Kith and Kin
Informal Child Care

This is an excerpt from the full brief.

Over the last four decades, the steady movement of women with young children into the labor force has been accompanied by vastly increased use of out-of-home care arrangements for the young children of these working parents. While many children receive care in licensed child care centers, preschools, or licensed family child care homes, a good deal of child care takes place in settings that are, for the most part, not regulated. This type of child care is referred to as “informal” or “kith and kin” care. These terms, which are often used interchangeably, include care provided by grandmothers, aunts, and other relatives of the child, as well as care by friends and neighbors. These caregivers may or may not be legally exempt from state licensing requirements, depending on the state and the specific circumstances.

Although this may be the oldest and most widespread form of child care, kith and kin child care received very little attention from either researchers or policymakers until the late 1980s, when states were required to allow the use of federal subsidies for all legal forms of child care, rather than restrict their use to licensed providers. For child care advocates, the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996 raised concerns that moving large numbers of parents from dependence on cash assistance into the workforce would result in an increase in the proportion of subsidies paid to informal caregivers (Collins and Carlson, 1998). The absence of a body of research on this type of care made it difficult to assess the likely consequences for parents (in terms of their ability to obtain and hold onto jobs) and for children’s well-being.

The purpose of this document is to summarize what the available research tells us about informal child care, and to identify significant gaps in knowledge. Published articles and reviews, research reports, and other literature were examined to provide answers to the following questions:

• What proportion of children are in informal child care and what have been the trends in usage over time?
• What are the characteristics of families that use informal child care?
• Why do families use informal child care?
• What are the costs of informal child care?
• Who provides informal child care and what are their experiences?
• What are the experiences of children and parents who use informal child care?