Nobody had asked
Answered 3 September 2026
Family child care homes licensed for eight or fewer children appear on no public list, and it was widely assumed that state law kept them private. A close reading of the statute suggested otherwise, so the Family Child Care Association of San Francisco asked the California Department of Social Services for the records. Fifteen days later, at no cost and with nothing redacted, the department sent them: 556 homes, licensed to care for up to 4,322 children, across 25 ZIP codes.
Before this, no one could say how many of these homes San Francisco had. The information was never secret. Nobody had asked for it.
Questions providers bring me
September 2024 – September 2026
Over two years, 200 people from the family child care provider groups I belong to came to me one to one. In the conversations I could count, they brought at least 875 questions — at least eight a week. After arranging a time to meet, the most common were about documents, subsidies and licensing: the kind of question a help line exists to answer.
- Arranging when and where to meet 67 questions · 32 people
- Finding the right document, handbook or template 66 questions · 25 people
- Subsidies — when the city or state pays for a child’s care 59 questions · 20 people
- Licensing rules — inspections, fingerprints, safe sleep, fire safety 54 questions · 21 people
- Finding and enrolling families — tours, waitlists, contracts, fees 44 questions · 22 people
- Filling in forms — translation, signatures, tax forms 44 questions · 17 people
- Training — CPR and first aid, courses, credits, certificates 39 questions · 22 people
The topic the most people raised is simply arranging a time to meet. That is coordination, not expertise — it calls for an easier way to book time, not another FAQ.
How this was counted
These are my own one-to-one conversations, with the teachers in my own program left out. The question count includes only conversations that contained at least one voice note, so people who only ever typed are missing and the true number is higher. Topic rules place 47% of the questions in a category; tracing a reply back to what it answers reaches 64%, which is the honest ceiling. The rest are short follow-ups whose subject sits in the message before, and forcing a category onto them would invent one.
Teaching AI and data to providers
19 March 2026
A 90-minute evening session for Children’s Council of San Francisco, taught to Chinese-speaking family child care providers: using AI to write to parents and to answer letters from licensing and subsidy offices, where AI gets things wrong, and how to track whether their marketing actually brings in families.
Developmental screening, in Chinese
2026 · in progress
The Family Child Care Association of San Francisco is partnering with the San Francisco Department of Early Childhood’s developmental screening team to train family child care providers to use Sparkler, in Chinese. Sparkler is a phone app families use to check how their young child is developing.
Practical AI for referral and payment agency staff
7–9 October 2026 · Sacramento · upcoming
A 90-minute session at the Joint Annual Conference for staff of California’s child care resource and referral and payment agencies — the organizations families turn to for finding care and paying for it — on using AI safely to take routine administrative work off their plates.
Presenting in my role at the California Child Care Resource & Referral Network.