Lessons from Southwest Detroit's Efforts to Support Informal Child Care

[PREVIEW CLIP FROM CLEO JACOBS JOHNSON]

If we're going to have a policy that is focused on formal care and licensed child care programs, why not ask, what about the informal providers? How might we support that system? Because what we know is that system is not going away and that it plays a significant role in the lives of so many children and families.

[J.B. WOGAN]

I’m J.B. Wogan from Mathematica and welcome back to On the Evidence, a show that examines what we know about today’s most urgent challenges and how we can make progress in addressing them.

On this episode, we are going to talk about an effort in Southwest Detroit to understand the nature of informal child care, who uses it and why, who provides it and why, and how state and local organizations, from foundations to nonprofits to government agencies, can provide funding and other resources to support this critical thread in our social fabric.

Informal child care means unlicensed care provided by family, friends, and neighbors and it is an important part of our social safety net because outside of care provided by a parent it is the most common form of child care for infants and toddlers in the United States.

Five years ago, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, in partnership with the Kresge Foundation, launched Hope Starts Here: Detroit’s Early Childhood Partnership. The initiative aims to ensure that all families in Detroit receive the support and resources they need to provide their children with high quality early care and education experiences. As part of that citywide effort, Mathematica partnered with three community nonprofits. With funding from the Kellogg foundation, Mathematica created and facilitated a learning collaborative. We’ll talk more about what exactly a learning collaborative is in a bit, but for now just think of it as a partnership between multiple organizations with different resources and expertise. In this case, the collaborative set out to understand and meet the needs of informal providers in Southwest Detroit, a neighborhood with a high demand for child care and virtually no supply of formal, licensed providers.

Lessons from the collaborative in Southwest Detroit are now available in an issue brief recently published by Mathematica. Both the brief and this episode of the podcast were made possible with support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. On this episode, I’ll share findings from the brief and contextualize that evidence through interviews with informal providers, staff at community nonprofits that serve those providers, as well as representatives from the Kellogg Foundation and Mathematica’s research team.

While this effort to support informal child care providers and families in Southwest Detroit started back in 2016, its lessons are emerging at a time when the nation is reckoning with a public health crisis that has dealt blows to the current early care and education system and to women’s participation in the labor force. It will take years to fully understand the interplay between COVID-19, parents’ choices about working in 2020 and 2021, and the availability of child care in that time, but policymakers are already actively looking for ways to strengthen the early care and education system so that parents who want to return to work have the ability to do so. In that context, the Southwest Detroit learning collaborative provides some insights that could ensure that high quality informal child care is part of that national child care system currently being built back.

Okay, so I’ve already mentioned that informal child care providers can be family, friends, or neighbors, but the Mathematica study shed more light on the characteristics of these providers—at least among the 70 who received services from the learning collaborative in Southwest Detroit. Those 70 providers cared for about 250 children. Most (about 80 percent) were Hispanic, Latinx, or of Spanish origin. All were women. The average age of informal providers in the study was about 40, but it was a pretty wide range from 21 to 68.

One of the informal providers in the study was Linda Jackson, who takes care of her granddaughter Jo Jo while her son and daughter-in-law work. She watches Jo Jo five days a week, starting at 8 a.m. and going as late as 7 p.m. some nights. They all live together. Before working with the learning collaborative, Linda hadn’t heard of the term informal child care.

[LINDA JACKSON]

I fit in as the caregiver/babysitter when they're working. And when they're off work, she goes back to them. On a weekend, she's with them.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Even before her son got married, Linda says she knew that she wanted to help watch her future grandchildren.

[LINDA JACKSON]

Well, you know, how family situations change, but when I grew up, my grandmother lived in our house, my mother's mother, and she took care of us and it was invaluable. I remember growing up because both my parents worked. And so, when in turn I had my son, I didn't have that. I had to pay for help. So paying it forward, I feel like the fact that I grew up under such a rich circumstance, but my son didn't, I'd like to give it to my granddaughter.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Linda spent a career as a special education teacher, which makes her somewhat of an exception. Many of the providers who received services from the learning collaborative did not have formal education or training in child development.

[ALESHANICOLE]

They’re still child care providers that may not have necessarily had certifications or training or considered it their profession. However, there's lots of people here who have taken care of children for 20 plus years.

[J.B. WOGAN]

That’s AleshaNicole, a teaching artist at Living Arts, a neighborhood nonprofit that provides arts education programs to engage and inspire youth, families, and teachers. Living Arts was one of the three community partners that participated in the learning collaborative.

