Understanding and Supporting Family Childcare Educators Beyond a Center-Based Lens

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Home-based child care, including regulated family child care (FCC) homes, is an important part of the early care and education (ECE) landscape, particularly as this care context is crucial for populations with less access to center-based care, including children who need care during nontraditional hours, infants and toddlers, children in rural areas and children with disabilities (Henly & Adams, 2018). However, research in home-based settings lags research in center- and school-based programs. Furthermore, conceptualizations of quality and standards used to assess home-based settings are often rooted in center-based conceptualizations of quality, not fully accounting for the unique features of home-based care (Doran et al., 2022; Tonyan et al., 2017). This paper symposium draws together three papers focused on the unique context of FCC settings.

The first paper documents the relationship between a new observational measure of program quality, designed to allow for a broader understanding of quality in ECE programs, and existing measures of global- and domain-specific quality in FCC settings. The second conceptual paper presents promising practices for including FCC in publicly-funded pre-K programs, based on a literature review of the evidence base in FCC and pre-K programs. The third paper presents qualitative findings about educators’ motivations to work in FCC programs and their perspectives on how their work differs from center-based care. Our discussant, expert in policies affecting FCC educators, will lead conversation around the findings taken together and future directions for FCC research

Sub Unit

• School Readiness/Childcare

Chair

• Erin Harmeyer, Rutgers University - New Brunswick

Discussant

• Alexandra Patterson, other

Individual Presentations

• A Multi-Instrument Examination of Observed Family Child Care Program Quality - Presenting Author: Alison Hooper, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa; Rena Hallam, University of Delaware

• Promising Practices for the Inclusion of Family Child Care (FCC) Homes in Publicly-Funded Pre-K - Presenting Author: GG Weisenfeld, Rutgers University - New Brunswick; Erin Harmeyer, Rutgers University - New Brunswick

• ‘I Can Kind of Flow How I Want to Flow’: Motivations and Perceived Contrasts of Providing Care in Home-Based Settings - Presenting Author: Erin Harmeyer, Rutgers University - New Brunswick; Brittany Wittenberg Camp, Phoenix Children’s Hospital; Catherine Anne Moon, Louisiana State University