Using the Child and Adult Care Food Program
to Support Quality in Family Child Care Homes

The Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) is a federally funded nutrition program administered by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). CACFP is available to all regulated family child care providers and to license-exempt providers in states that have established standards for their participation in the program. Providers who participate in CACFP receive reimbursement for serving meals and snacks that meet USDA nutrition guidelines. They also receive annual training in child nutrition and food safety and onsite assistance from CACFP monitors whose unannounced visits include both CACFP compliance inspections and technical assistance.

Some family child care providers require parents to supply their children’s food, but many providers prefer to prepare and serve meals and snacks for the children in their care. Having all the children sit down together for a family-style meal offers wonderful learning opportunities, especially when the children can help prepare and serve the food and help with setting the table and clearing the dishes. When many children eat more meals in their child care homes than they do in their own homes, and parents are often hurried and exhausted at family meal times, it is important for family child care providers to offer a relaxed social setting for family-style meals and snacks.

The cost of nutritious food, including fresh fruits and vegetables, can be a significant expense for providers, but CACFP offers a source of funding for nutritious food that can help providers serve meals and snacks to the children in their care and afford healthier choices.

The CACFP reimbursement rate for family child care providers is now tiered to provide a higher reimbursement to providers serving low-income children, in an effort to target those children who are at greatest risk of receiving inadequate nutrition and inadequate school readiness skills. Research has shown that there are crucial relationships between nutrition and health, and nutrition and learning, and CACFP can help providers improve the quality of their programs to meet children’s health and learning needs. CACFP reimbursements help providers purchase healthy food, and CACFP training and technical assistance help providers teach young children healthy eating habits and food safety. 

When providers receive reimbursements from CACFP their gross income increases, often without a significant increase in expenses.  Providers who were already serving meals before participating in CACFP may spend slightly more on food to meet the USDA guidelines, but the reimbursement rates should exceed the increased cost even in Tier II homes, allowing providers to allocate more of the tuition fees they receive to program improvement and provider compensation.

The mission of the National Association for Family Child Care (NAFCC) is to promote quality child care by strengthening the profession of family child care, and we believe that CACFP is a program that can strengthen the profession of family child care by providing both an important financial support through the reimbursements for meals and snacks served and a professional development and quality improvement support through its training and technical assistance.

• CACFP reimbursements increase family child care providers’ gross income, which may help providers serve better food, make other program improvements or increase provider compensation significantly enough to encourage them to remain in the family child care profession.
• In a time when childhood obesity is a health threat to so many US children, the importance of early nutrition training to develop lifelong healthy eating habits cannot be overstated. CACFP helps family child care providers impart the essentials of healthy eating to our youngest children.
• CACFP provides USDA guidelines for meals components and portion sizes for children that help providers determine what and how much to serve, and CACFP also offers sample menus and recipes for nutritious food. Children who are served meals according to the USDA guidelines are more likely to meet the recommended daily allowances for food energy and nutrients.
• Training in nutrition and food safety from CACFP will help providers improve health and safety in their family child care homes. In addition, many CACFP sponsor agencies also offer additional professional development training for the providers in their programs.
• CACFP also helps providers develop and hone the administrative skills needed to plan menus in advance in order to serve a well balanced and varied diet and to maintain up to date records of attendance and meals served.
• The unannounced visits of the CACFP monitors help to keep providers in compliance with both CACFP requirements and licensing requirements pertaining to capacity and supervision of children.

Using the 2005 – 2006 CACFP rates, a family child care provider receiving Tier I rates can be paid over $5,000 annually for serving six children breakfast, lunch and a snack daily.¹

A provider receiving Tier II rates can be paid nearly $2,500 for serving the same number of meals and snacks to six children. Even providers who do not serve that number of meals can receive a substantial financial benefit from CACFP, but the reimbursement is only part of the benefit family child care providers receive from CACFP.

The benefits of CACFP, including both the reimbursements and the nutrition and food safety training, should outweigh the administrative responsibilities of documenting attendance and meals served and the unannounced visits of CACFP monitors for professional family child care providers looking for ways to improve the quality of their programs. Yet only about half of the eligible providers participate in CACFP.

NAFCC encourages family child care providers to participate in CACFP, and we urge state agencies responsible for child care licensing and subsidy programs to partner with the state CACFP program to provide information on CACFP to all eligible providers and to work with CACFP sponsors to provide the outreach and technical assistance necessary to increase CACFP participation.

CACFP can be a key source of support for family child care providers. NAFCC strongly supports CACFP as a quality improvement resource for providers and believes that increasing family child care provider participation in CACFP would be beneficial to family child care providers and the children in their care.

¹ Tier I day care homes are those that are located in low income areas, or those in which the provider’s household income is at or below 185 percent of the Federal income poverty guidelines. Sponsoring organizations may use elementary school free and reduced price enrollment data or census block group data to determine which areas are low income.

Tier II homes are those family day care homes which do not meet the location or provider income criteria for a tier I home. The provider in a tier II home may elect to have the sponsoring organization identify income-eligible children, so that meals served to those children who qualify for free and reduced price meals would be reimbursed at the higher tier I rates.

A child’s eligibility for tier I rates in a tier II day care home may be documented through submission of an income eligibility statement which details family size and income or participation in any of a number of means-tested State or Federal programs with eligibility at or below 185 percent of poverty. Source: USDA Child and Adult Care Food Program website visited 07/07/06 at http://www.fns.usda.gov/cnd/care/CACFP/aboutcacfp.htm.