How Not to Improve Child Care

A new Idaho bill would unleash the libertarian impulse; plus, the Oscars!

Will Conclave take home the Oscar? Is it okay for respectable liberals to worry about declining America’s birth rates, and are South Korea’s rebounding? That, and more — it’s Friday, it’s Family Matters:

• The Main Event: Idaho’s child care bill takes the right impulses too far

• Hooray for Hollywood: What the Oscars say about America

• It’s Me, Hi: The Atlantic, the Daily Mail, and more

• Parting Shots

The Main Event

Abundance is so hot right now. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are writing books. David Brooks is writing columns. Think tanks are putting out reports (hey, I know that guy!) And a key insight that binds this nascent movement together is a renewed appreciation for supply-side economics, rightly understood. It’s not enough to just cut tax rates and let a thousand flowers bloom. You have to tackle the regulatory red tape, the accreted years of zoning and environmental reviews and impact statements and parochial self-dealing and inclusive policy riders and all the rest, in order to unleash the supply side of the equation and make key goods — like housing and health care — affordable to more households. You will continue to hear more about this insight and approach to politics until it becomes conventional wisdom.

That impulse is good. That impulse is healthy. That impulse is necessary. That impulse can also be taken too far, or misapplied, as we see in a new bill out of Idaho, would take a DOGE-like chainsaw to the state’s child care regulations.

Cover photo via Flickr

The bill, HB 243, would completely eliminate the child-to-staff ratio on the books (currently one adult can watch no more than six children under age two at once, and so on.) It would allow each facility to develop its own child-to-staff ratio, ensure it is made available to parents upon request, and be required to remain in compliance with the policy that it developed for itself. Don't worry, it won’t lead to complete anarchy — the state would require at least one adult employee be present whenever children are attending, so it totally won’t become a race-to-the-bottom free-for-all or anything.

Not only that, the bill would proactively prevent any cities or localities from enacting their own, more stringent regulations or standards on child care operators. No more allowing the city of Boise to pass regulations that might differ from Pocatello; the state code would no longer be the minimal standard, but the only standard.

We know that staff make up the largest expense for most daycare providers. And there are lots of voices in more libertarian corners of the right that the main way to make child care more affordable in this country is to deregulate it. A recent paper by Anna Claire Flowers, Vincent Geloso, Clara Piano (members of the George Mason economics family), and Lyman Stone (who isn’t a libertarian on most things) constructed an index of child care regulations, suggesting that more “relaxed regulatory environments” lead to a lower gap between a woman’s stated fertility preference and the number of babies she actually has. They argue that if you take their results at face value, you could expect the state of Connecticut to see a 13 percent increase in the state’s TFR if it adopted the laxer (they say “better”) regulatory index score of Louisiana. A previous paper, by Diana Thomas and Devon Gorry, suggested increasing the child–staff ratio requirement for infants by one might decrease in the cost of child care by 9-20 percent.¹

The basic insight is, of course, correct. Regulations and strict staffing ratios can drive up the cost of care. And there are plenty of ways we can and should remove barriers to entry into the marketplace, where new firms and options could operate.² Take a page out of Austin’s book and legalize home-based daycare, by right, across much of the whole city (or state). Do your best Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez impression and highlight outdated or unnecessary regulations governing the width of stairs or the amount of toys that can be in a play yard, and trim the rulebook back to focus on rules that relate to actual physical safety and well-being. Loudly oppose the ever-growing push to get day care educators credentialed and certified, driving up costs without much to show for it.

But some child care regulations exist for a reason. At the most basic level, they’re there to provide parents some kind of minimum quality assurance — after all, many of the recipients of child care as a service are non-verbal, and unable to complain about neglect or abuse until the signs become severe enough not to miss. Out of deference to sensitive readers, I will not link to local news stories about fly-by-night day care operators leaving children in trash cans or dryers, but I assure you they exist. Without the ability to freeze time, a single adult cannot provide the bare minimum quality of care for double-digit numbers of infants at any given time. Simply saying “parents know best” ignores the fact that parents don’t have perfect information — just as we have the FDA to guarantee safe food handling practices (or attempt to) because consumers can’t very well walk into a slaughterhouse or canning facility, some staffing and safety rules can give parents some peace of mind that their child will be treated with a minimum degree of care and caution, or the provider will face the consequences.

