It’s common for parents in the United States to leave their children in the care of family, friends and neighbors. This group of caregivers actually represents the most prevalent type of non-parental child care in the U.S. But it’s a job that often goes unseen and underpaid.
Many of these caregivers don’t identify as part of the child care workforce and have never even heard the term family, friend and neighbor (FFN) provider, which is used in the field to describe this type of arrangement. The workforce, which is predominantly made up of women, many of them Black and Latina, often receives little to no compensation and has minimal access to resources to support their work.
What difference might it make if these child care providers had access to support networks, training and financial resources? That’s a question I set out to understand as part of a research project about the lived experiences of FFN providers for my undergraduate studies at Harvard University.
I interviewed five women — all Central American immigrants — in Spanish, and with support from Early Edge California, a statewide policy and advocacy organization I interned for, I paid each participant a stipend for their time.
There are millions of FFN providers. In the state of California, where the women I interviewed live, an estimated quarter of parents with children under 3 years old rely on FFNs for child care. The California Master Plan for Early Learning and Care is one of the first major government documents in the state’s history to identify FFNs as a source for child care. That’s an important step forward for this sector of the workforce.
The American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) provided emergency child care relief by including a provision that allowed licensed and unlicensed child care providers to be eligible for subsidies. That was a game-changer for unlicensed FFNs, but ARPA dollars, like federal subsidies before the pandemic, were not reaching them. California was unique in that it issued ARPA funds to local contractors, who could issue individual stipends to FFNs in their preexisting networks, though these dollars are soon to sunset.
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