They run child care programs from their homes. It’s not as easy as you might think. 

Standing on the newly built deck in her backyard, Asha Clark wipes mucus off the face of the infant she’s holding in one arm, while using her free  arm to keep a toddler from re-entering the house. In the grass, three children ages 1 to 4 are riding small bikes and playing with sticks. 

“No, we don’t just go inside,” she tells the 3-year-old, who is determined to break the rules of playtime. Clark’s voice is higher-pitched and firm. “You can grab your water real quick, because I’m right here, but then you need to come back outside, please.”

A fence splits Clark’s yard down the middle, with a children’s play area on one side and family space with chickens and a shed on the other. The house has two driveways, two front doors, and two kitchens. From the outside, it looks like a two-family home or a design flaw realized. 

It is neither. Clark runs Growing Wildflowers Home Child Care, a family child care program she opened in October. One side of the building is her home, where she lives with her daughter, and the other has three classrooms, an open floor plan, and bathrooms with little toilets for her students. 

Clark is one of the more than 100 family child care providers in New Hampshire. By state law, family child care is defined as an “occupied residence in which child day care is provided for.” Often referred to as home-based child care, family child care providers can teach early education, licensed or unlicensed, in their home, depending on how many children they care for. 

Home-based care can offer a child more hands-on, individualized, and culturally specific teaching in a way that center-based care might not. Programs can also offer more flexibility in hours of operation and help fill gaps in child care across the state. 

But the number of family care programs in New Hampshire is shrinking. Providers across the Granite State are leaving child care due to low wages and burnout. But studies from the UNH Carsey School of Public Policy found that family child care providers experienced a 12.3% closure rate between 2023 and 2024, compared to a 2.3% center closure rate. Additionally, complex local and state regulations and business issues are deterring people from running these programs. 

Why a home business?

Providers like Clark turn away from child care centers to run a business from their home out of personal need and professional want.

Clark has been a caregiver since high school, when she became a licensed nursing assistant. She switched careers and became a child care provider after she had her daughter, and her daughter’s child care offered her a job. 

Clark does not like working in centers, she said, because they see children as “numbers and dollar signs.” She believes that children learn better with more close care and smaller ratios. 

“It’s not about filling a classroom,” she said. “It’s about that one-on-one attention and care that you can provide when the numbers are lower.” 

By running her program from her home, Clark is able to home school her 9-year-old daughter and provide parents with flexibility in care times. She offers before- and after-school care and is willing to care for children outside her 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. business hours if parents need it. 

“It’s not necessarily part of the day care, but I’m home,” she said. “You need to stay late for a meeting. I will check your kid out, and they will come have dinner with me. It’s not a big deal.”

When one of her family’s houses burned down, Clark kept the child for a couple of nights while the family figured out the next steps. 

“These families are not just clients. They are an extension of my family or I’m an extension of theirs. I don’t consider this my home, it’s our home,” she said.

For Andressa Freitag, running a home-based child care program is about killing two birds with one stone. When she was a young single mother with limited financial resources, Freitag realized she could care for her own children while earning extra cash babysitting in her neighborhood. 

Now, Freitag runs Wildlings Family in Whitefield, the only registered family child care program in Coös County. She is on her second iteration of the program, having closed the first during the pandemic. She reopened once she had her youngest two children with her current partner. Even though her business was “born by need,” Freitag struggles with having her business in her home. 

“It is definitely a little tough to have your job be inside your house,” she said. “You can’t really take a day off and be like, ‘Oh, I really don’t want to clean today.’”

Many families in Freitag’s program are struggling financially, so she allows parents to pay when they can rather than weekly. The decision was costly, but she said her parents “appreciate” the flexibility in pay deadlines. 

“We’re all parents. We’re all living our life,” she said. 

Just getting started can be tricky

Becoming a family child care provider can be a lengthy and confusing process. Child care is heavily regulated by the state, and although family child care is the least regulated, providers and their homes still must meet a plethora of requirements to legally and safely host children.

State licensing rules are rigorous. The 85-page licensing handbook regulates everything from teacher certifications to the height of a backyard fence to how often diapers need to be changed. Additionally, because verification is required at both the state and local levels, providers may have difficulty determining the correct steps in the process. 

To be a family child care provider in New Hampshire, a person must first meet the education requirements to be a provider and have a suitable home environment. 

A director would then decide what type of program they want to run from their residence: a licensed program, a license-exempt program, or an unregistered program. Under state law, a provider must become licensed if they care for four or more children besides their own. With four or fewer children, a family child care provider can be license-exempt or unregistered. 

Licensed programs are eligible for the New Hampshire Child Care Scholarship Program and receive the highest level of state oversight. Child care centers must be licensed. 

Being license-exempt means a program is registered with the state and may be eligible for reimbursement from the state Child Care Scholarship Program. Programs can be unregistered and eligible for license-exempt status, but are not overseen by state officials. If a home-based provider is caring for more than four children besides their own and is not licensed, they are breaking state law. 

Then, providers must have their home approved by their local fire department and local health and safety officers, and pass a state background check and an on-site visit by the state child care licensing unit to ensure compliance with state rules. 

Programs that need approval at the local and state levels are both confusing and contradictory. In New Hampshire, state zoning laws do not automatically override town laws, creating a challenging situation for prospective child care business owners to navigate. There is currently a bill in the state Legislature to address this, but it has met pushback from legislators who want local governments to maintain control. 

When Freitag decided to reopen Wildlings Family in April 2025, she considered doing so as a small child care center to increase revenue and because her partner is in the process of earning an early childhood education certificate. She decided not to because of how “confusing” the process is. 

“The guidance was either very convoluted or nobody knew nothing about nothing,” she said. ‘I’m calling the town and they’re sending me here and they’re sending me there. … It is a crazy process we do not have the time for.” 

