This guest blog was written by our UW Public Humanities Fellow, Kate MacCrimmon. She has been at Kids Forward over the past academic year. Kate offers a unique perspective as both a former Family Child Care provider and doctoral candidate researching the subject. This is the second in a two-part series connecting family child care provider voices to policy and advocacy.

Introduction to professionalization in the family child care theme.

The societal idea of a professional is a well-dressed person leaving their home each morning to go to an office, school, or other commercial sites. The working professional, in this view, has clear work-life boundaries. But, if we only think about professionals in this way, we exclude a large portion of the workforce, especially the already undervalued workers. Of these, child care providers are most invisible because they work in their private homes and do not have the same work-life boundaries. The exclusion of providers from being socially recognized as professionals has material effects on their income, well-being, and life chances. The stakes are high.

During my journey as a family child care provider, I realized that there were many conflicting ideas of what it meant to be a professional family child care provider, including the fundamental question of whether this sector can even be considered a profession. Since all child care providers in the U.S. operate in the private sector, each one must own her  own small business. This entails meticulous record keeping of expenses for the home, the business, or both; keeping contracts with families up-to-date, marketing open slots, creating policies, filing taxes, among other tasks. The survival of their businesses depends entirely on tuition for children in their care, which covers the cost of food, liability insurance, internet, equipment, and their education. Not much is left for income. Providers are told to be “business-like,” meaning be strict with your “customers” when it comes to tuition costs and hours of operation. But providers often struggle with setting strict boundaries when families are struggling financially or are going through tough times in their personal relationships. Providers are put into situations where they are expected to be a social worker, second parent, Jill-of-all-Trades, child care expert, and CEO. As private business owners, this places providers in a very difficult position, subjecting their caring nature to exploitation. These conflicting messages of the expectations of providers take a toll on their own well-being as they try to take on all these expectations at once.

Currently, there are multiple forms of professionalization. Family child care providers can become certified through their county, state-licensed through the state, and/or choose to become accredited. If providers want to take care of low-income children with subsidies, they are obligated to become a part of the national trend of Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) (called YoungStar in Wisconsin), a system that ranks providers from one to five stars. When I first began this work, I took 40 hours of credit-based coursework and followed many rules to become state-licensed. I chose to get accredited through the City of Madison because it was a low-cost voluntary professional process. However, not all providers in Madison have the money and time to dedicate to this process, and national professional programs are even more expensive.

Family Child Care is Work, So Why Aren’t Providers Seen as “Working Professionals” Yet?

Providers are faced with two connected issues when it comes to professionalization: society does not see them as professionals and the existing professionalization pathways are not giving providers the support they need. Although providers want professionalization, and deserve it, nothing yet exists to help them achieve the respect and benefits of being a working professional, just like other care-based professions, like nurses and school teachers.

Kids Forward has recorded six episodes of an upcoming podcast that will feature discussions with family child care providers, including the three mentioned below. We expect this to launch in Summer 2021. Through this podcast project , the interviews with providers illustrate the deep commitment, pride, and professionalism each provider brings to their work and how important they are to providing child care in their communities, especially during the pandemic. At times, providers had to make excruciating decisions about closing their programs, simply because they had no choice. In spite of this, they remain optimistic but surer than ever that we as a society need to commit to investing in and respecting this critical profession as the public good that it is. 

Abby’s Story: “You have families coming and you share everything; you raise this child together.” 

Abby’s unwavering dedication and commitment shine as she talks about her chosen profession with passion and conviction. Through her decades of experience, she has landed on family child care as the sweet spot of her career journey – a place she describes as having the privilege of working closely with parents and children in a small group and really focus on the needs of every child. Abby sees this as a partnership between parents and herself; they are in this together, solving problems as they arise in a close and trusting relationship. She understands that this profession requires a range of complex skills, and explains that providers must consider, “child nutrition, child safety, child education, relationship to parents, all the regulations, paperwork, everything . . . there is no end in quality care.” This connects closely to Abby’s critiques of professionalization. She observes that many of her colleagues do not like the YoungStar QRIS or the Registry, a professional recognition system only for the early care and education (ECE) workforce, because providers “have hundreds and hundreds of hours of training that have not been counted because they were not from an accredited university.” With the multiple regulating bodies such as state licensing, YoungStar, and the Registry, she shares “I wish the system had embedded connections as far as computer things so you don’t have to send supporting documents to each organization.” She also mentions the high costs of memberships in national ECE organizations and how these organizations have done little to make family providers more visible and get funding to providers. It is so complex to operate a family child care business that she cannot imagine “how someone who wants to start a family daycare now, and has to go through all of these things for them and set it up.” However, Abby is well established from the decades that she has provided in-home care. Her fulfillment comes from knowing that she’ll always be learning new things to share with her families and children. She states, “A professional is being always up-to-date, staying on time, willing to know more, and be self-motivated in this field.” Abby makes time to give back to newer providers and to be an advocate for the profession. She mentors providers by sharing her seasoned wisdom and knowledge, in addition to encouraging everyone in the early care and education workforce to work together for better conditions for all. She demonstrates every day that a professional family child care provider is a “devoted and committed and reliable person who families can count on.” 