The Idaho House of Representatives passed the bill by a vote of 54-15-1, and it now heads to the Senate, where hopefully cooler heads will prevail. We all have a vested interest in making child care more affordable, and giving parents more options for however they choose to structure their lives. So yes, take a chainsaw to the literal nanny state clauses regarding sink placement and educational requirements.³ Yes, make it easier for new businesses to open, particularly neighborhood-based providers that provide flexible care that many working parents prize. But scaling regulations to less than the bare minimum, and preventing localities from acting to reflect the needs of their residents, is the wrong way to push conservative child care policy.

Hooray for Hollywood

One unfortunate side effect of the Internet’s fracturing of our national attention span is that monoculture events are waning in importance. The Academy Awards used to draw upwards of 70 million viewers when the U.S. population was much smaller; last year it brought in 20 million (albeit the highest total of any post-pandemic awards show.) Growing up it felt like everyone had Oscars takes, and I think that was genuinely better for America — make movies great again! Give more people more common points of interest and light conversation topics to banter about!

The Oscars also tell us a little bit about where the heights of pop culture are focusing their energies. The fact that Emilia Pérez, a musical by a French director (!) about a transgender (!!) drug lord (!!!), received the second-most nominations of all time suggests that the ‘vibe shift’ hasn’t yet hit California (or at least the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences), and the subsequent backlash has been less about the surprisingly easy way to gender politics of the film in a neo-traditionalist way than star Karla Sofía Gascón’s impolitic tweets. Conclave, with its cringe-inducing ending twist, marries Hollywood’s love of traditionalist Catholic aesthetics with the trendy push to move beyond the gender binary. A Complete Unknown offers Boomer fan service while Anora is a lighthearted look at an immigrant sex worker. What comes away with the prize on Sunday will doubtless be seen as indicating which subgroup receives the most victim points from the rich and famous for the first year of Trump II (will we see justice for the talking animals?) Will the documentary prize go to the Japanese #MeToo film, the Ukraine documentary, or the story from the Israel-Palestine conflict? Will The Wild Robot obtain its deserved moment in the sun?

So play along! Fill out your own ballot and send it to me by replying to this email (or here) by 7 EST/4 PST Sunday; the contestant with the highest win total (Best Picture counts for three points) will get a lifetime of bragging rights and public credit in the next episode of Family Matters.⁴

It’s Me, Hi

Marc Novicoff covered the lonely (yet increasingly less so) world of conservatives eager to get people talking about declining fertility for The Atlantic:

“Still, the pronatalists think they are winning, if slowly. Stone told me he understands there to be “a few” Vance staffers tasked with getting Congress to raise the child tax credit in this year’s reconciliation bill. Whether or not that happens, the pronatalists feel they are operating on a longer time horizon. “Short term: maybe; long term: yes,” Brown told me when I asked if he was optimistic. But they had better not move too slowly. If convincing people takes too long, there might not be enough people left to convince.”

I spoke to Sadie Whitelocks about the recent Gallup data showing a rise in LGBTQ+ identification, and what that does and doesn’t say about future marriage trends, for the Daily Mail:

“While the headlines will focus on the rising share of young adults identifying as a sexual minority, we shouldn't overlook that the recent increase is driven particularly by young women identifying as the most fluid category in LGBTQ+, which is bisexual.”

Leah Libresco Sargeant

and I engaged in the fourth and final part of our virtual book club on Hawon Jung’s Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea's Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women' s Rights Worldwide. An excerpt:

Leah: As we discussed previously, for South Korean women, being victimized by men’s spycams in supposed single-sex spaces was already a common occurrence. It beggared belief that the author didn’t see a reason that many South Korean feminists didn’t feel comfortable with a broad gender movement.

Patrick: And that was another reason this chapter ultimately made me feel a little more hopeful about the U.S. avoiding a “4B”-style breakdown (and, not coincidentally, slightly more offended by feminists here comparing their situation to the downright depressing gender relations we’ve spent the last four weeks reading about.)

