Erica Phillips felt a steady and powerful pull towards her grandmother’s South Philadelphia home. Other neighbors and family members did, too. “My grandmother’s house was a house that everybody went to,” Phillips says. “There was always food. There was always a hand to help out with the children.”
Grateful as a child for that attention and warmth, Phillips realized as an adult that her grandmother, like many home-based childcare providers, lacked recognition, support, and compensation for this vital service. Now the executive director of the National Association for Family Child Care, Phillips advocates for the caregivers who provide this essential neighborhood service to millions of working parents. The NAFCC estimates that about 40% of the country’s 6.7 million infants and children in paid childcare receive it in a home-based setting.
The association, founded in 1982, provides networking, tools, education, and an online professional development academy. It hosts a national conference, sets accreditation standards, and supports affinity groups, like the group for Arabic-speaking care providers that recently launched. Advocacy is one of Phillips’ key duties. Since she was named executive director in 2022, she has made several visits to the White House to push for more federal funding for childcare.
The NAFCC estimates there are about a million paid home-based programs in the U.S., and women provide the bulk of that care: About 98% of home-based providers are women, and about 60% are women of color. They earn an hourly average of $13, Phillips says, which is so low that some qualify for public assistance. And because they are small business owners, they are not subject to minimum-wage laws, so some net as little as $5 to $6 per hour. “That’s one of the reasons why there’s a shortage in childcare,” she says. “Half of all children under age five live in a childcare desert, which means there’s not enough childcare programs for the number of children in the community.”
What are the benefits of home-care programs?
They are generally smaller than either a center or some school-based programs that have early childhood programs. You really get to know the children, and there are really deep relationships between the families and the practitioner and the children. And because they’re so small, they can be located anywhere. They are a huge solution for rural communities that can’t sustain a large childcare center. They can be located near either the family’s work or their home. In addition, they often provide care outside of your typical 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Some run 24 hours because that’s when families need care.
I’ll give you an example of a nurse in Colorado who has a school-aged child and a toddler. Her hours are really long, and she needs care for her toddler, but her 7-year-old needs to get to school. So she drops them off at the provider, and the bus comes to the provider’s home, takes the 7-year-old, brings the 7-year-old back, and at the end of the day, the mom picks up both children. She can keep both children in the same safe and nurturing place because they can also care for children before and after school.
Why should providers be considered educators?
What they are doing is educating. They will often tell you that they’re not babysitting. We do not sit on babies! What we’re doing is so critical for not only the families but also for children whose brains are being built in the early years. And those experiences underlie all the future learning that they’re going to do. We offer a lot of trainings on a variety of topics from integrating STEAM [science, technology, engineering, arts, and math], addressing the social-emotional needs of different children, identifying any developmental delays, and supporting parents and children.
It is very important to us that they be viewed as educators. This helps with their own confidence and their power in navigating their work, whether it is with the various agencies that license and support childcare or whether it’s with a family. Over the last couple of years, we have been working to shift that narrative both internally and externally to the view that education starts before birth.
Why did you pivot from industrial engineering to childcare funding, education, and policy?
As a Black woman who’s good at math and science, going into engineering felt like a good path to elevating not only myself but my whole family. However, I wanted to do something that more directly impacted my family’s communities.
I wrote my business school essay on this idea and did the ED degree at Stanford knowing that I wanted to bring in that knowledge to further some of these ideas. I did eventually start a nonprofit organization called Second Home Early Childhood Centers. I was really committed to doing this model on the limited public subsidy dollars, but it became very clear to me that there was no way that you could sustain — much less make a profit, much less be able to run a large network — on just the public dollars available at that time.
That really shifted the way that I thought about our childcare crisis. I realized that the home-based childcare providers doing this work were sacrificing a lot and keeping childcare running on their own backs, needing public assistance and making very low wages. That’s part of the reason why, if you look at the number of licensed family childcare programs over the last 15 years, we’ve lost almost half of the capacity.
How did the pandemic affect in-home care?
All the schools closed, yet people, particularly essential workers, were still working. Family childcare was the backbone. They stayed open, which is incredible. And even as the pandemic continued, when people returned to more formalized care, they wanted something like family childcare. That was a huge turning point. We were able to say, yes, family childcare is great, but even before the pandemic, there were some serious issues with how we funded childcare. And now that we have your attention, let’s talk about how we cannot go back to the prior system but build a better way of caring for young children.
This silver lining is the awareness that came from it. And quite frankly, the funding that came from it is, too, because it allowed us to demonstrate that with public funds, this can happen: We can be responsive to community needs. We can bring in so many more families who need care. We can develop resources and technology to better communicate with families and to run better businesses.
Do you see any shifts in thinking?
There’s a growing awareness around some of the economic issues with the business model of childcare. Some estimates put the cost of the nation’s infant-toddler childcare crisis at $122 billion in lost earnings, productivity, and revenue every year. There’s a growing awareness that that model is broken, which leads you to say: What are innovative solutions or new ways of approaching the challenge to address the lack of childcare, the lack of affordable care, the lack of compensation for the educators doing this work?
The ultimate solution is we need public funding. We need government. We need companies to step up and to allocate funds because — between young families and the providers — there’s just not enough resources to have the type of change that we need for early care and education.
There are states that have increased funding for childcare. There’s a [0.44%] payroll tax in Vermont that just passed. New Mexico [in 2022] passed [a constitutional amendment guaranteeing] a right to early education. There are other models where families and employers are putting in money for childcare. In places like that, we have seen some increases in compensation, but it’s generally still not enough. NAFCC is really focused on making the case that we need additional funding at a federal level for childcare. [The U.S.] is at the bottom of the developed world in terms of investment in the young years.
How optimistic are you?
There’s been some forward movement. The [federal] budget that was passed this year included a billion dollars more than we were expecting, given that it’s a tight budget. That is an indication that there’s incremental progress. It’s a bipartisan issue. People across the political spectrum understand the importance of childcare and get that there is a role for government to play in providing more funding. We’ve also seen a rise in childcare unions or in unions representing childcare providers. And through that, in some places, they’ve been able to negotiate for retirement programs and benefit contributions. So there are definitely some bright spots.
The focus on childcare as an economic issue is super validating because I came out of business school talking about the challenges of childcare but had a lot of difficulty convincing peers and other experts that this is one of the biggest issues facing our country. It’s personally very rewarding to have more classmates and more business schools focusing on care. And I am very excited to see where we go from here.
How do you apply your Stanford education to your work?
I am always leveraging different leadership skills: the importance of having a clear vision of communication and building strong relationships. In Leadership Lab, I taught a class on the stages of team development. I still use that all the time in assessing where my teams are at and what type of support they need from a leader.
What do you enjoy most about your career?
I love engaging with family childcare educators all over the country. They are really inspirational. They’re incredibly smart. They’re often accidental entrepreneurs, women who see a huge gap and take whatever resources they have, even if that’s just themselves and their house, to address that gap. They’re always eager to think about new ideas and ways we can work together to solve big challenges, whether it’s childcare or climate or food security. And sometimes when I do visits, I get to hang out with toddlers for an afternoon.
Photos by Eugene Krasnaok