[ALESHANICOLE]

I guess when I used to think of who we service through this program, I would just think it was, you know, the neighborhood lady that everybody knew or the, the aunt or the grandma, you know, I didn't necessarily have a term.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Alesha leads arts workshops for caregivers. She considers the title, informal provider, as a sign of respect. It elevates and recognizes the important contributions that these caregivers make in their communities.

[ALESHANICOLE]

I think that it's brought a sense of respect and appreciation to yet another sector of essential workers, where we're really getting this magnifying glass in our world right now, right on the essential workers.

[J.B. WOGAN]

When Living Arts began offering workshops for informal providers, Alesha says she noticed some familiar faces among the attendees.

[ALESHANICOLE]

They were also parents of some of our children in Living Arts that are in the dance programs or in the, you know, the karate class or the beat making class or the family involvement class. Like I knew of, however, I didn't even recognize that they were taking care of maybe 10 of those different children in the programs. Right. Because it was one mom who was able to do it and took care of a whole bunch of other parents, kids, you know?

[J.B. WOGAN]

Mathematica found that there are several reasons why families choose informal providers. Here’s Cleo Jacobs Johnson, a senior researcher at Mathematica.

[CLEO JACOBS JOHNSON]

It's affordable. Providers oftentimes are not paid financially, or, you know, they're not receiving financial compensation, nor are they looking for it. One of the things we heard a lot was, I get paid in hugs and kisses.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Another reason families choose informal providers is the flexibility, Cleo says.

[CLEO JACOBS JOHNSON]

It’s flexible, so that parents who work on weekends or evenings, you know, they work non-traditional hours or have again, things to do with very non-traditional hours. They have a place for their child to receive care overnight care, weekend care.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Work isn’t the only reason. Parents may also be in school or they may have tasks to do for which they don’t want to bring their child.

And culture can also be factor, Cleo says. Southwest Detroit is known for having a large share of Latinx households where Spanish is the first language. The neighborhood also abuts Dearborn, Michigan, a Detroit suburb popular among Arab Americans. It might be difficult for families to find a licensed facility that has staff who speak their language or know their culture. And it helps if the provider is someone familiar to them, someone from the neighborhood.

[CLEO JACOBS JOHNSON]

Parents say they use this form of care because they want their child to be with someone they know and trust. I mean, this is their baby, right?

[J.B. WOGAN]

While it’s true that parents often choose informal providers because they prefer that type of care, it’s also true that in many communities, parents don’t have another option in the neighborhood. In Southwest Detroit, for example, the neighborhood has about 1,500 slots at licensed early care and education facilities for an estimated 6,000 children between 0 and 5 years. Fewer than 40 of those slots extend past 4:30 p.m.

[CLEO JACOBS JOHNSON]

There are communities out there that have literally no licensed child care center, family child care center in their community and parents, you know, who wants to use, who need care, needs to find a place for their child.

[J.B. WOGAN]

From the Kellogg Foundation’s perspective, there were a number of compelling reasons to invest in supporting and enhancing the quality of informal care in Southwest Detroit. Here’s Eileen Storer Smith, a program officer for the foundation.

[EILEEN STORER SMITH]

The work made a lot of sense in Southwest Detroit, where you have a high a high number of informal providers, particularly family, friends, and neighbor care. You have a high number of not only families that do not have access to center-based to more expensive center-based care due to inequities in, in financial resources, but that there are also a number of of families that have limited access to due to some language barriers that make it challenging for them to access those supports and services. There are also a number of families that have maybe have different status in terms of immigration. Again, we always want to speak about families from a strength-based perspective, but recognizing how the important role that informal providers play for families in Southwest Detroit, we thought it was an important investment to make.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Communities all over the country share Southwest Detroit’s experience with an inadequate supply of licensed child care centers. With an estimated 20,000 child care facilities closing permanently during the pandemic, that supply has only contracted in the past year. While lawmakers in Washington have instituted some temporary changes to make it easier for families to afford child care, and those changes should help licensed providers, it seems likely that informal child care will be an even more important child care option in the coming years. Here’s the Kellogg Foundation’s Eileen Storer Smith again.

[EILEEN STORER SMITH]

Because early childhood is so underfunded, one of the things that happens is folks who come out of institutions of higher education, who are early childhood certified, who love young children, they get in making $9 an hour, and then they realize that they can be in the K, the K three system and be making double that. And so they leave the profession. And so even if we had enough money to, to provide a quality early learning experience for every eligible young child, there are not enough providers. There are not enough qualified staff to serve those children.

