Hands Off Child Care: New at Reason

States like Connecticut have a problem with the “shadowy underworld of illegal child care,” as journalists breathlessly report. Why?

J.D. Tuccille writes:

Oh no! Why would anybody entrust their children to an illegal shadowy underworld (as cool as that sounds)? Well, it turns out that “most of the unregulated providers are known to the parents—a neighbor or a friend—and the convenience is attractive. Parents of infants are also sometimes hesitant to leave their babies with people they have only just met, the specialists said.” In addition, unregulated day care is cheaper, “undercutting licensed home providers by as much as $150 per week.”

So… entrust your beloved children to expensive strangers, or inexpensive friends and neighbors. It’s so hard to decide.

Theoretically, all of those friends and neighbors could get legal by submitting to the costs and bureaucratic requirements of licensing. But that puts them on the radar for inspections. And there are so many rules by which to abide that all 20 Connecticut home day care providers scrutinized in a 2013 audit “did not comply with one or more state licensing requirements.”

That’s every single one examined.

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