5 Myths About Working in Early Childhood Education

Posted On July 14,2025

Plenty of people will have an opinion when you express any sort of interest in a career. For some reason, people love to share popular myths about teaching, especially when it comes to early childhood education. When these comments get under your skin, you may wonder if it’s worth committing to getting a degree in early childhood education, but don’t let these myths turn you away. Early childhood education needs good teachers who are ready for a fun and challenging career where they can make a real difference.

Early Childhood Education is So Easy, Anyone Could Do It Without Training

The mark of anyone good at their job is how easily they can make it look to someone outside the profession. Early childhood education faces numerous challenges in meeting the diverse developmental needs of the youngest students. Early childhood educators need to be not only aware of these milestones but also trained in how to maximize these learning opportunities. Not to mention dealing with young children and their wide range of emotions, communicating with parents, and managing a full classroom every day. It’s rewarding, it’s fulfilling, and it’s fun, but early childhood education is not “easy”.

Another aspect of this myth is that teaching is not only easy but doesn’t even require a lot of hours. “Must be nice to be out by 3:00 and have the summers off” is a refrain that every teacher tires of. Early childhood teachers may send the kids home at the end of the school day, but that doesn’t mean your work is done. There’s planning and preparing for the next day, communicating with parents and coworkers about incidents and progress, and handling all the administrative tasks that can only be done once the students have left for the day. Not to mention that many teachers, especially those in early childhood education, take on roles that require them to work year-round.

Early Childhood Education Doesn’t Matter Long Term

“It’s just preschool. It’s not a big deal. Don’t you want to teach in a real school?”

Sound familiar? One of the biggest myths about early childhood education is that what happens before the age of five doesn’t matter, or that early childhood education is ineffective. Children don’t learn anything in a classroom that they wouldn’t learn naturally. Early childhood education can have a greater impact than any other educational experience someone will have. When we invest in early childhood education, we are getting to every student when they are making their greatest developmental leaps, and the chance to build those connections and set children up for a lifetime of success is nothing short of amazing. Early childhood education doesn’t just matter in the short term. It makes a big difference.

Play-Based Learning Doesn’t Work

There’s a common myth that play is something that’s incorporated into an early childhood educational setting as a “break” for the teachers and students, or a fun reward for putting in the real work on academic skills of letters, shapes, and numbers through direct teaching or by using electronic applications. If there is play, it should be educator-directed, supervised, and have a distinct and clear learning objective. However, this is patently untrue. Meaningful, child-directed play helps the earliest learners build imagination, creativity, rational thought, cause and effect, and physical skills that will support their success in and out of the classroom. A good early childhood educator will facilitate this play by creating stations and areas where children are free to explore. With the right environment, play-based learning in an early childhood setting is far more effective than forcing a rigorous, adult-directed, academic teaching curriculum. A great early childhood education program will balance direct teaching of early literacy and numeracy skills with play.

Early Childhood Education is Glorified Babysitting

Want to get an early childhood teacher upset quickly? Tell them their job is babysitting. Now, there’s nothing wrong with babysitting, nannying, or childcare as a career. But any early childhood teacher can tell you that “child minding” and “child education” are two very different things. The educational growth of a child under the age of five occurs at a pace that will never be duplicated again, and early childhood education teachers are trained to work with children at the most critical stage of their development. Early childhood educators need to have the training and tools to maximize this time when the students are sponges, ready to soak up every learning opportunity you give them. It’s fun to spend time with kids, but early childhood teaching is not babysitting.

The Education System is Broken

Let’s be honest: there are some aspects in every level of education that can be improved upon, and teachers, both new and old, will have moments of frustration with educational bureaucracy. But to take the idea that education is so broken it’s not worth becoming a teacher is a dangerous myth that needs to be stopped before it drives quality and motivated potential teachers away. To help improve the education system, it needs quality teachers who will be invested in their students and advocate for them. The system is only truly broken when negative commenters succeed in dimming the spark of every educator who is ready to step in and make sure young children have the educational experience they deserve.

There will always be naysayers who will have you second-guessing your career choices. Early childhood education is one area where many people think they know far more than they do, and this results in the perpetuation of myths that, sadly, might drive great prospective teachers away from a field where they could have the chance to make a real difference in a young child’s educational experience. Teaching is an incredibly fulfilling career with many benefits that go far beyond the paycheck. If you are interested in making a difference for the youngest learners, a two-year degree in early childhood education can get you into your own classroom quickly, ready to teach and start disproving these myths yourself!

Make a real impact in early childhood education. Get the training you need at Athena Career Academy and start teaching sooner than you think. Contact us today to learn more.