[J.B. WOGAN]

In the context of that underfunded early care and education system, informal providers are a critical resource for families. Eileen says the Mathematica study contributes valuable insights not only about who provides and uses informal child care and why; it also hints at ways that organizations, including service providers and funders in a community, can better support informal providers and the children they care for. As I mentioned before, Mathematica was the research partner for something called a learning collaborative. Now it’s time for the technical definition. A learning collaborative is a systematic approach to process improvement where organizations test and implement system changes, measure their impact, and then share their experiences to accelerate learning and broaden implementation of best practices.

As a collaborative, three community based organizations successfully figured out ways to identify and engage informal providers, which is no small feat considering their very status as informal providers means many of them are not already on a program contact list or operating out of a shared space. Each community partner offered a unique set of programs, resources, and supports to informal caregivers in Southwest Detroit. Over the course of the project, community partners offered supports and programming to informal providers in order to increase providers’ knowledge of child development, increase their access to supports and resources, and to address the value of arts-based education in the lives of young children. Incentives like food, gift cards, and child care helped increase their participation in workshops and other events. Community partner staff noted the value these incentives played in the lives of caregivers. Providing them with a meal and child care enabled informal providers to immerse themselves in the workshops and learn important skills and techniques that could help them support the development of the children in their care.

The design of the programs, resources, and supports came from the community partners’ experience in Southwest Detroit and were offered in response to the perceived needs in the community. This included a need for the programming to be bilingual and culturally responsive. For example, workshops were offered in Spanish and English, and most of the programming was offered in Spanish because that’s what most of the informal providers preferred. The collaborative advertised reminders of future events in both Spanish and English for the same reason. And community partners worked to ensure that staff and presenters who offered workshops were people of color to mirror the identities of informal providers. Providers like Violeta Ramirez.

[VIOLETA RAMIREZ]

Pues mi cultura pues es Mexicana.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Violeta is originally from Mexico. Monday through Friday, she cares for two grandchildren and sometimes her friends’ children as well. Violeta says she appreciated that activities were available in Spanish so that she could participate.

[VIOLETA RAMIREZ]

Y el idioma para mí fue muy difícil pero siempre hubo traductor en las organizaciones.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Violeta struggles with English, but it was never a problem because the community partners always had translators present.

Through focus groups, Mathematica learned that informal providers changed their approach to interacting with children because of what they learned through the collaborative’s programming. Linda Jackson, for example, says the workshops, materials, and resources gave her ideas of activities that would stimulate her granddaughter. Sometimes it wasn’t so much about learning something new, but remembering ways to engage a child.

[LINDA JACKSON]

Like a lot of the times, they would have people who like for, for playing puppets for getting the children to role-play through puppets and actually hands-on making the materials themselves and having her color and do things and talking to her and getting her to, to look at a face on the puppet or maybe not even a facing and just internalizing it or, or talking back that kind of thing because with her, and I guess with most kids at age that they're kind of in their own world and it's hard for them to project outward. And so things like that, activities they gave us to do with mirrors and so that she can look at herself in the mirror and you can talk to them and then she can talk to herself and give positive affirmations about what they're able to do and things like that.

[J.B. WOGAN]

The Mathematica study was a formative evaluation, so it didn’t attempt to measure the impact of the collaborative on, say, the quality of informal child care provided, or the impact of informal child care on child development. However, Cleo says there are promising signs that providers and the children they care for are—for lack of a more precise term—better off.

[CLEO JACOBS JOHNSON]

Providers did share that they learned more about child development. They learned about key topics, including communication, the value of a schedule for young children, how to communicate effectively with a young child.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Violeta Ramirez says her conception of herself and her role changed through the workshops provided by the Detroit Hispanic Development Corporation, another local nonprofit in the learning collaborative. Initially, she identified as …

[VIOLETA RAMIREZ]

La señora que cuida los niños.

[J.B. WOGAN]

That translates to, the lady who takes care of children. But now?

[VIOLETA RAMIREZ]

Ahora soy la cuidadora informal.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Now she thinks of herself as an informal caregiver. Violeta says that after participating in the programs, she knows more and has more confidence in her abilities. I asked her what specifically she has been able to apply from the programming for informal providers.

[VIOLETA RAMIREZ]

He aprendido el desarrollo del niño,

[J.B. WOGAN]

I have learned the development of the child, she says.

