Lessons From an Urban School Readiness Initiative: Including Family, Friend, and Neighbor Care Providers

‘Our work is to be there’: understanding Latinx immigrant family, friend, and neighbour childcare providers’ motivations, needs, and experiences

“…In their review of quality in FFN childcare settings, Susman-Stillman and Banghart (2011) note that a majority of FFN providers have minimal educational or formal training in childcare or child development. Relatedly, through interviews FFN providers express a desire to expand their content knowledge on a variety of topics such as child development, health, safety, nutrition, school readiness, and developmentally appropriate activities for children in their care (Thomas et al, 2015b;Douglass et al, 2017). Furthermore, multiple studies have acknowledged FFN providers' feelings of isolation as a need for programs to address (Douglass et al, 2017;Thomas et al, 2015a;Drake et al, 2006).…”

Understanding and Incorporating Home-Based Child Care Into Early Education and Development Systems

“…Douglass, Taj, Coonan, and Friedman (2017) and Schaack, Le, and Setodji (2017) studied FFN providers. The former documented an initiative to include FFN providers in efforts to improve school readiness in an urban city.…”

Reaching unconnected caregivers: Using a text-message education program to better understand how to support informal caregivers roles in child development

“…Over 60 percent of the more than 20 million children under the age of 5 in the United States regularly receive non-parental care. Informal care (child care provided by family, friends, or neighbors (FFN)) is the most common type of child care arrangement (Douglass et al, 2017). Estimates of the number of children under the age of 5 who are in informal care range from 33 to 53 percent (Susman-Stillman and Banghart, 2008), and children from lower income families are more likely to have informal caregivers (Gordon et al, 2013; Shulman and Blank, 2007; Susman-Stillman and Banghart, 2008).…”