BUILDing Strong Foundations

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• Attention to State Child Care Subsidy Systems Essential to Building the Supply of High-Quality Child Care and Supporting Families with Infants and Toddlers

  Advocates striving to ensure that all families—especially low-income families—have access to high-quality child care for their infants and toddlers should focus on strengthening their state’s core child care assistance system. It is a key determinant of both the quality of care that low-income children receive and their families’ economic stability. States now have a tremendous opportunity to improve their child care assistance policies and make them work better for infants and toddlers and their families, thanks to the historic increase in funding for the federal Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) starting in FY 2018.

• Infant Mental Health Consultation: A Wise Investment of CCDBG Dollars

  IECMHC builds the capacity of providers and families to understand the powerful influences of infant and toddler relationships, interactions, and environments on the development of babies. Infant-toddler well-being is promoted and mental health problems are prevented or reduced as a result of the consultant’s partnership with adults in young children’s lives. It can also promote emotional and other important skills for infants and young children.

• Why the Market Can’t Provide an Adequate Child Care Supply and How States Can Help Fill the Gap

  Almost four million babies are born in the United States every year. These infants require diapers, blankets, baby food, and countless other products, creating a large and profitable market for companies meeting this demand. However, the law of supply and demand fails to hold true for perhaps the most essential good for children, high-quality child care. Why does the child care supply fall so short and how can states close the gap and support families?

• 2018: Wins for Infant and Toddler Care in Rhode Island!

  Rhode Island’s recently passed FY 2019 budget, signed on June 22, 2018, ensures that center-based child care programs for children under six in the Child Care Assistance Program will receive a rate increase, with significant increases for all quality levels and larger increases for higher quality programs as measured by the BrightStars Quality Rating and Improvement System. The budget establishes a tiered child care reimbursement rate structure in statute for infants and toddlers with high-quality programs paid at or above the federally recommended benchmark (75th percentile) to promote equal access to high-quality care. Rhode Island KIDS COUNT started this effort with a special focus on infants and toddlers but realized that we needed to promote tiered quality rates for all ages of children, given the needs in our community and knowing that the financial health and quality of child care providers depends on funding across all age groups. Fortunately, the expanded Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) money made it possible to go beyond our initial “state” ask to also include preschoolers and the budget established tiered quality rates for preschool age children as well as for infants and toddlers. We were not able to secure adequate funding to meet the federal benchmark for preschoolers this year, but we took a sizeable step forward. We plan to continue our work to promote equal access to quality child care for children from infancy through age twelve.

• Families First: Keeping Children at High-Risk Safe in the District of Columbia and Nationally

  As early childhood systems builders, we are well aware that infants and young children undergo rapid developmental changes that are highly influenced by relationships and environment. Supporting families to provide safe, stable, nurturing relationships and environments should be a key element of early care and education programs and services, particularly those that serve populations at high-risk, such as children at risk of entering foster care. (National data show that children birth to age five are at higher risk of placement and enter foster care at higher rates than older children and youth.) Programs and services also should be provided to help prevent child abuse and neglect and to aid pregnant women and families with young children. Through recently approved federal legislation, protecting children at high-risk has become more actionable.

• Who’s Caring for our Babies? New Jersey’s Dire Need to Provide Quality Infant and Toddler Care

  The journey to providing quality child care for babies begins by altering the way we think about it. We did that as a state, and a country, with regard to preschool. People came to understand that preschool provides education - an opportunity to get children started on a pathway to school success. Child care—and especially child care for infants and toddlers-- must be thought of in the same way. Child care is where babies are being educated outside of the family. That’s why quality is so important.