Daycare and the public interest

Nicholas Rosen has some interesting things to say, in partial response to a discussion on the Bujold mailing list:

Then there was a case I read about some years ago in Reason magazine. It seems someone wanted to open a childcare center, and some kooky neighbor objected to her getting a license. The neighbor didn't want another child-molestation horror in her neighborhood, and a city councilman went along with her, so the would-be childcare provider couldn't get a license. (It later emerged that many of the cases of alleged child molestation at daycare centers were utterly bogus, and even if some were not, the immense majority of daycare centers are not fronts for gangs of child molesters.) Here was a city government preventing a willing provider from offering child care to parents who wanted to hire her, all for no good reason, while politicians and others were complaining about the lack of affordable child care, and the Need for Government to Do Something.

There may be a case to be made for having government provide welfare, especially to children, who are not at fault for their parents' laziness or incompetence or bad luck. The trouble is that when government undertakes to do too much for people, people often lose their sense of responsibility and determination to provide for themselves and their families, leading to increased levels of social pathology and family breakdown. You can, for example, try reading Theodore Dalrymple's Life at the Bottom for an account of this.

Daycare is one of those discussions that can't help but move into politically dangerous ground: there's never enough quality care available to meet the need, and what there is is often too expensive for those in greatest need of it. It regularly becomes an issue in Canadian elections, although the proposed changes or new programs would far too often make the situation worse (the good news is that they are rarely implemented once the election is over: costs and complexity trump the "we must do something" urge very quickly).

Many children are cared for during the working day (and often well beyond the usual working hours) in informal daycare with friends and neighbours. At least three families on my street provide this kind of service on a full or part-time basis, for example. It may not be perfect, but it meets the needs of the parents, and clearly is beneficial to the providers (or they wouldn't do it). Yet these unlicensed operations are the ones most likely to be shut down by regulation or government mandates.

Some people — both in and out of government — pretty clearly feel that parents are the worst people to be put in charge of any one else's children, and many of the proposed reforms would put additional barriers in the way of this kind of service. It may sound great to a ministerial committee to mandate that only adults holding a post-secondary certification in child care should be allowed to take care of children they are not related to, but there are not (and will not be) enough holders of ECE certificates or equivalents to cope with the children who would need to be taken in if such a rule was put into place.

Similar things would happen if rules which are designed for commercial daycare facilities were also mandated for home daycares. The cost to retrofit would be far in excess of the perceived benefit, and in many cases would not be allowed under municipal building codes. (Of course, under some municipal rules, informal daycare is already wandering into regulatory gray areas.)