Majority of Parents Rely on Friends and Family for Child Care, Report Finds

A new study shows trust is the most important factor for parents when choosing child care, with many leaning toward at-home programs or relying on their families, friends and neighbors. But researchers are concerned there is not adequate support in place for those systems to flourish, with the majority of legislation focused on bolstering child care centers.

“I think it’s not necessarily surprising, but an ongoing issue of importance is there is tremendous demand for infant and toddler care,” said Philip Fisher, director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood. “We’ve historically segmented it from preschool and seen it as a lower priority from an educational perspective. But from a family and generally economic well-being perspective, having adequate care is extremely important.”

The RAPID Survey Project, based in the Stanford Center on Early Childhood, released a survey in March detailing what parents consider when looking for child care. Trust was the top priority, according to the study, followed by affordability, availability, location and hours.

The high regard for trust led to more of a reliance on friends, family and neighbors (FFN) for child care — nearly 40 percent of the 700 respondents relied on that network, with 26 percent using unpaid FFN care and 13 percent using paid FFN care.

“We’re not seeing knowledge of child development as the most important issue, we’re seeing there are issues of convenience and trust and comfort level,” Fisher said. “Oftentimes, parents will prefer to have home-based or FFN care rather than center-based care. In terms of policies, we need to develop them to support all kinds of care and listen to parents to determine what their needs are and orient policies to meet the demand.”

The lack of investing in early childhood education — particularly in the FFN network — is nothing new. The COVID-19 pandemic shined a light on the importance of child care options when many programs were forced to close down, but in the five years since the health crisis started, minimal changes have been made in federal policies to boost those options.

Natalie Renew, executive director at Home Grown, a national initiative focused on building inclusive systems for home-based child care, said the policies that were made were focused largely on licensed child care centers, with smaller, home-based centers as an “afterthought” and FFN networks remaining untouched.

“It’s often excluded entirely or it’s an afterthought, and it’s happening when this is one of the most prevalent forms of child care and often used by families to meet their needs,” Renew said. “I think it complicates things when grandmoms and trusted friends are part of our childhood system. … Regulatory compliance and quality have to be rethought around this caregiving population.”

There are still strides to be made in the center-based options as well. The continually low pay for child care educators and providers, forcing them out of the industry, coupled with the lack of stability, has brought the early childhood education sector to a boiling point, according to Fisher.

“The increase in precarity … it’s a problem; I see at epidemic levels,” he said. “And it continues to be a significant challenge for many families across the country. It ebbs and flows somewhat, but it’s never a level that we would consider to be acceptable.”

The problem was further exacerbated when looking at rural areas, according to the report. Child care deserts have long been a concern. That lack of access is coupled with a rising cost for some families, including a Montana-based survey respondent that stated “in a rural area, child care is very hard to find, and rates are not competitive because they don’t have to be.” A family in Louisiana said they drove an hour twice a week for part-time care, with another parent in rural South Carolina stating she had to contact a child care provider when she was six weeks pregnant, snagging the last spot.

“If we had waited much longer, we wouldn’t have gotten in,” the anonymous parent said.

Beyond the obvious issues that come from a lack of child care — which is necessary for a child’s safety — Fisher recently published a study that added the lack of consistent care can negatively affect well-being for children and parents, leading to depression, anxiety and stress.

Without a wide-scale intervention, Fisher said he believes the problem will worsen.

“The market is really in free fall and people have been saying that for a long time. It’s not likely to get better without third-party intervention,” he said.

He pointed toward smaller initiatives, including from Oregon and Washington, D.C., that boosted funding for early childhood care providers. Renew, pointing to similar state initiatives, said she was hesitant to say whether the problem will get better or worse, adding some of the proposed changes have stirred up “unfortunate headwinds” about the deregulation movement, or pushing for home-based centers that previously needed licenses to maintain fewer rules in an effort to be cheaper.

“Often, friends, families and neighbors get lumped into the deregulation movement,” Renew said. “We’re not talking about a friend who lives on the corner who’s caring for 15 kids and has no license; that is illegal. These are grandmothers who are caring for a kid and maybe a neighbor, which is perfectly legal.”

But both Fisher and Renew agree more needs to be done when addressing the FFN network.

“Those [initiatives] do go a long way to increasing the supply and meeting the demand,” Fisher said. “We see these things happen at the local level — we just have to see them at a national level.”