get up and down off of the floor.

Because not only are you moving kids up and down, you’re picking toys up and down and equipment up and down and you’re cleaning and all that kind of stuff. If you are physically unable to do that, it’s hard to do infant-toddler care well. With school-agers and preschoolers, it’s the same thing.

There’s lots of up-to-down and moving and it’s moving in different ways, but it’s the same high demand that we have in the infant-toddler rooms. We’re playing games with the kids, we’re moving equipment, we’re setting up equipment, we’re cleaning and we’re doing all that kind of stuff. So there is a certain level of mobility and flexibility that’s required for this work.

And there’s also endurance, because not only do we need the strength and the mobility and flexibility, but we also need to be able to do those things over and over and over throughout the course of a day, throughout the course of a week. The strength requirements aren’t a one-and-done kind of situation on a daily basis. There’s multiple things you need to do.

So there is a certain physical demand to this work. And again, we don’t spend enough time probably thinking or talking about it. And so why is this important? Well, I think the big one is emergency response.

In an emergency situation, a fire, a building intruder, an injury on the far side of the playground, there are going to be some physical demands of the caregivers. And if, say you’ve got to evacuate a building because of a fire, and if a certain percentage of your staff aren’t physically able to move kids through the building in a timely, speedy manner to get them out, you’re going to have a problem. Now, we can probably accommodate a couple people who aren’t as mobile and aren’t as quick as others.

But at some point, there is a point where a lot of people are in danger if there aren’t enough staff who can physically do the job of evacuating that building. And that should be a concern. That’s something programs should think about.

Another thing is hazard mitigation. Now, I’ve talked a lot on this podcast about the fact that risk isn’t something we should be worried about in terms of keeping kids safe. Risk is something we should actually encourage.

What we should focus on when it comes to safety is hazard mitigation, which is helping kids see and predict things that may cause harm. And so lacking staff in a program, lacking enough staff in a program who are physically able to meet those physical demands of the job is a hazard. And so having a substantial number of your staff that are physically fit and able reduces many, many, many hazards in an early learning setting.

So again, that goes, like the emergency response, that goes back to a health and safety issue. And then there’s interactions with children. And this is a day-in and day-out thing, and we’ve already touched on those a little bit.

The getting up and down off of the floor, the moving equipment, the engaging with the kids. Staff who are physically unfit are often staff who don’t want to get up and go outside and don’t want to go on walks and do those kind of things. And again, that may not be their choice.

There may be conditions that they don’t have any control over that are causing that, but they’re still physically not able to do those things or not interested in doing those things. And so those things don’t happen. And so if we want kids to be up and moving and active, again, a certain number of the adults working with them have to be up and moving and active.

It’s important. And then also there’s that modeling engagement with the world. Not only do we need to be doing those things, but doing those things is also modeling for kids that being up and moving and active is a human thing.

If you’re a toddler and the majority of the physical activity you see your adult doing is scrolling on a flat screen piece of glass, you don’t come to appreciate the physicality of the world and all that that offers you as far as potential activity engagement goes. And so there’s a certain amount of modeling we do by being physically active. It shows kids that it’s important to be up and active and moving and using their bodies.

I’ll be back at some point with some sample standards in a future episode of this topic because I think they’re out there. It’s not going to be anything crazy, but there should be a certain amount of weight we should lift, a certain level of flexibility that we have and those kind of things. And so I’m going to throw some things out there and we’ll see if anybody wants to start a conversation about this.

And again, I hope I’m not too much of a jerk for bringing it up, but it was on my mind. So I decided I’d put it in an episode to wrap up this episode. First, share your thoughts on this topic.

I’d love to hear it, especially if you don’t agree with me. I’d like to have some some thoughts on that and get your your feelings because I look I might be way off base. I don’t know.

Amazon idea for this month. These sweet magnets. Somebody used my Amazon link.

It’s in the show notes. Using that link gets you into Amazon and then anything you buy via that portal. A little bit of that goes to support this podcast and the Playvolution HQ website.

And it’s much appreciated. Somebody got a 60 piece magnet set. They’re about an inch in diameter and really thin.

And there’s all kinds of fun magnet board activities you could do in an early learning program with these things. I don’t know if that’s what the purchaser intends, but I’d like to see those in use in programs for magnet boards and those kind of things. Look, they’ve got a little self adhesive thing on there so they stick on.

Sometimes that stuff gives out quick and you might want to use a stronger adhesive. But for most stuff, it’s pretty good. So that’s the Amazon idea for this month or this week.

Share the show, the website, PlayvolutionHQ.com if you like them. It’s much appreciated. Next week, we’re going to dig into proprioception and school readiness.

I’m going to give you a guitar update. I am so uncoordinated. Dad joke of the week as we wrap things up.

Why did the math book look depressed? It had too many problems. This has been the PlayvolutionHQ podcast. Back soon with an episode.

Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.

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