Improving Quality Among Family Child Care Providers

Home-based child care is an especially common form of child care for infants and toddlers from low-income communities and communities of color. Parents choose family child care over center-based care for a variety of reasons. For parents who rely on public transportation, it’s often easier to access home-based care than it is to find a close child care center. Family child care providers often offer more flexible hours than center-based care, providing extended or even overnight hours for parents with nontraditional work schedules. Perhaps most importantly, family child care programs tend to be more affordable than center-based programs. According to the Committee for Economic Development, the national median cost for infant care in a center is $9,185 compared to a cost of $6,828 in a family child care setting.

Despite the widespread prevalence of family child care providers there is little research on quality in family child care settings. The research that has been conducted has reached mixed conclusions. Some studies have reported low levels of quality in family child care settings while other studies have found high levels of satisfaction among mothers of children cared for in these settings and a belief that home-based care provides a safe, warm, and healthy environment for the child.

With home-based child care being so common nationwide it’s imperative that mechanisms be put into place to ensure high levels of quality among these providers. Organizations such as All Our Kin provide a model for improving quality in home-based child care. All Our Kin is a nonprofit organization that offers training, support, and other resources to family child care providers in four Connecticut metro areas: New Haven, Bridgeport, Stamford, and Norwalk. The organization aims to increase the supply of high-quality, affordable child care while enhancing providers’ knowledge, skills, and practice as early childhood educators.

In collaboration with the Connecticut Children’s Museum, All Our Kin offers a Family Child Care Toolkit Licensing Program that provides resources and support to help unlicensed caregivers fulfill state licensing requirements and become part of a more professional community of child care providers. Through their Family Child Care Network providers are able to engage in educational mentorship, professional development, and advocacy and leadership opportunities. Network members meet monthly, take part in workshops and trainings, and gain assistance in CDA credential coursework. Providers also have access to a hotline they can call for advice at any time and can choose to participate in one-on-one consultations with All Our Kin educational consultants who conduct regular program visits.

A recent independent study illustrates the impact that the All Our Kin model has had on the quality of provider care. For the study, researchers compared 28 randomly selected All Our Kin providers with a group of 20 providers who had never had contact with All Our Kin. Both groups of providers had to be licensed and caring for at least three children. To measure the quality of care in the two groups, the researchers used two instruments - the Family Child Care Environmental Rating Scale - Revised (FCCERS-R) and the Parenting Interactions with Children: Checklist of Observations Linked to Outcomes (PICCOLO). The FCCERS-R is an established tool for measuring quality in family child care while the PICCOLO exclusively measures adult-child interactions.

The study’s findings provide a lesson in how initiatives like All Our Kin can help improve the quality of family child care providers. The study found that quality on both of the observation tools was statistically higher for All Our Kin providers than those providers not affiliated with All Our Kin. In fact, All Our Kin providers scored an average of 53 percent higher on the FCCERS-R and 30 percent higher on the PICCOLO than providers not associated with All Our Kin. Specifically, 64 percent of All Our Kin providers scored four or higher (out of seven) on the FCCERS-R compared to just five percent of non-All Our Kin providers (see tables below). All Our Kin providers scored higher than the other providers on all of the seven FCCERS-R subscales, especially on the subscales measuring interactions and listening and talking. Research tells us that positive adult-child interactions are extremely important for ensuring the healthy language development of young children. Additionally, 50 percent of All Our Kin providers stated that they intended to stay in the field of family child care for “as long as possible,” compared to just seven percent of comparison providers. And the study also found that All Our Kin providers were more than two and half times more likely to have a CDA credential than the comparison providers.

This study provides evidence that staffed family child care networks, such as All Our Kin, can be an effective way to increase quality among family child care providers. Increasing investments into similar models that provide professional development, CDA coursework, and one-on-one expert consultations to family child care providers could go a long way towards ensuring that the millions of children who receive care in these settings are receiving high-quality care and learning opportunities. Currently, there are few organizations such as All Our Kin, but the study results should increase interest in learning about its model and replicating it in other communities.

More research is needed to gain a better understanding of just what makes the All Our Kin model successful. Further research could help identify which of the strategies that All Our Kin utilizes are most effective in terms of increasing child care quality. Is it the professional development, one-on-one consulting, workshops, or access to a peer network that is the most influential in increasing quality? More research also needs to be done investigating the link between family child care providers deemed high-quality and actual child outcomes. For example, do children enrolled with providers that are part of All Our Kin exhibit higher scores on cognitive and language assessments? The next planned phase of research will attempt to answer this question by comparing the cognitive and social-emotional development of All Our Kin children to their peers enrolled with other family child care providers. This research will certainly be helpful in providing further evidence of the importance of replicating the All Our Kin model for improving family child care quality on a national scale.

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