"Flowers of Fire," Week Four: “My Body”

Parting Shots

• Gideon Lewis-Kraus tells respectable readers of prestige magazines that it's okay to slightly worry, prudently and without getting too carried away, about declining birth rates across the globe (The New Yorker)…and Elizabeth Bruenig tells respectable readers of prestige magazines that the future of humanity “is too important to cede to a political right with questionable intentions” (Liz, I assure you that my intentions are strictly honorable!) (The Atlantic)

• The Indiana state senate has unanimously passed a newborn child credit, where parents making up to 720% of the federal poverty line would be eligible for a $500 tax credit the year during which a family welcomes the birth of a child (Indiana Public Media)

• Not to be outdone, a group of lawmakers in Montana, led by Rep. Lukas Schubert, have introduced a “birth day tax credit,” where new parents would receive $3,000 as a credit against federal, state, and payroll taxes upon the birth of a child. Do it and become legends!

• Brad Wilcox argues that despite high-profile examples of Republican politicians abandoning monogamy and fidelity, the GOP is still the "pro-marriage party" (Compact)

• Rachel Cohen explores how more workplaces are offering childcare benefits, which helps parents and boosts businesses. Naturally, some on the left are concerned (Vox)

• My EPPC colleague Carter Snead teams up with AEI’s Yuval Levin to over words of extreme caution regarding the President’s recent executive order on IVF (The Hill)…My EPPC colleague Nathanael Blake writes about the abuses and excesses of the fertility industry (The Federalist)…and Erika Ahern argues the Trump administration can do better for all families than IVF, which raises bioethics issues and only helps a select few (Real Clear Policy)

• Charles Camosy reviews Tyler VanderWeele’s A Theology of Health: Wholeness and Human Flourishing (Public Discourse)

• George Weigel writes about the threats posed to American health care and the pro-life movement by the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as HHS secretary (First Things)

• Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Penn.) and Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) introduced the MODERN WIC Act, which would introduce a remote certification option for eligible parents, among other provisions.

• The state of Alabama is considering giving state employees paid parental leave, with new moms receiving eight weeks and dads two (Alabama Daily News)

• The state of California is exploring options to provide diapers to low-income parents, either with cash assistance, diaper banks, or covering diapers through Medi-Cal

• South Korea’s birth rate rose, incrementally, for the first time in a decade, while in Japan, rates fell again; there, the number of births is lower today than it was 125 years ago.

• Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) has introduced a national age verification bill, which would require commercial pornographic sites to verify a user's age before allowing them to view explicit material

• Tennessee lawmakers have introduced a bill that would make it the fourth state to give couples the option of a “covenant marriage,” which lays out a more stringent path to dissolution than no-fault divorce.

• LGBTQ Democratic leaders in San Francisco are moving to condemn Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy's memo that seeks to give preference to communities with above-average marriage and birth rates (Bay Area Reporter)

• Anna Louie Sussman explores the evolution of the dating and mating market (New York Review of Books)

• Lastly, EPPC is looking for someone interested in families, tech, and the intersection thereof to join our team: Apply here.

Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.

1. I, personally, take this estimate with a very large grain of salt. The main specification of their model only controls for state median income, thus ignoring what else might be correlated with high incomes, high regulatory burdens, and high child care prices. The unobserved differences between the states - if, say, some have a higher proportion of parents who prefer high-cost child care - are a source of bias in their estimate. (For the true sickos who crave a more technical description of what I mean, see Hotz and Xiao (2011))

2. Abundance-minded progressives should take heed, too. Look no further than neighboring Washington state, where a plan to make state-funded preschool services available to all low-income children has been delayed for over a decade because of a lack of sustained public funding. Meeting parents’ needs in absence of overwhelming political will could benefit from trusting markets a little more.

3. How these reforms happen matter too: day care providers in Mississippi, for example, are also complaining that a rushed review process didn’t given them time to provide input into proposed changes that would have driven up, rather than reduced, their costs and went beyond a focus on immediate health and safety.

4. Unless, of course, it would be personally or professionally embarrassing to be publicly known as a Family Matters reader, in which case I can hardly blame you.