2-120 - Informal Child Care in California: Understanding Caregiver and Parent Characteristics, Motivations, and Needs for Support

Session Type: Conversation Roundtable

Integrative Statement

For young children to reach their full potential, they must have loving adults to provide stimulating environments and buffer them from chronic stress. New national and California-specific research highlights the pressing need for attention to the quality of informal child care settings the majority of low-income children experience every day. However, most of the national policy discussions about improving children’s school readiness focus on formal early care and education settings, such as regulated child care centers and family child care homes, and enhancing the quality of instruction and behavioral support in those settings. This conversation roundtable discusses a new initiative focusing on informal caregivers; that is, license-exempt or unlicensed non-custodial caregivers who provide care for children age 0 to 5 on a regular basis. The goal is to provide much-needed information on the characteristics, motivations, and support needs of informal caregivers in California, and to work with informal caregivers to design promising, innovative approaches to improving caregivers’ and children’s experiences in these settings.

Three teams are using complementary approaches to accomplish the initiative’s objectives. One team provides a high-level scan of informal care in California through desk research, interviews, and case studies. Another team uses ethnographic methods to create detailed profiles of families and the caregivers in their lives. The third team focuses on potential intervention designs by bringing informal caregivers together to define major challenges, sketch out new approaches, and provide perspectives that inform the design of future programs.

Sub Unit

• School Readiness/Childcare

Moderator

• Bernadette Sangalang, No Institutional Affiliation

Panelists

• Kimberly Boller, Mathematica Policy Research, Inc.

• Jaime Thomas, Mathematica Policy Research, Inc.

• Ana Chang, No Institutional Affiliation

• Jeremy Kamo, Further by Design