Noel Warrior
The vile sensation of warm vomit oozing from the strands of your hair down to your chin all while you strain to hold up an aggressive kicking oversized toddler. Working with children requires a level of patience that you must acquire when dealing with these small humans. More specifically, being a children’s church leader, you must have a brave face when walking into the Rainbow Hall every Sunday morning. That one morning a week you must stay strong for three hours and be prepared for whatever nonsense comes your way. The many types of conflicts you face as a children’s teacher at a church can range from possible gun threats, to low wages, to overwork. The main types you face are the overbearing parents, the children with bad behavior, poor wages, the workload that leaks onto off days, and just overall trying to keep everyone happy.
There is a fine line between protective parents and overbearing parents. Protective parents know the dangers of leaving their child with a stranger, but also know that they have a choice and take precautions before they leave their children in the hands of childcare providers to ensure the safest environment for their kids. Overbearing parents do the same, except they tell us how to change diapers, organize our lesson plans, and what games they think would engage the children even more. We, the certified childcare teachers, get scorned by first-time parents about the time it takes to remove the defecated, warm, and weighted diapers off the children to change them into clean diapers, and even the time-blocks we change their diapers because little Jerry doesn’t want to miss movie time so he can wait till after, they would try to explain. The countless poopy diapers I changed on a day's work averaged more than how many any of those parents had changed.
Not only are they overly critical, but they overstep their boundaries, which makes it an unsafe environment for other kids. The lack of trust that they give us teachers, even though they had a choice to give us custody of their children, can lead to parents taking drastic measures to ensure their child’s safety. One drastic measure a parent took was leaving a loaded rifle in their toddler’s backpack for them to be able to protect themselves. The backpack was in my room, the Green room, and we heard a lockdown procedure happen. I gathered all the kids in a corner and tried to keep my cool, but I was only fifteen at the time and I did what any person would do, panic. The doors of the room unlocked, and the head pastor busted through the door and went through little Johnny’s backpack, and there in the middle sack was the rifle, loaded, and ready to use. Johnny’s father quickly burst through the room to plead his case for safety and was supposedly heard out by the other church leaders. He wasn’t removed from the church, more so the situation was swept under the rug, and he was ensured of his child’s safety, even though no previous threat to Johnny’s safety was indicated and he himself created the unsafe environment.
The next type of issue we teachers face in general are the bad seeds. And I’m not talking about kids behaving poorly, because that is what defines a normal kid. I’m specifying the mean kids. The kids who are more intelligent than other kids, and use that intelligence as an advantage over younger kids, to manipulate them into giving them toys they want or snacks they like. Those kids constantly act poorly, but that isn’t the worst part of it. The issue is when the parents come to pick them up and see little Sammy in the timeout corner and advocate for their bad-behavior children. Mr. and Mrs. Walker wouldn’t believe that Sammy somehow managed to take a toy soldier from a younger kid, chuck the toy across the room, give another kid a scratch on the forehead, and then swipe an uppercut jab to another kid because they got goldfish and she got animal crackers, but she is a bad seed. But somehow Sammy’s parents have been in this situation with her outbursts so much they’ve grown accustomed to defending her, and so they are skilled in pleading her case. They believe I’m wrong, and they think maybe if the younger kid let her have the toy, the kid wasn’t standing in the falling path of the toy soldier, and if she got goldfish then none of these atrocities would've happened.
Preparing the bible lesson every Sunday requires a whole day run-through and previously scheduled daily preparations. The time consumption of being a children's-teacher at church requires us to build a lesson plan that educates the children academically, using one core subject per Sunday (Math, English, Science, or History) while also using a bible verse or story to teach the children each Sunday. Our goals are to create a day that is interactive and fun for the kids, but it’s nearly impossible to create a whole schedule without the preparation leaking into your off days. Assuming that someone is going to wake up at 5 am each Sunday, rather than working on the schedule the whole Saturday, disregards one of the central of the problems of the human race, procrastination. Being a teacher in general comes with the knowledge that you will be overworked and not given enough rest time.
Not only do children’s teachers, especially in the line of religious work, deal with mental strains, but we are expected to go above what is expected of us while being paid a poor wage. I remember when I was first hired I was told the children learning about the Bible and watching them grow into great people makes the pay even better.
I asked, “Pastor, what is my pay wage in numbers?”
He responded, “$7 an hour is where you will start with.”
Okay well, I’m being paid $7 an hour for a bit then I will get paid more the longer I work here, I thought. Well, it was two and a half years later and I still was getting paid my initial wage. Although I loved working with kids, you work to get paid. And getting paid allows you to afford that new PINK shirt you want to buy, or even Ramen noodles to get you by during the week. I was privileged enough to not be living off this pay wage, but my 20-year-old coworker had no choice to, while managing her other job at Starbucks, and going to college. All because the first job she had was working at the Church she grew up with, and she didn’t have the heart to tell her they couldn’t raise her pay wage, so in turn she had to bend her back to make ends meet.
While being a children’s teacher comes with its technical struggles, there are also mental strains that both the children and the workers endure. The children struggle with separation from their parents each Sunday. There was one time a girl latched onto her dad’s leg and he couldn’t get her off until he tickled her off. We had to comfort her, assure her that her dad is coming back, then get her to have fun that day. While working on the children’s happiness, we also try to help each other as a team feel a lot better about all the stress we endure from this line of work. Sometimes we get each other coffee from Starbucks, or pizza from Little Caesars, if someone is swamped with a lesson with the kids, we will take on another task to help them. Even though this causes more strain, it helps in a way to let us know someone hears us and acknowledges our significance.
