What does it take to show up for someone else’s pain, every single day?
Across Europe, thousands of caregivers step into that question daily—not as an abstract idea, but as lived reality. They support children who have experienced loss, trauma, displacement, neglect, and the many forms of structural exclusion. And yet, their own emotional needs often remain invisible.
This emotional labor is not listed in job descriptions. It doesn’t appear in timesheets. But it is the glue holding together some of the most vulnerable lives. And too often, it is unsupported, unrecognized, and unsustainable.
The Weight Carried in Silence
Emotional labor, a term first introduced by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, refers to the effort involved in managing feelings—our own and others’—as part of a role. In caregiving settings, it means remaining calm in the face of distress, offering comfort while holding back fatigue, and constantly scanning for the emotional cues children may not have the words to express.
Caregivers do this work under immense emotional strain. Many serve children with backgrounds shaped by migration, domestic violence, systemic poverty, or institutional instability. These children bring with them silent grief, anger, or confusion that cannot always be verbalized. It’s the caregiver’s role to absorb this emotional turbulence and help contain it.
Yet who supports the caregiver? Who listens to the one listening?
Research confirms the toll: caregivers who work in high-stress environments without emotional training or psychological support are significantly more likely to experience burnout, secondary trauma, and disengagement. According to the European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education, emotional well-being is a decisive factor in caregiver performance and retention. The World Health Organization has also underscored the need to recognize and mitigate psychological stress among frontline child welfare and care professionals.
Despite this, few national education and training systems have integrated social-emotional learning (SEL) for adult caregivers. Emotional intelligence is treated as a personal asset—nice to have, but not essential. As a result, the system treats emotional resilience as something caregivers are expected to possess naturally, rather than something that can be taught, practiced, and supported.
A Project Begins by Listening
Empowered by Empathy is a new Erasmus+ project operating in Türkiye, Poland, and Portugal. Its goal is to transform the way we support caregivers of disadvantaged children—but it isn’t starting with tools or training sessions. It’s starting with questions.
We are currently conducting a needs analysis that asks caregivers, educators, and institutional leaders:
- What emotional challenges do you face in your work?
- Where do you feel most alone?
- What support do you wish you had, but don’t?
- What would make your emotional labor visible, acknowledged, and cared for?
These aren’t rhetorical questions. They are the backbone of our design process. The needs analysis is being conducted through surveys, structured interviews, and informal reflection sessions. It is being carried out in all three countries, with an emphasis on institutional caregivers, foster family associations, and social workers who interact daily with children in vulnerable situations.
We believe that emotionally intelligent systems cannot be built without emotionally honest beginnings. And so we listen—not only to logistical gaps, but to emotional truths.
Redesigning the Support System
The project’s long-term vision is to integrate emotional intelligence into caregiving through:
- Modular training materials grounded in social and emotional learning (SEL)
- Trauma-informed digital learning pathways that foster reflective practice
- Locally adapted tools responsive to cultural and institutional realities
This is not just about professional development—it’s about emotional infrastructure. The goal is to help caregivers build the micro-skills they need to navigate emotionally charged moments: co-regulation, de-escalation, emotional mirroring, and boundary setting. It is also about helping institutions shift from reaction to reflection.
In many systems, emotional support is still viewed as an individual problem to be managed in private. But when emotional labor is shared, recognized, and supported, the entire culture of care changes. Children learn to trust more easily. Caregivers last longer. Teams become safer spaces.
By framing emotional intelligence as a structural competency, not a personal burden, Empowered by Empathy hopes to catalyze a shift in how caregiving systems are designed across Europe.
Help Us Surface What’s Invisible
If you are a caregiver, educator, or social worker in Türkiye, Poland, or Portugal—we want to hear from you.
Your experiences, your struggles, your insights are not side notes. They are the foundation. The questions you ask, the emotional skills you’ve developed on your own, the burnout you’ve managed to survive—these are the real curriculum.
Through your voices, this project will become what it needs to be: relevant, realistic, and resonant.
Together, we can begin building structures that acknowledge the full scope of caregiving labor—especially the invisible kind. Not just to prevent burnout. Not just to reduce attrition. But to honor the emotional strength it takes to care for others, every single day.