[VIOLETA RAMIREZ]

Como cuidarlos, como hablarles, como contarles un cuento

[J.B. WOGAN]

How to take care of them, how to talk to them, how to tell a story,

[VIOLETA RAMIREZ]

Como disfrazarse uno de payaso y hacerlo reír,

[J.B. WOGAN]

How to dress up as a clown and make them laugh.

[VIOLETA RAMIREZ]

Cuando el niño está de mal humor como contentarlo

[J.B. WOGAN]

How to keep children happy when they are in a bad mood.

[VIOLETA RAMIREZ]

Como ayudar a que no pelen por un juguete. Todo eso me gusto.

[J.B. WOGAN]

And how to help them not fight over a toy. She enjoyed learning all of those things.

Lessons from the workshops for informal providers have changed the way she cares for children.

[VIOLETA]

Un ejemplo son los sentimientos del niño cuando el niño está llorando como tenemos que abrazarlo que el necesita cariño.

[J.B. WOGAN]

An example, she says, is the feelings of the child when the child is crying, how we must hug them, that they need affection.

[VIOLETA]

Y en mis tiempos era, ya no llores o sea ya no llores y no abrazas al niño ni le das cariño. Eso para mi es muy importante.

[J.B. WOGAN]

And back in my time, Violeta says, we would say, “no more crying,” and we wouldn’t hug the child or give them affection. That, to her, is very important. What Violeta has learned from the workshops on caregiving have caused her to reflect back on how she raised her own children.

[VIOLETA RAMIREZ]

Yo hubiera dado todo lo mio por haber yo educado a mis niños, los mios que ya son adultos, con lo que se ahora.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Violeta says, I would have given my all to have educated my children, who are already adults, with what I now know.

[VIOLETA RAMIREZ]

Ahora he aprendido tanto que hasta he pedido perdón por no haber dado lo que ahora se.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Now she has learned so much that she has even apologized to her adult children for not giving them the education that she’s now able to give others based on what she now knows.

Violeta is one of many providers whose understanding of themselves and their role in facilitating child development also changed. Amanda Holiday, an early childhood specialist at Congress of Communities, one of the neighborhood nonprofits that participated in the learning collaborative, says it’s the same phenomenon she has noticed with parents sometimes not recognizing the role they play as educators.

[AMANDA HOLIDAY]

Parents don't think about that every word they say is teaching the children something, every action they do, kids are learning culture. Kids are learning norms, kids are learning, you know, what's acceptable, what's not acceptable. And let alone like just learning, you know, what the word is for cup, you know, and how to ask for a red cup, you know?

[J.B. WOGAN]

Another way that the providers are better off is that they have a community of peers now. Linda Jackson says activities organized by the collaborative gave her an opportunity to socialize with other adults in a similar position. It’s a stark contrast to her days in K-12 education at a school.

[LINDA JACKSON]

I taught special ed and I had like a classroom with 15 special needs kids, but I always had one or two teacher aids with me, or I had staff next door, someone I could always collaborate with, but when you're at home, you're so emotionally tied to this one little person. And you have nothing, no one to bounce off of your ideas or whatever. So you're going off yourself and you're going by how she's reacting and you know, it can be isolating.

[J.B. WOGAN]

The learning collaborative in Southwest Detroit uncovered a few challenges for organizations interested in supporting informal child care providers. It was difficult for the three community partners to find and recruit informal providers. Once they did identify providers, it wasn’t always easy to retain them for ongoing workshops and other educational activities. The community partners also told Mathematica that it was sometimes difficult to dedicate staff time to informal providers.

Community partners also expressed frustration by the lack of community resources and networks available to informal providers in Southwest Detroit. Even when supports do exist, such as child care subsidies, informal providers are either unaware of the resources or find it challenging to benefit from the support. Each state receives federal funds to administer a child care subsidy program for income eligible families. This subsidy allows families to work or attend school. In most states, including Michigan, it is available to qualified licensed and unlicensed providers. Due to the fact that unlicensed providers and the families they serve are rarely organized in any way, many do not know of the subsidy program. Here’s Amanda Holiday from Congress of Communities again.

[AMANDA HOLIDAY]

There is this process and it is available, but people, obviously some people know about it, but a lot of people don't know about it.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Amanda says the informal providers and parents would benefit from more robust outreach and public education campaigns that help people take advantage of programs like the federal child care subsidy.

