Built on a trusting relationship between a family and a provider, child care is deeply personal. Perhaps the most intimate form of early care and education (ECE) is with a family member, friend, neighbor, or nanny, who offers a level of closeness and trust that may not be feasible in the larger groups of licensed settings. Family, friend, neighbor (FFN), and nanny care arises organically and is wholly exempt from state licensing. Such care may be paid or unpaid; a small number of caregivers are compensated through a child care subsidy. Families who use FFN or nanny care often value its relative affordability and flexibility, but additional factors skew towards the personal. Black and Latine parents, in particular, associate these caregivers with the value they place on their own cultural backgrounds and native languages. Some parents even consider FFN or nanny care to be the ideal child care arrangement, especially for children under age three (Powell et al., 2023). While the first report in this three-part series focused on the parents' perspective (Powell et al., 2023), this second report shares findings about FFN caregivers and nannies in California: their motivations, day-to-day experiences, challenges, and more. Previous literature on FFN or license-exempt care largely focuses on household- or parent-level studies of ECE utilization. The National Survey of Early Care and Education provides both household-level data as well as provider-level data (National Survey of Early Care and Education Project Team, 2021). Additionally, the federal Administration for Children and Families has sponsored a research agenda dedicated to home-based early care and education (Del Grosso et al., 2021). Within these data sets, however, FFN caregivers may be blurred with licensed homebased family child care (FCC) providers. In practice, FFN caregivers outnumber their licensed counterparts but distinguishing them and understanding their self-perception as caregivers can be challenging (Del Grosso et al., 2021; Home Grown & ParentChild+, 2021). This study sample filters out licensed caregivers and limits the scope to California to provide richer data applicable to the state's policy context. This study offers a deeper analysis of caregiver motivations, self-perception, and goals, building on the framework of Alarcon and Sangalang (2015), who segment caregivers based on their motivation: FFN caregivers may be on a lifetime "journey" with their loved ones, or they may be on an "occupational track" and cycle through families. Grandmothers embody the former end of the continuum and nannies, the latter, while other relatives and friends fall in between (Alarcon & Sangalang, 2015). After exploring the variation in the caregiver experience in California, the authors offer recommendations for California and FFN-focused policies more broadly.