Davon Russell, President of the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation (WHEDco), built on the growing momentum of the home-based family childcare movement in a Crain’s op‑ed calling for deeper investment in these programs and the networks that help make them great options for working families. Read an excerpt below:
Across the state of New York, home-based childcare programs outnumber center-based by more than two to one. They are a vital part of the childcare sector—trusted neighbors who care for children in their own homes, offering flexibility, cultural understanding, and continuity on which many families depend.
For many parents, including my wife and me, home-based care was the preferred option. Both of our daughters began their early care in a neighborhood home-based setting at three months old, where they remained until they transitioned at age three to a center-based pre-school.
Home-based childcare programs— spanning informal care providers to registered and licensed family or group family day care providers—open their homes to children from six weeks through age 12. They disproportionately serve infants and toddlers, families working non-standard hours, and immigrant communities, and they provide care that aligns with families’ schedules, languages, and lived realities in ways that center-based models often cannot.
Any serious effort to achieve universal childcare must begin with two realities: home-based care is already a central, trusted part of New York’s childcare system, and it will only remain viable if we design and fund public policy intentionally to include it. Treating home-based providers as essential infrastructure, rather than an afterthought, is critical to building a system that truly works for families.
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For years, home-based childcare has been stretched to a breaking point by chronic underinvestment and policies that have failed to integrate it fully into the public system. For example, when New York City rolled out universal pre-K in 2014, most of the new funding flowed to center-based programs, ignoring the home-based sector on which many families relied. The consequences are visible today. More than 12,000 children sit on the city’s childcare waitlist, even as many licensed home-based providers and centers have open slots they cannot fill. This is not a failure of supply, but of how funding is structured and delivered. Inadequate subsidy rates, delayed payments, and unstable enrollment force providers to leave seats empty or close altogether.
Stabilizing home-based childcare is also a workforce strategy—one that the Governor herself has identified as essential to keeping parents, especially women, in the labor force. Yet, despite increasing recognition at the policy level, providers still face steep barriers in practice. A new Center for New York City Affairs report found that licensed home-based providers earn the equivalent of just $6.01 hourly when factoring long days and staffing costs. Informal providers are paid just $68 for a full day caring for a three-year-old.This all must change to achieve universal childcare and honor parent choice. Informal and licensed home-based providers must be funded as core components of the State and City’s expansion. We need a true cost-of-care methodology, a wage subsidy floor, startup and stabilization grants, access to benefits, automated rate increases paced with inflation, and simplified systems that ensure accountability while delivering reliable, on-time payments.
New York has an opportunity to implement universal childcare that is equitable, efficient, and rooted in community. That means funding what already works—and recognizing that for many families, care begins at home.