“Family child care is a critical source of care for infants and toddlers. That’s where most infants and toddlers are, and often it’s where parents want them to be because it’s such a safe, nurturing, intimate environment.”
– Jessica Sager
Interview with Jessica Sager
To improve the success of family child care businesses in Trenton, NJ, Burke began a partnership this year with All Our Kin, a national nonprofit organization that trains, supports, and sustains family child care educators who reach infants, toddlers, children, and families in BIPOC and low-paid communities. Co-founder and CEO Jessica Sager shared her thoughts on the value of supporting family child care and creating a community of quality, affordable providers across the country.
What led you to establish All our Kin?
I was a theater and literature major in college and ended up participating in programs in New York City public schools with middle schoolers who were doing theater. I fell so in love with these children and realized that what I really wanted to be was an advocate for kids. I thought the best way to do this was to go to law school. The year was 1996 — a time when there was a huge child care crisis across the country and, as a law student doing community-based research, I was horrified by what I saw.
There was a lack of access to safe, adequate child care, let alone nurturing, developmentally appropriate care. I could not walk away from that problem. When looking around different communities, I saw that the only thing stemming this tide of terribleness was the family child care educators who were holding their communities together — but nothing was being done to support them. And I thought maybe we could flip this paradigm a bit by investing in and supporting the family child care educators who were doing this critical work. All Our Kin opened about a month after I graduated from law school, and here we are 25 years later.
What does family child care typically look like and what are its benefits for children and communities?
With family child care. we’re talking about serving small groups of children, say 5 or 6 kids up to 12 kids, who are cared for in the educator’s home. A defining feature is that the setting is a home that looks and feels like a home but also functions as a tiny classroom. And it operates as a micro business. There may be 1 or 2 paid staff members, but they feel like an extension of the family.
Family child care is a critical source of care for infants and toddlers. That’s where most infants and toddlers are, and often it’s where parents want them to be because it’s such a safe, nurturing, intimate environment. It’s the primary source of care for parents who work evenings and weekends for whom the hours at a typical center just don’t work. It’s culturally competent care, so you may find an educator who speaks the language of your family or who you feel comfortable with. Family child care provides individualized attention, and it’s situated in the neighborhoods where families live. These are not solely child care programs — they become resources and hubs for whole neighborhoods and communities.
You describe those providing family child care as “child care educators” instead of the more commonly used term “child care providers.” What led to that choice?
Family child care providers do many things. Certainly, they provide care, and that role is critical. They’re also businesspeople running small businesses. But they are also educators. They work with children during the most formative years of their lives, teaching them essential concepts about the world, what it means to be a human being, to be ready not only to go to school but to interact with others, and that’s often overlooked. Putting the word “educator” in is a great way to remind the public that these child care providers are in fact educators. It’s also galvanizing for the child care educators themselves to hear that term being used to describe them.
What should the public and policymakers know about the kinds of challenges facing family child care educators?
The first thing is that family child care is a very hard job. You’re caring for a group of children all day, often by yourself or with one other adult. And in the case of home-based educators that day may go 12 hours, depending on the schedules of the parents you serve. You’re also the director, so you manage all business elements, and you’re the cook, having to make sure the children get fed. It’s an enormously challenging range of things that we ask educators to accomplish. Unfortunately, most family child care educators lack access to professional support. That includes ongoing training, but also being part of a peer community, and without this the work is even harder and lonelier.
Second, educators are underpaid with most barely scraping by. Across the field of child care, educators earn poverty-level wages, but it’s even worse in family child care. Educators may have to choose among which bills to pay and some are forced to close their doors, much as they love their work.
The child care system is regulated at the state level for the most part, and states have different requirements. For example, in Connecticut and New York you have licensed educators for child care programs of a certain size — but New Jersey is an outlier in that it has registered educators, not licensed educators. This means that in New Jersey there are not as clear pathways for professionalization and differentiation of home-based child care.
What are some potential solutions?
The biggest thing is public funding for child care overall. If we invest money in the system, we can address both the issue of educators being able to stay in business and build wealth, and the challenge of affordability for parents. One way to do this is to increase subsidy dollars that go to parents to help them pay for care, and the other is direct wage supplements to educators to help make their businesses sustainable until we become a society where we actually pay educators enough.
Next is that every family child care educator needs access to a system of supports, and that’s where agencies like All Our Kin come in. Educators need to have opportunities for ongoing learning. This is critical when they’re getting started, but also throughout their professional lives so they can keep up with the latest knowledge in the field and know how to run their business. Educators also need to be connected to their peers. They’re looking to have a social community of peers who deeply understand and care about them and can support them, so providing opportunities to develop those networks is important.
Is it hard to get family child care educators together in a room for continuing education?
Sometimes educators have had bad experiences that lead them to distrust certain trainings or agencies. It can be hard to build that trust, but if you offer a high-quality, supportive learning experience and 5 educators come, the next time you’ll have twice as many — and twice as many again the time after that. If you treat educators with respect, your trainings are rooted in adult learning, and you use trainers that have lived the work and have deep and ingrained knowledge, family child care educators will show up.
What’s the goal of the family child care network being created in Trenton (and supported by the Burke Foundation) and what role will All Our Kin play in developing this network?
We believe the network will do several things. First, it’s going to build the supply of child care, particularly in neighborhoods of greatest need, by helping educators set up their businesses.
Second, it’s going to ensure equitable access to quality care for children and families by offering educators equal access to the latest and best child development knowledge.
Third, it will give educators the tools to succeed as businesspeople so their programs will stay open, and it will free them to focus their time and attention on the kids. With sustainable programs, they can also build wealth.
Finally, it will enable development of a peer community, which we hope will not only sustain the educators themselves, but ideally help create policy recommendations and suggestions for how both Trenton and the state can support child care more effectively.
In helping to develop this network, All Our Kin can’t just waltz into Trenton and say, “We’re here. We know everything about Trenton. We’re going to support you.” But what we can do is find an agency in Trenton with deep knowledge and deep relationships with the community and give them all the knowledge, skills, tools, and approaches that All Our Kin has accumulated over 25 years of doing this work. And we can walk side by side with that agency for 4 years, at the end of which we believe that agency will be a self-sufficient, fully running, high-quality family child care network.
If you could ask the presidential candidates one question about their platform relating to child care, what would it be?
Given the impact of child care on children, on parents, and the economy, what are the tangible steps you’d take in your first 100 days to make sure children, families, and child care educators are thriving?