Blog

By: Adrienne Briggs and Diane Gardner, Quality Influential Professionals

Family child care, the licensed form of home-based child care, is deeply valued for its role in supporting young child development, supporting families with working parents, and contributing to local employers and economies. Family child care (FCC) is most likely to be offered in close-knit neighborhoods, at times that meet families’ needs and at a reasonable cost. Despite the critical role that FCC plays in communities, federal data tells us that between 2012 and 2019 over 30,000 listed home-based child care programs closed their doors leaving families with fewer child care options. The pandemic exacerbated this trend. Today in Philadelphia there are 323 licensed family child care educators, this is half as many educators as we had in the city less than 10 years ago (in 2016 there were 676 FCC educators). Research also shows us that when communities have fewer home-based child care options, parents view the child care market more negatively.

Quality Influential Professionals (QIP) was created by long-tenured FCC educators in the City of Philadelphia to support peer FCC educators in their unique roles as educators, small business owners, and community anchors. Foundational to this work is listening to and learning directly from their peers about the issues they face in maintaining their programs. To guide their work, QIP undertook a research project to gather data and insight around the barriers and challenges that FCC educators face. Working alongside a human-centered design consultant, QIP engaged FCC educators in the city of Philadelphia in a survey and focus groups to develop a set of findings that will guide their work.

Christina Gotfredson of Spiral Impact supported QIP in designing this study which included two key components: an interview of all QIP members (50 of 100 members who are FCC educators responded to the survey); and interviews and focus groups with 10 FCC educators who shared their personal experiences. Survey and focus group participants represented the membership of QIP, FCC educators who primarily identify as women of color, and were conducted by QIP leaders. Data collected from these interviews was analyzed to determine what issues posed the greatest risk to educator longevity. There are many findings and learnings from the survey that are documented in the full report, and the following issues posed the greatest risk to FCC program closures:

 

1. The long hours and the lack of flexibility: Educators feel burnt out by spending 10–12-hour days with children only to then clean, prepare, and manage the business before and after. While as business owners they described the freedom to spend their day as they see fit, they struggled to find time to do anything other than child care – take a vacation, spend quality time with their own family, make doctor’s appointments, etc.

1. The overwhelming demands on their business: Educators feel overwhelmed by trying to keep up with the changes in regulations, understanding new programs being offered, navigating the processes to participate, managing the associated paperwork, etc. More importantly, they feel that they are not sufficiently compensated for the time they invest in trying to keep up with the external demands of their business.

2. Inadequate Health Insurance: Inadequate health insurance emerged to be a considerably high-risk reason for an educator to close. During our interviews, providers tended to either receive healthcare from their spouse’s employer, Medicaid, or qualify for a low-premium health plan on the open market. Thus, they had health insurance. However, they expressed fear of how their healthcare costs would be covered without these options. More importantly, they described their frustration that this was not a consideration for educators like them as it is in other settings (public school teachers,      child care centers, etc).

3. Lack of Retirement Benefits: educators explained that lack of retirement benefits is perversely a reason NOT to close. They felt they did not have the financial security to retire. Rather, they expressed frustration over not earning enough over the years to comfortably put money aside, not having access to employer-sponsored 401(K)s, or simply not knowing how to establish a retirement plan.

In addition to these key findings, the report outlines important issues that underscore the risk of FCC program closure, including that a majority of educators (54%) in the study considered closing and 10% had already closed. Across all the findings the overall insufficiency of income exacerbated challenges from the demands of paperwork to meeting the needs of families. The study also revealed some potential mediators for program closure; we found that there is a strong relationship between an educator's likelihood of closing and whether they have support staff working with them.

QIP is currently using this data in ongoing conversations with our members to design solutions and work with community partners to improve support for educators. The findings of this report clearly point to systemic and deeply entrenched challenges that force FCC educators to close their operations and discourage new FCC educators from opening. We invite educators to join us as members, we hope to build strategic partnerships with community partners seeking to address these challenges, and we hope to engage policy and decision-makers in this effort. Learn more about QIP and join us on our website: http://qippa.org/