[AMANDA HOLIDAY]

One of the things that we were trying to do was make sure that people were connected to that system better. And we actually held an info session. We, and we brought in United way. United way is one of the leads on getting people enrolled in that system. And we brought in United Way to sign up a bunch of families for the child care subsidy or sign them up to be informal caregivers, taking care of kids, getting paid by the childcare subsidy.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Even if more parents and providers become aware of the child care subsidy and how to enroll, Amanda says they will still encounter a system that can be difficult to access.

[AMANDA HOLIDAY]

It also is really, really annoying and long and difficult to sign up for. So on the parent side of it, all the hoops that the parent has to jump through to get a child care subsidy is ridiculous.

[J.B. WOGAN]

For immigrant families, the documentation status of the family or the provider could be yet another barrier to accessing subsidies.

To build on lessons from the learning collaborative in Southwest Detroit, Amanda says larger organizations, including government agencies and nonprofits with a statewide presence, which have more resources and influence, also need to focus on supporting informal caregivers.

[AMANDA HOLIDAY]

I think that our three organizations have made some positive impact on specific number of people's lives. And there's thousands of caregivers, just in Southwest Detroit. And the way to reach those, is those bigger structures.

[J.B. WOGAN]

One general lesson from the Southwest Detroit learning collaborative, Cleo says, is that any national conversation about the child care system needs to include informal providers.

[CLEO JACOBS JOHNSON]

If we're going to have a policy that is focused on formal care and licensed child care programs, why not ask, what about the informal providers? How might we support that system? Because what we know is that system is not going away and it plays a significant role in the lives of so many children and families.

[J.B. WOGAN]

In the past year, Congress has passed several large stimulus bills that included provisions to bolster the child care system and make child care more affordable, but the long-term implications of those legislative efforts aren’t clear yet. For the most part, those changes pertain to child care arrangements between families and either licensed family child care providers or child care centers. And those changes are currently temporary. The provisions do not focus on supporting providers that offer critical care to working families in an unlicensed setting.

In neighborhoods like Southwest Detroit, where the families and providers tend to be from Black, Latinx and/or immigrant communities, policymakers may decide that providing more resources for informal care not only helps the economy but increases equity within the child care system. Here’s Eileen Storer Smith from the Kellogg Foundation again.

[EILEEN STORER SMITH]

Informal providers serve a vital function because they are there to step in and it could just be, you know, a sister or a grandmother who says, you know, there's nowhere for my child to go, or I can't afford it if, if, because childcare is so expensive, but so little of that goes to the salary for the provider or the educator, but it takes such a huge chunk out of a working families’ income, informal providers have been able to step in to provide this vital by vital support in a way that keeps the economy going. But it's all based on the fact that there is highly inequitable funding across the zero to third grade space and beyond. And then between licensed and unlicensed providers.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Even without legislative changes, it’s clear that many families will continue to turn to informal providers, either out of necessity or because it’s the option they prefer. And because these providers tend to be friends, family members or neighbors, they aren’t doing it for the money or professional development opportunities. Linda Jackson, one of those caregivers being compensated through hugs and kisses, says she’s grateful for the chance to spend so much time with her granddaughter.

[LINDA JACKSON]

Because even as I harken back to my son's developmental years, I was working, I was teaching full time. I was also a teacher coach and I did other activities, professional development. So I missed out on a lot of the things that, because when, when he went directly to daycare and, and I from like almost seven o'clock in the morning to six o'clock in the evening or latch key. And so I missed a lot of the things that I now get with his daughter. And to me, it's just because I'm so family oriented to me, it's, it's a gift, you know?

---

Thanks to my guests, Linda Jackson, Violeta Ramirez, AleshaNicole, Amanda Holiday, Eileen Storer Smith, and Cleo Jacobs Johnson. I also want to thank my Mathematica colleagues, addition to Cleo, who are Daisy Gonzalez, Patricia Del Grosso and Megan Hague Angus. They helped in myriad ways throughout the life of this episode, from scheduling interviews to providing feedback on the script.

In the show notes and on the Mathematica blog associated with this episode, I’ll include links to the issue brief we explored in this episode as well as a short news release summarizing the topline findings. As I mentioned at the top, this episode wouldn’t be possible without the support of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

As always, thank you for listening to another episode of On the Evidence, the Mathematica podcast. We’re always looking for feedback, but especially right now while we have a listener survey out in the field. Find the survey at tiny url forward slash on the evidence. There are a few ways you can keep up with future episodes: Subscribe wherever you find podcasts or follow us on Twitter. I’m at JBWogan. Mathematica is at MathematicaNow.