The Best Child Care Option May Be Right Under Your Nose

Adriana Joseph needed child care desperately.

The New Haven, Connecticut-based COO of a nonprofit and her husband, who works for the government, toured the top-rated daycare center in their area for their infant daughter. They were impressed with the fingerprint scans, the camera feeds set up in each room, an app to document children’s feeding, sleeping and diapering schedules, and the stellar reputation of the place, where many of their colleagues sent their children.

“We thought, ‘Those are the things we should have.’ We were in this position where we could afford it, and thought, ‘This is the best, so we should have the best option,'” Adriana said.

Then, she learned of an in-home daycare option nearby. It was much cheaper, about $1,200 per month compared to $2,000 to $3,000 for a center. The caretakers spoke Spanish, so her daughter could be bilingual and be able to communicate with Adriana’s mother, who is Mexican. She put her daughter on the waitlist, and when the pandemic hit, a spot opened up.

Adriana calls her family daycare “the family that we have here,” and feels the quality of care is just as high as the daycare centers, but “without the bells and whistles.” She’s astounded by how her daughter Andi, now 15 months, has thrived. Andi is one of six kids in the infant and toddler program at the center, which is housed on one floor of a three-story multi-family house; older children are on another floor, and the top floor is occupied by the married couple that runs the daycare.

Her colleagues have questioned why she chose the family center over the more well-known local daycare centers. “The cost of child care is so ridiculous that parents have to sacrifice things to send their children to the daycare they choose,” Adriana said. “But if people had more information about what in-home daycare is, it would become more of a preferred place to send your kid, rather than a big place.”

Understanding Home-Based Care

Home-based child care, also known as family-based child care, isn’t always understood or valued by parents and policymakers, many of whom may view daycare centers as the gold standard for child care. Research shows that family-based child care programs are the primary source of child care for children of color and children from low-income communities–the same families that often have no options other than to work non-traditional hours, making it harder to find child care.

Many home-based centers don’t need licenses to operate, and the myriad state regulations vary widely, providing a patchwork of data on family child care arrangements, unlike child care centers, which are more easily tracked, measured and documented.

“There is a bias against family-based care,” Natalie Renew, the director of Home Grown, a national collaborative dedicated to improving quality access to home-based child care, said. “Our mental model of early care and education is centered on a school- and center-based understanding. It very much looks like the model of K-12 pushed down to younger kids.”

The bias against home-based child care matters because of how the public funds and subsidies are distributed. President Joe Biden has outlined an ambitious goal of $39 billion in funding for child care investment. Traditionally, more federal funds have flowed toward child care centers rather than home-based centers, and understanding and addressing this bias may shape the future of child care for millions of families.

Approximately 1.9 children–only about 14 percent of those eligible–receive subsidies for child care, and it’s up to individual states to decide how the subsidies can be spent. Many family child care providers do receive subsidies, but they’re often reimbursed differently than center-based providers, with states generally setting reimbursements levels lower for home-based care. For example, a license-exempt provider may be reimbursed $13 per day for caring for an infant, while a child care center would receive $35 for the same care.

Head Start, a major funder of early childhood education that caters to low-income families, serves over one million children per year. Though its funds can technically go to home-based care, according to federal data, only 9 percent of Head Start funding goes to those in a family child care setting, though far more family and home-based care centers are eligible for funds. Natalie says 50 percent of families want their kids in family child care, but when trying to access a Head Start or public pre-K spot, they may have no choice but to go to a center.

A Complicated History

Part of the bias against home-based child care can be traced to a much uglier history. Home-based daycares, called “day nurseries” in the late 19th Century, were little more than a room full of children and one adult to mind them while unmarried or widowed mothers worked. Families that could afford it hired a nanny or wet nurse to watch their children, often women of color, often at low wages. When the center-based model of preschool was introduced, its founders intentionally differentiated from the day nurseries, as to attract a middle-class clientele.

“Our child care system for infants and toddlers has a history of racism and exploitation,” said Jessica Sager, co-founder and CEO of All Our Kin, a nonprofit that trains, supports and sustains family child care providers. “You can take the labor of Black and brown women, with a history of slavery and exploitation, and underpay them or pay them nothing,” Jessica said. “This is a very particular racist history that leads us to think about family child care labor as worthless.”

Different Families Have Different Needs

Center-based care facilities thrive in parts of the country with large concentrations of high-income families on more traditional work schedules, including big cities and suburbs that are often the same places where such policies are developed and advocacy begins. But there are countless reasons a home-based or family child care center may work better than other options for many families: Parents working non-traditional hours or unpredictable schedules can’t always make a center-based model work as centers’ limited hours often don’t match family work schedules.

A center also typically requires set tuition payments, whereas low-income parents working paycheck to paycheck may have too unstable an income to meet the payments. Family providers may be more flexible with payments and hours and many develop close bonds with the families they care for. Siblings can often stay together in home-based settings, which some families may also prefer. Plus, for infants and toddlers in particular, some parents appreciate the smaller, more home-like setting of a family care facility.

As conversations continue about how to expand quality child care services, family child care centers don’t require the overhead and staffing of a daycare center, and may be a more viable solution in child care deserts and rural areas, where few options for quality care exist.

Child care policy experts agree there is space for both options, and the one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work for making quality child care available and affordable for everyone. And as Adriana discovered, quality child care might look different than she’d initially anticipated. It may just take some extra time and effort to find.