The Best Child Care Option May Be Right Under Your Nose
Article/Op-Ed in Working Mother

July 15, 2021
Rebecca Gale wrote for Working Mother about the difficulty parents have in accessing home-based care for their children:
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.”