Supporting family child care and quality improvement: findings from an exploratory survey of Illinois child care resource and referral agency staff

Background Home-based child care is a widely used form of non-parental early care and education both within the U.S. and abroad. The National Study of Early Care and Education estimates over one million paid home-based child care providers or family child care (FCC) providers and close to three million unpaid home-based caregivers or family, friend, and neighbor (FFN) caregivers care for children ages zero to five in the U.S. (NSECE 2015). Home-based child care is also an essential component of early childhood systems abroad as documented in a recent review of ten countries’ family child care systems (Davis et al. 2012). For example, in Canada a third of children under age four in early care and education arrangements are cared for in FCC homes (Sinha 2014) and nearly a fifth of children in Australia are cared for in home-based child care (Blaxland et al. 2016). Abstract