More Options for Families: Public Preschool in Family Child Care Homes

Home-based child care providers are an essential part of the early care and education landscape in the U.S., but despite their popularity, they are not always integrated into major early care and education programs. According to the National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE), an estimated 5.2 million home-based providers care for children ages 12 and younger in their home, and nearly 6.4 million children ages 0-5 receive care in a home-based child care setting. Families may prefer home-based care (also known as family child care) for many reasons, including the small group size, nurturing setting, cultural and linguistic familiarity, mixed-age grouping, and often more flexible schedule and relatively affordable cost. In many geographies underserved by child care centers, home-based care is a critical lifeline for working parents.

However, as public preschool programs have expanded across the U.S., many have explicitly—or inadvertently—excluded home-based providers. This can have devastating consequences for providers, the families they serve, and the overall availability of care. In 24 states with publicly-funded pre-K, funding can go toward services provided in residential settings. Outside of a few outlier geographies, in most places a very small portion of publicly-funded pre-K children are actually enrolled in home-based settings. In 7 of 24 states, zero family child care educators received pre-K funds in 2022.

It is no coincidence that home-based provider participation in publicly-funded early childhood systems is so low; most are not designed with these providers in mind. Changing these systems will require focused effort, and involves both operational changes and addressing the biases against home-based providers inherent in our public systems.

In a new set of resources that we published with Home Grown, we explored the question of how system leaders could more intentionally work to include family child care providers in public pre-K systems, drawing on lessons learned from city and county leaders across the country.

We were motivated to write these resources by our own experiences in New York City and from the lessons we have learned from members of the ECE Implementation Working Group. In New York, home-based providers were not included in the initial roll-out of universal pre-K for 4-year-olds, which created significant challenges for providers. Some of the lessons we learned from early implementation mistakes led us to make changes, including prioritization of home-based providers in the program’s expansion to 3-year-olds. Still, the initial exclusion of home-based providers caused lasting harm. To more fairly and holistically reflect on our experience, we partnered with leaders at ECE on the Move, a movement with over 600 child care providers in residential settings in New York City. With them, we created a suite of research briefs to help leaders and administrators plan for and incorporate home-based child care into publicly funded systems by:

• making the case for including family child care in public pre-K to their stakeholders
• ensuring equitable funding and support for home-based child care is considered
• utilizing best practices for incorporating provider voice in the planning and policy-making processes

We created the ECE Implementation Working Group—now housed in the New Practice Lab—to serve as a forum where early childhood system leaders could share implementation lessons and challenges candidly with the goal of building stronger systems. When we shared our experience working with New York family child providers and building more inclusive systems over time, we heard a diverse set of stories from leaders in other parts of the country. Some working group members built systems that were more inclusive of home-based care providers from the outset. Other leaders had experiences similar to New York City’s, and had made changes or were working to make changes in the midst of implementation.

In the materials published by Home Grown, we focused heavily on “inside-outside” strategies: tactics that combine pressure from advocates and providers with work inside of government to change policy. As we wrote in the introductory brief, “Since public preschool programs are ultimately financed through processes like legislative budgets and executive decisions, the effort to incorporate home-based care into them successfully is, in part, a political one—so administrators will need to leverage strategies to influence decision-makers and the political process.” In addition to telling the New York City story from multiple perspectives, we explored two other elements of inside-outside strategies: working with labor unions, and the tactics required to effectively engage in participatory planning and program design.

The stories shared by working group members who have meaningfully engaged in this work make clear that seeking provider input is not a one-time activity to check off the to-do list. Providers need to have a seat at the table continuously and to play a meaningful role in conversations about planning, implementation, and ongoing operations. For inside-outside strategies to succeed, they must begin with the kind of regular, sustained contact that fosters trust. Below, we highlight key lessons from a few working group members who have engaged home-based providers as a critical part of their mixed-delivery early childhood system.

