Taking Action to Increase the Number of Family Child Care Providers

While much has been written about the difficulties parents face in finding affordable, high quality child care across the nation, that attention is more often focused on a lack of center-based child care rather than family child care (FCC). Family child care, also known as home-based child care, is offered in a provider’s private home, and typically consists of small groups of children of different ages overseen by one or two caregivers.

Many parents prefer this type of care for reasons ranging from convenient hours to cultural and linguistic fit. “Home-based caregivers are more likely to serve children of color, more likely to serve children with special needs, and more likely to serve children who are from mixed status households. So this is where our most diverse children and families are receiving their care,” says Alexandra Patterson, director of policy and strategy at Home Grown, a national collaborative of funders focused on improving the quality of and access to home-based care.

The data, however, tell a sobering picture about the fate of FCC providers over the past 20 years. For example, more than 90,000 FCC homes closed throughout the country between 2005 and 2017, and the number of small FCC homes in which a sole caregiver provides care fell by 52 percent in that same time period. And while the number of child care centers has rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, the same is not true of FCC homes. In the 39 states with available data, there were about 107,000 licensed FCC homes open in 2019 and only about 94,000 in 2023. Much of this decline can be attributed to persistently low compensation, lack of benefits, and the rising costs of housing and insurance.

The state of Maryland has not been immune to this national trend when it comes to FCC providers. The number of registered FCC providers throughout the state has declined from over 12,000 in 1996 to only about 4,300 in 2023. The pandemic only exacerbated the decline, with registered providers falling from 5,089 providers in January 2020 to 4,001 in January 2024.

A pilot program in Maryland is aimed at reversing the FCC decline and has seen promising results so far. Growing Opportunities for Family Child Care (GOFCC) is a program that was developed about a decade ago in Montgomery County, the state’s most populous county and one that sits adjacent to Washington, DC. With the county experiencing rapid growth in its Hispanic population, an early emphasis of the program was on specifically recruiting Spanish-speaking early childhood educators.

The program provides targeted training, coaching, and resources to support individuals interested in opening a licensed child care business in less time than would be possible on one’s own. “They might be raising their own kids or working other jobs while they're trying to figure this out. That's one reason to speed up the licensing process, so that they can get to opening their business as soon as possible because they need revenue coming in. They can't spend two years doing this without bringing in money,” says Laura Weeldreyer, executive director of the Maryland Family Network, a statewide nonprofit that oversees the program.

After the initial success of the program in Montgomery County, lawmakers provided funding during the 2021 legislative session to launch a two-year pilot program in other counties throughout the state, with an emphasis on using data to identify child care deserts where more child care spots are urgently needed. “We can get multiple bangs for our buck here by not just opening licensed family child care, which is a laudable goal, but opening them in the communities that need them the most with the same cultural or ethnic traditions and languages that are underrepresented in child care,” says Weeldreyer.

Participants in GOFCC receive support through a cohort model that has the benefit of helping to reduce provider isolation. “It can be a pretty isolating profession, women working alone with kids. So the chance to be part of a professional cohort and have some colleagues is pretty attractive,” says Weeldreyer. Participants receive training on topics such as licensing, the child care subsidy program, tracking expenses, and filing taxes through a series developed by All our Kin, a national nonprofit that supports FCC providers. Additional topics are finalized after talking directly with participants to gain a better idea of what they see as their greatest areas of need.

The outcomes of the program have been positive so far. Over 300 individuals have participated in GOFCC across 20 of the state’s 24 jurisdictions. As of November 2024, GOFCC has facilitated the opening of 185 FCC programs across the state and has increased the number of FCC slots available to children by 1,260. GOFCC has also helped newly licensed providers to participate in Maryland EXCELS, the state’s quality rating and improvement system.

The program has been so beneficial for increasing the supply of FCC providers that it didn’t take much pressure to convince lawmakers to extend the pilot for another two years recently. “The sponsors of the bill got up in the hearings and said, ‘This is how public policy is supposed to work. Try something before we decide we're funding it.’ And there's no question that this has worked,” says Weeldreyer.