A Closer Look: Informal Child Care Arrangements and Support in California (Issue Brief)

This brief presents findings on informal caregivers’ and parents’ networks, focusing on child care arrangements and sources of support and information related to caregiv­ing from a small sample of informal caregiv­ers and parents in California’s Bay Area. It uses ecomapping, a method to create a graphic representation of an individual or family and the web of connections to people and institutions that make up their social support system, to illustrate the caregiver networks. This is the second in a series of three issue briefs for the Informal Caregivers Research Project, conducted by Mathematica and funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation’s Children, Families, and Communities (CFC) program.