The Administration for Children and Families has contracted with Mathematica and the Erikson Institute to complete various activities examining home-based child care (HBCC) supply and quality.
HBCC is a vital part of our nation’s child care supply and the most common form of care for children living in poverty. Yet, HBCC providers have fewer resources and supports when compared to providers in child care centers, and many HBCC providers face challenges in providing quality care. Additionally, the supply of licensed and publicly subsidized family child care has declined dramatically over the past decade. This project will: (1) fill gaps in our understanding of HBCC supply; and (2) address challenges defining and measuring quality in HBCC settings. The following research questions will drive study activities:
What are the key drivers of HBCC supply?
The study team will address these questions by:
If optional services components are exercised, Mathematica and Erikson will collect original data and develop a new measure of HBCC quality.
The study team will engage a variety of stakeholders, including state and local administrators, quality improvement providers, provider networks and associations, policymakers, and researchers, in shaping and learning from contract activities and will communicate project insights to the field through various products, such as reports, briefs, and presentations.
Products
In 2019, more than 5 million providers cared for one or more children either in their own home or in a child’s home. Home-based child care (HBCC) providers are a varied group that includes both listed providers and unlisted providers who do and do not receive payment. HBCC is especially prevalent in communities of color, communities with high concentrations of people from immigrant backgrounds, areas of concentrated poverty, and rural communities. Yet, research on HBCC lags behind research on center-based child care and early education (CCEE), and the least is known about unlisted providers who do not appear on state or national provider lists and work outside the formal systems supporting CCEE programs. Using the 2019 National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE), this brief focuses on the demographic, educational, economic, and health and wellbeing characteristics of unlisted HBCC providers.
Millions of families with children from birth through age 12 rely on home-based child care (HBCC). HBCC, meaning noncustodial care for children in the provider’s own home or the child’s home, is the most common form of non-parental child care for infants and toddlers. It is especially prevalent in communities of color, communities with high concentrations of people from immigrant backgrounds, areas of concentrated poverty, and rural communities.
Yet the research literature on child care and early education (CCEE) quality primarily focuses on center-based settings. Little is known about the features of quality that may be more characteristic of HBCC. Some features might be implemented differently (such as supporting development across mixed-age groups of children) or occur more commonly in HBCC than in other CCEE settings (such as care offered during evenings, early mornings, and weekends).
This brief focuses on these features of quality that are more characteristic of HBCC. Understanding these features might help highlight the strengths, resources, and resilience of HBCC providers that research, program development, and policy commonly overlook.
To build the evidence base on home-based child care (HBCC) availability and quality, the HBCC Supply and Quality project developed an equity-focused research—or learning—agenda. The goal of an equity-focused research agenda is to use research to help ensure everyone, especially people from historically excluded and/or marginalized communities, has fair and equitable access to resources and opportunities and the capacity to take advantage of them. The agenda is a proposed set of research questions about how the conditions and systems that affect HBCC and how HBCC providers’ practices and experiences influence positive and equitable outcomes for children and families in these HBCC settings. The agenda encompasses the following topics: (1) the gaps in the knowledge base about HBCC availability and quality, and the research questions that need to be answered to fill the knowledge gaps; (2) research activities that could be conducted at the national, state, and local levels to answer the research questions; (3) recommendations for future research activities that could be conducted as part of the HBCC Supply and Quality project.
This agenda includes recommendations for four research activities that can help fill gaps and could be carried out through the HBCC Supply and Quality project: (1) analysis of data from the National Survey of Early Care and Education; (2) a multisite mixed-methods study of HBCC; (3) case studies of state and local ECE systems and community-oriented strategies; (4) measures development focused on quality features that are implemented differently or are more likely to occur in HBCC.
Millions of American families rely on home-based child care (HBCC), which is child care offered in a provider’s home or the child’s home. HBCC encompasses providers who offer regulated family child care (FCC) and those who offer unregulated family, friend, and neighbor (FFN) care. Yet the research literature on child care quality focuses primarily on center-based care. This report summarizes findings from a review of existing literature on the features of quality in HBCC settings and the provider and neighborhood characteristics that may influence these features. The review includes 29 literature reviews and 59 primary research articles primarily published since 2010, including peer-reviewed articles and grey literature. The review documents the types of evidence and types of HBCC settings described in these publications, along with evidence of the mechanisms that link features of quality to provider, child, and family outcomes. This review is one component of the HBCC Supply and Quality project, and findings will guide how the project team understands and approaches quality in its work on other project components.
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