Opinion: With funding cliff looming, NC must invest outside of traditional childcare centers

Good childcare doesn’t just happen in traditional childcare centers. North Carolina leaders should fund home-based care, or family, friend, and neighbor care.

Childcare has immeasurable power to shape who a young person becomes and with that great power comes immense responsibility. 

In North Carolina, there’s a widespread perception that this caliber of care can only be found in traditional centers — not within home-based childcare (HBCC) or Family, Friend and Neighbor (FFN) care.

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There’s a systemic undervaluing of these forms of care and a legislative focus on deregulation over meaningful investment. This means there’s a growing number of families who rely on home-based care due to financial constraints. 

There are also employees and advocates — like myself — who have been working in the early care sector for decades, spending their time caring for other people’s children while being unable to afford to care for my own.

When I started in early care and education over 30 years ago, I had two small children of my own and worked in a corporate, high-quality childcare center. As the director of the center, I was unable to pay the fees for my own children to come to work with me and be in the center. 

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My mother taught my three-year-old to read while I was helping teachers teach other families’ children to read and fighting for fair pay for other care providers. It was incredibly disheartening.

It’s time for this to change. It’s time for the North Carolina legislature to see that HBCC and FNN care are critical in supporting working families, economic growth and social justice. It’s time for home-based care to be considered and valued for the lifeline it is, especially with the looming funding crisis NC child care centers are facing.

The Current State of Home-Based Childcare in North Carolina

It’s estimated that 64% of children under the age of 6 in North Carolina receive FFN care. That means more than 7 million children in the US under the age of 6 are cared for in HBCC settings. 

HBCC is also the most prevalent form of care for infants and toddlers, with 30% receiving home-based care versus only 12% receiving center-based care. However, despite its prevalence, HBCC providers do not receive equitable resources, support, or recognition from the state’s early childhood system, which continues to prioritize licensed center-based facilities.

It’s time for home-based care to be considered and valued for the lifeline it is, especially with the looming funding crisis NC child care centers are facing.

There is an undertow in North Carolina that home-based childcare is not as high quality as centers or family child care homes that are licensed by the North Carolina Division of Child Development Early Care and Education (NCDCDEE).

However, parents are choosing to put their children under license-exempt FFN care because the cost is significantly lower than going to a center, even if it’s a low star-rated center. On the other side, there are the providers themselves struggling with funding and licensing.

Latteria Lassiter, Project Manager at MDC, moved from a Fortune 500 company to work in early childhood classrooms after the birth of her third child. The pandemic rapidly changed what child care looked like and left Latteria out of work for the remainder of 2020 with three school-aged children and two under-5s to care for. 

Latteria opened a family childcare home and prepared herself with credit counseling so she could secure a loan to make the necessary changes to her home. The challenges of licensing presented a discouraging rollercoaster of emotions for Laterria. It meant she was left working with no medical insurance, no 401(k) plan and insufficient income to provide for her family.

We need to raise awareness of the fact that license-exempt care does not equate to low quality by default. In fact, there’s a strong argument that HBCCs and FFNs can provide a higher quality of care than traditional early care centers. The lower staff-to-child ratios, for example, allow for a more concentrated level of interaction amongst smaller groups. Access to HBCC and FFN care also means families can hand-select caregivers from the same culture as their children and who speak the same language they speak in their home—caregivers they know and trust.

Policy and Funding Barriers

North Carolina is one of 11 states that fail to fund FFN care. The legislature in North Carolina is not willing to provide any more financial support to the childcare crisis but addressing it without funding is impossible. 

FFNs across the state of North Carolina used to receive subsidies prior to the QRIS system being in place. However, once QRIS came into play, that subsidy opportunity disappeared for FFNs.

My mother taught my three-year-old to read while I was helping teachers teach other families’ children to read and fighting for fair pay for other care providers. It was incredibly disheartening.

Other states are supporting FFNs with public funds, with some matching 1:1 with state and philanthropic organizations. 

North Carolina needs to take a closer look at this because if you take away the FFNs by not providing funding or policy support, you take away the essential spaces families need to access in order to go to work. 

Funding barriers hurt North Carolina’s workforce and economy today– but also have a huge detrimental effect on its future generations.

The new administration is focusing heavily on deregulation because they feel that less regulation will be better for North Carolina. We are not interested in undermining the safety or the development of North Carolina’s children because of the administration’s desire for deregulation. 

We need structured policies that support providers while ensuring quality care.

Reframing the Narrative with Stories and Data

MDC is pushing hard for HBCC providers to have a voice in policymaking. Our strategy is to get the home-based childcare providers — the people doing the grassroots work — around tables of power. 

There are now two HBCC providers who have been working with MDC, sitting on the North Carolina Child Care Commission and advocating for more inclusive policies. We need the people making decisions for early care and education to include more of the caregivers who are in the weeds doing it every day.

We also need to keep demonstrating that children in home-based settings perform as well as — or even better than — those in traditional centers due to personalized care and early interventions. 

One of our provider leaders on the MDC Haven program runs a licensed family child care home in North Carolina. A few years ago, a child who was nonverbal joined her program and as an educator, this HBCC provider built a relationship with the child and met the child where she was developmentally.

The HBCC provider fostered a safe, inclusive environment for the child to interact with peers, communicate her needs, and fully participate in learning activities. They also taught all of the other children in the program to understand sign language. With time, encouragement, and practice, the child is now signing her ABCs aloud. 

This is a poignant example of the impact that nurturing, inclusive, and individualized early care and education can have in home-based settings.

The Path Forward: Policy and Public Support

The next, most crucial step is for the North Carolina legislature to acknowledge and accept home-based childcare as an essential infrastructure. We need stronger support through funding, training, and inclusion in policy-making. A lack of investment today means the children being cared for now won’t be able to function well in the society of tomorrow.

The foundations of the home-based childcare community have to be strong and they have to grow but we can’t build on the backs of poor children and poor women. After 30 years in this fight, I won’t quit– and neither should North Carolina.

It’s time for the deficit model to be destroyed because we’re not looking forward to what North Carolina is going to look like in 10, 20, 50, 100 years. The deficit model is not good for children, families, the workforce, and the economy. We must keep fighting for a childcare system that supports families, providers, and North Carolina’s future generations.