Parenting Students Rely on Family and Friends for Care. Here’s How Colleges Can Make That Easier.

When someone says “child care,” do you imagine a center with a few rooms of kids divided by age range, staffed with multiple teachers? Or in-home care down the street from where you live, where a handful of kids play and learn from a child care provider and neighbor? Maybe you think of a live-in au pair who provides round-the-clock care for a family, or a couple of families who share a nanny.

All of these are child care, but they aren’t the norm for many parents who need help caring for their children when they are at work or school. The reality is more like playing a nerve-racking game of Jenga, plugging child care gaps with family, friends, or neighbors and hoping the pieces don’t fall when they have to be at work or school.

Student parents, like many other parents in the U.S., often rely more on informal family, friend, and neighbor (FFN) care than child care centers. Recent research found 60 percent of student parents rely on FFN care, and prior research found around half of student parents rely exclusively on family members for care. Another 20 percent use a combination of care types (for example, both a child care provider and a family member to supplement care when a center is closed).

There are many reasons student parents rely on FFN care. In our research, we heard from student parents that they trust relatives to look after their children. One student told us “for me, [child care has] definitely been easier than for others who need to look for care. I have it in the people I trust.” Parents may also want a care provider who shares a cultural background or speaks the same language. FFN is also often essential for parents working or taking classes during nontraditional hours when child care centers are commonly closed.

FFN is often a financial necessity, too. Care at a center is expensive and child care subsidies serve few eligible families, so FFN care can be the only or best option for those who can’t afford full-time care. Students living in a child care desert, like roughly half of Americans, may simply not have available child care spots.

For some student parents, FFN care may be their preference and what works best for their family, and for others, it may be the only feasible option. Either way, there are specific challenges students using FFN care face that colleges can help support them with.

Students using FFN care can face difficulties when their care falls through or their usual provider isn’t available at a particular class or work time. Colleges can help by offering specific resources and flexibility to parenting students.

Colleges can’t solve the child care crisis alone, but they can find solutions to support student parents by understanding that most are relying on FFN care to help them work and stay in school. They need support that reflects this reality.

Since student parents often rely on their networks to provide care, helping student parents strengthen networks is one way to support them in accessing care. We interviewed one college president who was interested in the idea of helping students join or form co-ops to share child care responsibilities with other student parents, but opted not to pursue this due to liability concerns. Even if a college can’t officially connect students to one another to form child care sharing arrangements, they can foster connection points between student parents. Models like Generation Hope’s cohort program can help student parents build a strong network among their peers, and campuses can help student parents form clubs or offer events designed to foster connection among this population. By strengthening their networks, student parents may find others with whom they wish to trade child care. We know that student parents face intense time poverty that may make it unrealistic for them to take on providing care for a student parent friend, even when in trade. It’s also crucial to consider other strategies that support students using FFN care.

Colleges can also play a role in ensuring students’ FFN supports have enough resources to get by, ensuring they can continue to help with child care. FFN providers themselves are often struggling financially and cannot access supports, like child care subsidies and subsidized food programs, that other child care providers have. Campus leadership could tap into campus resources, like their Early Childhood Education programs or community resources like Child Care Resource and Referral Networks, to learn more about state efforts to support FFN providers and how to connect student parent families to these efforts.

Offering priority registration to student parents is another way colleges can support them through the careful planning that goes into managing child care and other obligations. Allowing student parents priority to pick a class schedule that best aligns with their FFN care provider’s availability is one way to lighten their load. Priority registration could also help student parents manage transportation challenges; in our research, some told us about the difficulty of finding after-school programs that would pick their child up at school. Some needed to plan for family and friends to pick up their child and others had to leave class or work to bring their child elsewhere for care. Priority registration is one way to ease this burden by giving students more control over class times to ensure they’re available to transport their child, or picking class times when their FFN provider is available to pick up their child.

Beyond making it easier for students to find a FFN care arrangement that works for them, campus policies can help student parents get to class even if their usual FFN care falls through. Offering drop-in care or backup child care is one way to help student parents who are in a pinch when their usual FFN care provider can’t watch their child(ren). Student parents sometimes feel guilty using their networks for child care or worry about overusing friends and family who help - so offering other temporary or drop-in services can help them grow their options and lessen concerns about overburdening their networks.

Creating family-friendly spaces on campus, where student parents can bring their children when needed, is another way to support student parents relying on FFN care. If an FFN provider is sick, but a student parent still needs to study for a test, having a kid-friendly area in the library or other spaces to study with a kid in tow can allow a student parent to stay on track in their classes. Finally, campuses can adopt policies and provide syllabus language that informs student parents of whether and when it’s okay to bring a child to class. Faculty can also make clear in their syllabi that they’ll work to be flexible with students who miss class due to child care emergencies.

There’s no substitute for a large-scale federal investment in child care that helps low-income families access high-quality child care. After all, not everyone has a grandparent or neighbor nearby who can help care for their child(ren). Offering campus-based child care and helping student parents find child care off campus are important in meeting student parents’ need for care.

But campuses can use various strategies to meet most student parents where they’re at – piecing child care together in their networks and slotting it into their precarious schedules. Solutions like fostering community among student parents, providing drop-in or backup care, offering priority registration for student parents, and providing flexibility to help them meet child care needs can acknowledge and support parenting students while they shoulder the challenges of navigating child care while in school.