Alameda County has a rich history of engaging providers in planning work. The county has multiple family child care associates and a family child care policy group that are connected to the government agencies that oversee early care and education. When Alameda County began the planning work for the ballot initiative that would ultimately become ‘Measure C,’ providers were at the table to articulate their needs and help identify the programmatic components needed to meet them. First 5 Alameda County—a quasi-governmental agency with relatively strong trust among providers—was selected to administer the program. As Measure C implementation now gets underway, family child care providers and center-based providers will be given the same opportunities to access funds for facilities, wages, creation of new slots, and professional development.

Nancy Harvey, the Director of Lil’ Nancy’s Primary Schoolhouse, has worked for 17 years to unionize home-based child care providers in Oakland with the Service Employees International Union, and credits the progress that providers in Oakland have made to that effort. Since Governor Gavin Newsom recognized the union, Nancy and her colleagues have political power to advance their interests. They have succeeded in winning both full health care and a retirement plan for home-based providers, and are the first organization in the country to do so. She argues that despite some persisting disparities between home-based and center-based providers, they continue to make progress.

Champions are essential to make change, and they can and should be both inside and outside government. In Multnomah County, Chair Jessica Vega Pederson led the Preschool for All Planning Task Force and set the tone for the work. She and the staff operated on the foundational belief that great preschool experiences can and do happen in home-based care, and recruited like-minded people into the planning process. Her conviction that home-based care should be a valued component of public pre-K system allowed her to effectively push back against opponents who asked, why not just expand preschool within the public schools? Vega Pederson spoke credibly to family preferences for home-based care, the need to preserve infant and toddler capacity, and the detrimental consequences that other cities had seen in their preschool roll-out.

Multnomah County has prioritized the needs of home-based providers in their preschool roll-out. The per-child funding rate for home-based care is the same as center-based care, recognizing that providers require the same resources to deliver high-quality care even if the particulars of their model are different. In the first years of the Preschool for All roll-out, home-based providers were given preferential access, accounting for 37 of 82 pilot locations. This both evened the playing field for home-based providers to receive new funding and gave policymakers more time to work through operational challenges.

As consumers of child care, families are the best representatives of what their family needs and values. Leaders in Allegheny County recognize that what families need and what care is available in urban Pittsburgh is quite different from the much more rural communities surrounding the city. Family child care providers are critical everywhere, but particularly in communities with more limited transportation options and lighter density. When the county had an opportunity to deploy new funds for capacity building for infant and toddler care, they made home-based providers eligible alongside child care centers.

As support for more robust funding for early care and education grows at the local, state, and federal levels, it will be necessary to think holistically about the range of settings where children receive care. Further, deep listening with families through the New Practice Lab’s Thriving Families effort has demonstrated the complexity of families’ care needs, and interest in more flexible, trusted options like home-based care and preschool. If we take too narrow a view and focus solely on center- and school-based options, we risk further eroding the already-scarce capacity for child care. Family child care providers are a critical part of the early care and education system, who deserve the respect and support required to sustain their small businesses. Families deserve to have child care options and to be empowered to choose settings that best meet their needs. The strategies that state and local leaders have used to more effectively engage home-based providers in planning, design, and implementation of early education initiatives provide valuable lessons as we consider the work ahead.

Emmy Liss and Josh Wallack are two of the authors of a set of resources published by Home Grown in May 2025, ‘Inside-Outside’ Strategies for Integrating Home-Based Child Care Into Public Preschool. Shanita Bowen, Gladys Jones, and Doris Irizarry, leaders of ECE on the Move, co-authored these pieces and Alexandra Patterson at Home Grown provided critical support.

The ECE Implementation Working Group is a group of early childhood education leaders from cities and counties across the country. These leaders gather to share best practices from their experience working with families and local communities, and their work aligns with the New Practice Lab’s theory of change: that implementation lessons should inform policy design from the start. More information about the Working Group can be found here. You can reach out to us with questions about the group and its work at npl_work@newamerica.org.