Shortly after Miriam Bravo began looking after her 2-year-old grandson full-time, she realized it had been years since she had last looked after a young child. Feeling a bit settled, she went online to search for appropriate activities for Taddeo and advice on the best way to support him.
She found some resources online, like songs to sing with him, but Bravo wanted more.
Bravo belongs to a group of caregivers known as Family, Friends and Neighbors (FFN) providers. Very common Non-parental child care is a system used by millions of families in the United States. Limited options Training and education opportunities are available to FFN providers. Most early care and education supports are available to licensed child care providers or parents. Additionally, professional development opportunities available to FFNs are limited and often inaccessible due to factors such as cost, schedules, and language barriers.
So when she visited a community center near her home in San Jose, California, and asked if they had any programs to help her grow as a caregiver, Bravo was lucky to find exactly what she was looking for.
In Bravo’s Northern California community, Parent and Child+ We adapted our established model for parents to meet the needs and priorities of home-based child care providers, including FFNs.
For decades, evidence-based home visiting by trained professionals has supported families across the United States. These programs enable parents to engage their children in high-quality, developmentally appropriate activities, promote children’s social-emotional skills and school readiness, and foster safe, healthy, and nurturing home environments. More recently, many national home visiting programs have recognized the opportunity to reach more children by offering their services to in-home child care providers. evidence indicate It makes a difference.
“This is promising,” said Natalie Renew, executive director of Home Grown, a national initiative that aims to improve access to and quality of in-home child care, “especially in settings where there are few other interventions.”
Over the past few years, Homegrown has provided grant funding to three visiting programs that support in-home service providers. Parent and Child+, Parents as teachers and Home guidance for parents of preschool children — to better understand the needs of the caregivers involved, learn factors that contribute to the program’s success, and ultimately help expand its reach.
This is an investment in an often overlooked but extremely valuable population of caregivers, who in most cases were already looking for ways to provide quality care and education to their children, explains Kelly Caverly, chief program office for Parents as Teachers.
“People want to do the right thing for kids, but often they don’t have the tools or the knowledge to do the right thing,” Caverly says. “Sometimes it’s just about bringing about new opportunities.”
Organic expansion
Bravo quickly joined ParentChild+’s free, voluntary, in-home childcare model, and since February, Stephanie, a home visitor assigned to Bravo, has been visiting Bravo and Taddeo twice a week.
Stephanie brings books, toys and materials for Bravo to keep and use in future learning activities with Tadeo. But her home visitors’ greatest contributions are less tangible, Bravo said in Spanish through a translator.
Bravo said Tadeo lights up when Stephanie comes over and wants to know what activities are planned for the day. His motor skills have improved, and now at age 2 1/2, he can cut with scissors, something many kids don’t master by the time they reach kindergarten. He can now stay focused on activities that he struggled with just a few months ago.
Bravo, meanwhile, has grown in confidence. She’s become a more patient, loving caregiver, she says. “It’s brought us closer.” She now sees herself as more than just Taddeo’s grandmother: She’s also his teacher.
ParentChild+’s in-home child care model was a natural fit, said Sarah Walzer, CEO of the organization, which began as a home visiting program for parents in 1965 and now serves areas with largely immigrant populations who speak more than 40 languages.
Nearly a decade ago, home visitors reported that many of their parents were caring for other children in the community. Over the next few years, in response to that need, ParentChild+ built a parallel model for home-based child care providers, including FFNs. The program is now operational in 10 states.
The program for home-based caregivers is 24 weeks long, while the family program is 46 weeks long. Visits are designed around hands-on learning activities and play, with the goal of improving the quality of child care and preparing children for school, while paying attention to the learning environment and adult-child interactions, Walzer said.
Their work is strengths-based, Walzer explains: Home visitors identify what’s already working well and try to build on that, and this is true for other home visiting models and parent-targeted home visiting as well.
“We’re not going there to find out what’s missing, what’s deficient, or what’s illegal,” Walzer says. “We’re going to find out what’s really working and to strengthen the field of child care based on evidence-based practices.”
Parents as Teachers’ home-based childcare model has similar origins, which they call “supported childcare providers through personal visits” (SCPV).
In the late 1990s, more women were entering the workforce, Caverly recalled, and as a result, more families were seeking child care arrangements. Home visitors serving families across the country told stories of relatives or neighbors bringing children with them, rather than the parents.
“It really got me thinking,” Caverly recalled.
Parents as Teachers refined the curriculum and built the SCPV program, which is now used in 12 states. (With funding from Home Grown, they are updating the curriculum for in-home providers and will spend much of 2025 expanding their reach with new resources.)
Both Parents as Teachers and ParentChild+ serve both licensed home-based caregivers and unlicensed FFNs through their home visiting programs, but “at its core are the FFNs,” Caverly said, adding that working with FFNs is in many ways similar to working with families.
She said one of the main differences between working with health care providers and families is that health care providers learn how to screen and assess the children in their care.
This element was especially valuable to Gretchen Dunn, a licensed provider in Olathe, Kansas.
Dan has run a home-based child care program for 25 years, but when she heard Parents as Teachers was offering a home visiting program for child care workers, she called a local center and applied.
Although she acknowledges she is a seasoned provider who attends training every year, she liked getting a “refresher” and the opportunity to observe how another early childhood professional interacts with the children in her care.
For two years, Dunn received monthly home visits, with the visitors usually leading activities with the children and leaving handouts for Dunn to repeat in the future. The visitors also brought books. She also helped Dunn screen the children for developmental delays. Age and Stage QuestionnaireThis is something Dunn hasn’t used before in his program. These assessments can not only inform providers whether a child needs to see a specialist (such as a speech therapist), but also inform them about the activities and interactions that are appropriate for each child.
For Dunn, the whole experience has been a confidence booster, she said. Because she is the program’s only employee, she has little adult interaction during the day and few people to observe her work or pay attention to whether she’s doing her job well.
“Having someone who actually knows my field and my training come and give me new ideas and support and push me and all that kind of stuff is what I enjoyed most,” she says.
“Money well spent”
Home Grown’s Renew says perhaps the biggest problem with this model is money.
Existing facilities that provide home visiting services to both family members and carers say that with more funding they could provide services to even more carers.
“We know there are a lot of kids out there who fall through the cracks,” said Maria Rios, a home visitor for Parents as Teachers in Kansas City, Kansas, who oversees 30 home-based child care providers. “I wish there was more funding.”
Rios, a former kindergarten teacher and vice principal, isn’t too worried about children’s academic achievement. “They’re going to learn their ABCs in school,” she said. She feels what many kids need to develop sooner are social-emotional skills, like how to interact with other kids and how to share.
Home visiting programs, like most high-intensity, high-integrity services, are expensive to implement, Renew said. It’s a big change for states and localities to go from spending zero dollars on home visiting providers to investing thousands of dollars per person, she added. But she thinks it’s doable.Especially when you consider the number of children who will benefit.
There are already a few different funding models in place: Colorado is using Birth to Five preschool development grant money to fund home visits, and ParentChild+ has received public funding, including from the federal pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act, to support in-home child care programs in several locations, including counties in New York and North Carolina.
“From our perspective, this was money well spent,” Renew said.
For Bravo, the California FFN provider, that was certainly the case: Both the mentorship from the home visitors and the new community she found among other FFNs in her area were “great experiences” for her.
“This is not just a program,” Bravo added. “This is a family.”
Armed with her newfound caregiving expertise, she’s considering adopting more children, an idea she says she’s open to: At the very least, her future grandchildren will have access to her knowledge.
