A Guide to Mental Health for Early Years Educators

by Kate Moxley

2022 · Routledge

This practical and accessible guide tackles the challenges that busy childcare educators face with their mental health in what is a wonderful, rewarding, but often exhausting role. Drawing from "day-in-the-life" experiences and case studies, this book sets out high-quality staff wellbeing practices that can revolutionise the way childcare practitioners approach their job and their own health. Chapters guide the reader through a process of reflection and development, encouraging and empowering them to create a workplace culture that positively contributes to their personal wellbeing. This book: • Focuses on the realities of Early Years education, combining the author's lived experience with examples of real-life practice. • Encourages educators to think and feel positively about themselves; to identify the individual skills, strengths and talents they bring to their work. • Can be used individually or collaboratively by team members, with guidance on creating a positive workplace culture with a shared vision, core values and beliefs. Essential reading for anybody who finds that the job they love can sometimes leave them feeling worn out, stressed and depleted, this book has been written to enrich the lives of all training and practising Early Years Educators.

Fears and Fantasies

by Kate Murphy

2010 · Peter Lang

Fears and Fantasies: Modernity, Gender, and the Rural-Urban Divide explores the ways in which fantasies about returning to, or revitalising, rural life helped to define Western modernity in the early twentieth century. Scholarship addressing responses to modernity has focused on urban space and fears about the effects of city life; few studies have considered the 'rural' to be as critical as the 'urban' in understanding modernity. This book argues that the rural is just as significant a reference point as the urban in discourses about modernity. Using a rich Australian case study to illuminate broader international themes, it focuses on the role of gender in ideas about the rural-urban divide, showing how the country was held up against the 'unnatural' city as a space in which men were more 'masculine' and women more 'feminine'. Fears and Fantasies is an innovative and important contribution to scholarship in the fields of history and gender studies.