Hi and welcome to home-based child care basics. We will be discussing what it means to be a home-based child care. The National Association of Family Child Care or NAFCC, defines family child care as the business of child care and the practice of early care and education in the program provider's home. This means that you're providing care in your home for children who are non-relatives and depending on your state, you could have up to three children without a license or up to six or eight with a license. Home-based child care statistics. Out of nearly 11 million young children with working mothers, 40 percent spend more time in family child care than any other child care setting. Ninety percent of listed home-based providers were caring for at least one child under the age of three, while 85.5 percent were carrying for at least one preschooler. Almost two-thirds of these are reported serving at least one school-aged child. Nationally, about one in four receiving child care funded by the child care and development fund programs, were cared for in the family child care setting. Family child care providers care for 27 percent of infants younger than one and 24 percent of toddlers ages one and three in supported child care programs. What is a home-based child care setting? A setting where a small group of children are cared for in a home setting. Depending on your state, home child cares can also be referred to as a state licensed child care, state licensed group child care, legally exempt child care, certified child care home, a registered child care home, or family and friend or neighbor child care. The state set minimum standards for the basic components. This means these are the minimum standards to qualify to be operating a home child care. They talk about your adult child ratio, the group sizes, level of education and training, state and local regulations including fire codes and inspections, vaccination requirements, food handling guidelines, and child's enrollment information. Adult to child ratio, this means that there is one adult to so many children depending on the age of the child. Your group size is the maximum that you can have for each child age group. Level of education and training, depending on your state, this could be just using babysitting experience or having children of your own. Those will give you that training requirement. Level of education, a CDA in child care, an associates, bachelors, all of these things will give you the education that you need. States also require a certain amount of health and safety training per year so you may need to make sure that you're up on that. Your state local regulations including fire codes and inspections. These are all going to be happening before you open as well as while you are opened. Most states do require vaccination requirements along with the school age children. Depending on which state you're in will require which vaccinations the children need to have in order to attend. You may also be required to have some of these vaccinations. New food handling guidelines. You want to make sure that you're serving food that is properly handled. In your child enrollment information, each state will have their own variants on what enrollment forms will be necessary for the child to attend. To get your specific state guidelines, you can go to child care.gov website and this site is an excellent resource to give you all of the information you're going to need as you get started with the licensing process. Why would you want to provide child care in your home. Well, you can earn an income for your own family and this allows you to work from the home and still get money coming into your home to provide and you can stay home with your own children. Most states will count children in your ratio based on their age. But you are able to be home with your children and provide care to other children as well. You can also be home when the school bus drops off your school age children. This is an awesome way to make sure that you're there for your own children. You can provide child care to families so that they can go to work. There's such a demand for child care right now, by opening a home-based child care, you can be part of the solution. The opportunity to work in the early childhood field. If you've always loved working with children, this is a great way to get started. You can set your own schedule. If you want to open at seven and close by four, you can do that. If you would like to close at six, you are welcome to do that. That is your schedule. You can choose the children that you take based on what the schedule is like. Why would a family choose home-based setting? Well, parents like to have that close family environment. It does become a family. You have smaller amounts of children. Some children do better with a smaller environment. You might be more flexible in your hours than a center would be. If the center is open from 7:00-5:30, if a parent is running behind and says, "Hey, I'm going to be a few minutes late." You're there so you can stay open a few minutes later if you need to. More cost-effective than center base. A lot of families they can't afford to put their children in centers because it is a bit costly compared to the home-base child care. Siblings can also be cared for together rather than in separate rooms. At a center you're split based on age groups, whereas in the home-based they're altogether so they are still able to form those bonds together with the siblings. You may have less sickness. If you're in a center, you may have more illness that is more widespread, whereas if you're in a home-based, there's not as many children, therefore you're not going to have as many illnesses, which means the parents do not lose time at work. Continuity of care promotes early development. There's evidence that is very consistent and reliable for caregivers supporting early neurological development. Having the same family child care provider for several years provides the opportunity for a responsive relationship between the child and the adult caregiver. This means that they are building those bonds which are so important in the early years. Family child care provides children an opportunity to be cared for in smaller groups and be cared for by a provider who is responsible for fewer children. This means that in these smaller groups, children are getting more one-on-one attention, they're getting more care that is based around their needs. This video of the importance of home-based child care, this discusses how important it is and where we need to invest into our early childhood workforce and our children, because this is a critical time for children and we need to really take this seriously. There's a high demand for home-based programs. Government is realizing the importance of child care finally. Many areas nationwide are considered to be a child care desert. This means that there is not enough child care in that area that is high-quality and affordable for all of the children who need care and for all of those families who need to go to work. There are some child care deserts who offer grant opportunities to help you get started with your program. Thank you.