More from this section

Most popular boy names in the 90s in New Hampshire

+2

New Hampshire has 2 billionaires, see who they are

Movies and TV shows casting in Portsmouth

Instead, she decided to open up another family child care program as a license-exempt provider. She registered with the state to demonstrate the program’s legitimacy and to be eligible for reimbursement through the state Child Care Scholarship Program. 

“There are definitely pros and cons [to getting licensed], but most people don’t understand it,” she said. “I definitely know that a lot of times it does also push people away from just babysitting under the table basically, to a somewhat formal thing that we’re doing.”

Yijun Zhang owns and operates Panda Bear Montessori in Bow. She created her licensed family child care program after working at a center and being dissatisfied with its implementation of the Montessori curriculum, as she wanted a smaller, higher-quality environment that paid more attention to children, including her own. 

Zhang said starting her program “took a while” because she could not refer to a handbook or any other resources to help her get started. As a nonnative English speaker, she had trouble with the order of operations of the licensing process. She wanted to make sure she knew the rules and did “everything” right so she would not get in trouble.  

“You have to do certain things first, and then other things later,” Zhang said. “It’s just more about knowing the rules, and taking the time to learn and understand them.” 

Clark did not have the same issues as Freitag and Zhang, largely due to her family’s financial support and the smooth inspection process. 

After she stopped working in centers, Clark worked at her best friend’s family child care program. When her friend moved to Texas, Clark almost moved with her because she did not see any other cost-friendly child care opportunities in New Hampshire. 

Instead, her family helped her buy her current home, which the previous owner had designed as a family child care, so she could stay in the state and run her own business. 

The Community Development Finance Authority created a guide to becoming a family child care provider, one of the few resources available for family child care in New Hampshire. It estimates that start-up costs for family child care providers range from $4,200 to $13,500. According to the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute, the median annual salary for a child care provider is $32,490. 

Clark’s family also helped her with the upfront costs of the program, such as toys and baby furniture. When it came time to get licensed, Clark said she had a “terribly easy” time because her house was built as a child care home by the previous owners, and the local fire and health department remembered it. 

“I was so stressed about all these inspections and getting everything done, and it was very simple,” she said. “I got very lucky. There is nothing I had to fix in order to pass. I just passed.” 

Teachers cosplaying as business professionals

For home-based providers, their home is their workplace, and they are responsible for ensuring both are running properly. Most child care providers are trained to be early educators, not small-business owners, which creates a unique set of challenges for family care providers. 

For Clark, running the business is an unintended consequence of her job. She is licensed and trained as a teacher — she prefers to spend time with her students and not behind a computer screen. 

“Teaching is where my passion is,” Clark said. “It’s challenging to balance being a teacher and taking the phone calls and writing the emails and making sure all the paperwork is done.” 

Freitag said she forgets she is running a business most of the time until it’s tax season. Because she caters to the financial needs of her clients and allows an unstructured pay schedule, tax season has resulted in “a lot of tears.” 

“I know legally I’m a business. But it often doesn’t cross my mind until I have to sit down and I’m doing taxes or that kind of stuff,” she said. “Being somebody [without] a degree of some sort that helps them know what businesses are and how to start up your own business, it’s been tough.” 

Freitag said she could have ruined the business or faced long-term consequences because she did not have a program set up for parent payments and attendance, or a business bank account. She had a hard time figuring out what she could claim on her taxes. 

“We’re learning our lessons and doing our best,” she said, “so when we do something wrong, there’s a really good chance that it was not on purpose.” She said she’s willing to undergo “trial by fire” and is learning from every mistake. 

Family child care providers also face a unique problem: finding children to fill their programs. 

Most child care centers in New Hampshire have long waitlists, so long that some providers could fill their centers two to three times over. But because parents do not seek out family child care as often, Clark, Freitag, and Zhang all said they are struggling to fill their classrooms to capacity. 

The three providers all use Facebook to advertise, and they appear in the New Hampshire Child Care search program run by the state. However, Clark believes families are not seeking out her programs because they are either unaware that they exist or “shy away from it” because they do not understand the type of learning models she has implemented. 

“A lot of families don’t know what Waldorf is … it’s different,” she said. According to Clark’s website, Growing Wildflowers is inspired by the Waldorf play model, which is designed around children’s wants and nurtures the “head, heart, and hands” of every child. 

Freitag believes her capacity issues stem from a lack of understanding of the qualifications of license-exempt providers. She has a hard time educating parents and getting them to believe that “a random person [wasn’t] watching the kids.”

“We have inspections, we have background checks, we have continuing education, we have CPR certifications, like all those things are required to do this. I wish there was more knowledge for families out there, like they don’t understand that yes, we’re running it in my house, and we’re not a licensed day care, but [there are] very few differences between us.”

A call for more funding and resources

Home-based child care programs differ significantly from center-based programs, but both are facing industry-wide funding, workforce, and legislative issues. 

Child care wages are staying the same while the cost of living increases, forcing providers to either raise tuition for parents, take a personal pay cut, or leave the field altogether for a higher-paying job. 

Clark said the only reason she got her business off the ground was her family. She was living paycheck to paycheck while working her last child care job, a norm among child care providers. 

“Without a spouse, you cannot afford bills on an [early childhood education] salary,” she said.  “You can’t. End of story.” 

Zhang said she wants more resources for family child care providers and would like to see an operating network of providers for home-based care. 

“For people to set up and have more providers in the industry, I think that’ll be good for society, for the community,” she said. 

Clark wishes there were more grants and state investment in child care to help offset the costs of her program. When asked if it’s worth it, Clark said she’s “proud” of her program and of being able to open her dream school. 

“It’s a lot, but the hugs I get in the morning make up for it.”