Nicki’s Story: “It’s because of the importance of kids. I often tell people, if you give them what they need, they’ll give you what you want.”

Nicki’s experience as a family child care provider is closely intertwined with her dedication to her community. With her excellent reputation for providing child care in her home, friends and family know they can depend on her. Former child care children seek her out when they have babies because she’s a trusted figure. Nicki states “All those many years that you’ve done child care, you’ve had just a huge impact on all these people and I get to see them.” Clearly, Nicki has great pride in her work. During the pandemic, she continued to provide child care as her community needed her. Seemingly for the first time “They started figuring out we need child care providers.” Nicki states matter-of-factly, “You go to work every day. You show up on time, you pick up on time. It gives me room to keep up a routine with the kids and be professional with them.” Nicki’s describes how her overall experience with the regulation systems has been disappointing and unsupportive: “YoungStar’s pretty hands-off to me, they aren’t really in it to me, they’ve given me two great garbage cans.  That’s pretty good because I really liked those but that’s about it.” Nicki is referring to the fact that providers who participated in the YoungStar program could make approved purchases with YoungStar’s annual mini grant if they met all of the qualifications and she chose to buy garbage cans because that is what she needed at the time. However, in the end, she felt that all the paperwork she needed to complete was not worth the amount of money she received. She also shared how once she was written up by her certification regulator on a day she was closed so “I stopped trusting [removed] a long time ago.” She describes how they were on a “witch hunt” with providers and how frustrating that was: “That was wrong. I understand that, but if you’re going to do that, then help us figure out how to make it right. Serve as our accreditors to people who want to see us succeed so that you can succeed but I wasn’t getting that.” Since experiences with regulators have often been negative, when the union came to town, Nicki joined the effort immediately and stated, “That’s when things started changing because we had people that we could call.” Like many providers, Nicki brings other skills to her work such as her CNA and foster parent certification to care for entire families within her community, but when it comes to working with children, she declares “Certain things are the foundation to helping them grow into what you want them to be.” Nicki is a model example of a provider with deep and trusting ties with her community, one of many providers around the country.

Denise’s Story: “Every child that comes into my program has a different need, a different ability, a different way of learning and a different personality. I just love gearing my program to those specifics because I think we’re so individual and every one of us has so much to offer and I learn as much from the children as they learn from me.” 

Denise represents the thousands of providers who have wholeheartedly embraced their family child care profession with ongoing professional development opportunities and an inclusive program structure. She shares that “working with children and learning with children and teaching is just a joy.” It is evident that she pours her love and energy into the children and families in her care, making time for ongoing professional development so that she can meet the varied needs of the children in her care. Denise states, “I had a child who was Deaf and at that time hearing aids didn’t work . . . I always taught sign language to my children anyway and so we could communicate with this child.” She also describes the importance of volunteering on the boards of local child care organizations to help people learn about the profession as a profession. Denise has learned shared leadership skills in her provider support group too: “We’re all equal because we all have such different skills and that’s just amazing.” Despite Denise’s positive outlook, she explains how the professionalization system has been “a little bit frustrating” to her, even as an established provider. She understands that many providers participated in YoungStar “to buy more equipment because when you’re starting out there’s a huge amount of expenses.” She would have liked to use the annual mini-grant of $500-$1000 that YoungStar awarded providers for “an IRA for retirement or something like that. That would have met my needs” but that “menial paperwork was not worth the effort for me.” In addition, Denise appreciated the former City of Madison’s accreditation system and laments how it has “changed over the years, they’ve done different things, they’ve gone in different directions” and that they “used to actually have their own conference and also gave people stipends to attend other conferences too.” More than the insufficient support from ECE agencies, it is the lack of public recognition that Denise feels is the problem: “Many people, especially people who don’t have young children, have no idea. They have good intentions but they have no idea what we do every day and how we do it.” This past year has been especially difficult for her and after much consideration, she made the very difficult choice to close her program and sell her home. She shares “I felt I was at the top of my game and had so much more to give but it wasn’t the right time to do that.” In spite of all this, Denise remains optimistic, not ready to retire, and ready for her next adventure in serving her community. 

Kate MacCrimmon, Mellon Public Humanities Graduate Fellow at Kids Forward