Home visiting in home-based child care: Staff and provider experiences

Abstract

States and localities face challenges around how to deliver support to home-based child care (HBCC) providers in meaningful ways that improve quality for children and families and meet the needs of providers. While most support organizations deliver services to HBCC providers through home visits, there is limited research on how these visits are implemented. HBCC networks are a common delivery mechanism for support that are often funded through child care licensing, child care subsidy, and quality rating and improvement systems which may dictate the content and purpose of services delivered. This study sought to understand 1) the experiences of network staff who deliver home visits; 2) the range of home visiting implementation practices across HBCC networks; and 3) variation in home visiting implementation practices across networks with different policy roles. We surveyed 106 HBCC network staff who conducted home visits and 144 HBCC providers who received home visits from 35 HBCC networks across 19 states. The survey included closed-ended questions designed to examine aspects and dimensions of home visiting implementation including logistics, content, and relationship-based approaches to support from both staff and provider perspectives. We describe these implementation drivers for the entire sample and use Chi-square tests and two-sample t-tests to examine differences by the network’s policy role (enforcement vs. support). Findings suggest that HBCC network staff are committed to their work despite low wages and lack of benefits. Staff and providers report respectful positive relationships with each other during home visits. While home visiting is a widely used approach to supporting HBCC providers, the policy role of HBCC networks may be a factor in how networks implement home visits. Compared to network staff responsible for monitoring compliance to regulations, network staff whose role was around supporting providers reported taking a more provider-focused, responsive approach to service delivery and focused visits on working with children. Providers at HBCC networks that were focused on compliance and enforcement reported less comfort with visits and visits focused more on regulatory and administrative tasks. The results of this study suggest that ECE systems seeking to improve quality in HBCC should consider the role of relationship-based approaches to engaging and supporting HBCC providers.