Author: Alexandra R. Patterson
In our work at Home Grown, we regularly seek opportunities to learn from other disciplines as we partner with home-based child care (HBCC) leaders to advance policy solutions that build a more inclusive child care system that values and supports HBCC as a quality option for families and children. So often, the “in-sector” discussion about policy solutions to address child care affordability and access for families and low wages for HBCC providers seems to rehash the same solutions that emerge from a scarcity framework. It is by looking beyond the early childhood sector that opportunities often surface for new approaches that these systemic challenges require. For instance, the Thriving Providers Project (TPP) borrows a proven strategy from the guaranteed income community.
More recently, the Abundance framework for policy design, popularized by journalist Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, has gained traction in policy discussions. In the last month, I’ve had discussions with a staffer for a US member of Congress and with a local think tank, both of which are wrestling with this framework in the context of child care policy solutions. The Abundance framework poses the question: how might we renegotiate America’s social contract if we imagined policy solutions for societal problems from an abundance framework? What if we were not fighting over who gets a slice of a too-small pie, but rather focused on growing the pie so everyone can enjoy it?
To put a finer point on the framework, policy solutions focus on issues like how well-intentioned policymakers actually constrain the supply of goods like housing and child care through overregulation and government bureaucracy. This is an alternative perspective on the challenges of child care supply, access, affordability, and compensation, and perhaps one worth wrestling with.
To be fair, strategies like reforming child care licensing systems so that they look less like systems of policing child care providers and more like systems of support and recognition, right-sizing regulations to focus on the essentials of child care thereby reducing burden of entry and attrition for providers, and even using parent preferences around child care arrangements from trusted caregivers (family, friend and neighbor caregivers) to craft child care supply policy, are not single solutions for addressing the child care crisis. But the abundance framework creates an opening to shift our policy conversations away from crafting early childhood systems that keep home-based providers from accessing system resources and toward exploring how systems constrain and destabilize the existing supply of home-based child care.
At Home Grown, we are all too familiar with the places where home-based child care is constrained and destabilized by early childhood systems, from one-size-fits-all regulations, costly standards and inadequate compensation, to lack of recognition and outright exclusion. We see these themes repeated as we examine the emerging findings of the Thriving Providers Project across the country. We are excited to share site-specific evaluation products for completed TPP cohorts in Philadelphia and New York, as well as our first evaluation product examining data and findings across TPP pilots in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York, and Colorado. Taken together, these findings illustrate the nuanced ways that systems introduce threats to HBCC providers and make it difficult for dedicated caregivers to continue their care work. Across sites, we also see the meaningful impacts of a simple policy solution like regular, on-time, predictable cash payments in the lives of HBCC providers and the families that rely on their care. TPP evaluation findings point us to the opportunity available by shifting our focus from scarcity to investment: We can cultivate a robust, resilient system that truly recognizes the vital, ongoing contributions of home-based child care providers and enables families who seek this care arrangement to access it. By integrating these existing caregiving arrangements into early childhood policy, we can build a strong, resilient, and flexible system that honors home-based providers and respects family preferences.
English 
Spanish