Unlisted home daycare providers and the environments where they care for kids

According to this report by the Home-Based Child Care Supply and Quality (HBCCSQ) project, there is not as much research on home-based childcare providers as there is on childcare centers, “and the least is known about unlisted providers who do not appear on state or national provider lists and work outside the formal systems” that support those centers. The HBCCSQ project tries to fill the gap in research about unlisted providers, and in this report, Schochet et al. focused specifically on describing the community characteristics where unlisted home-based providers live and take care of children. To do so, they used data collected in the 2019 Home-Based Provider Survey (HBPS), one of the four nationally-representative integrated surveys that were fielded as part of the 2019 National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE), which is available, along with the level-one restricted versions of the 2019 data files, via the Child and Family Data Archive. The NSECE design enables researchers to match geographic areas used in the NSECE to other data sources. The analyses presented in this report linked the HBPS with a range of community characteristics from the American Community Survey, as well as from the Child Opportunity Index 2.0. Schochet et al. examined each characteristic separately for unlisted providers who accepted payment, unlisted providers who did not accept payment, and listed providers, then compared them. They found that unlisted paid providers more often lived in economically disadvantaged communities with higher poverty, housing vacancies, pollution exposure, and lack of healthy food access compared to listed and unlisted unpaid providers. Among unlisted providers overall, those identifying as Black non-Hispanic were disproportionately in communities with concentrated disadvantages like extreme poverty, unemployment, and poor environmental conditions. Tailoring support efforts to the economic and environmental realities in unlisted providers’ neighborhoods could enhance child care quality and sustainability. More publications based on NSECE data are available.