The Washington Post profiled a mother this
week who wants Virginia to impose licensing restrictions on
home-based day cares. Virginia is one of eight states that does not
regulate providers who take care of six or fewer unrelated kids in
their own home.

Spurred to activism by the death of her child, under
circumstances that are still under investigation, the mother wants
the state to require safety training, background checks, and home
inspections for all home-based providers.

Considering the fact that Post writer Brigid Schulte
clearly sympathizes with the idea that regulation would prevent
such deaths, the article does a pretty good job providing grist for
those who are more ideologically inclined towards less
government.

For instance, the article portrays regulated day-care facilities
as expensive and inconvenient relative to unregulated home-based
providers. Many thousands of kids in Virginia are in unregulated
day care, so it’s not difficult to see that requiring licensure
would impose massive costs on families.

That said, we’re meant to wonder if we, as a society, should
just find a way to shoulder the additional burden if it means safer
care. But a little digging into the data shows it’s not at all
clear that licensing yields any safety benefits.

From the
article:

Hundreds of cases of child abuse and neglect at unregulated day
cares were referred by Child Protective Services to local
investigators and prosecutors for further scrutiny in fiscal 2012,
state records show.

Those state records are here. There
were in fact 54 and not hundreds of investigations. The only way to
get to hundreds is to count the 200-plus investigations of
babysitters. Maybe Schulte thinks babysitters need more regulation
too, but the article is about home-based day cares. It’s rather
disingenuous to conflate statistics on the two without at least
mentioning that’s what she’s doing.

Moreover, of those 54 cases, only 13 turned out to be founded.
Instead of implying that there are hundreds of potentially abusive
unregulated providers in Virginia, Schulte should have just said
investigators found 13 last year.

By contrast, there were 292 investigations that turned up 51
cases of abuse or neglect at regulated day cares. Of
course, unregulated providers may be more abusive on average (if
they take care of fewer children). But regulated providers are the
source of more investigations and more cases of abuse.

Back to the Post: 

Day-care deaths in Virginia are rare. But three of the four
children who died from suspected abuse or neglect while in day care
in fiscal 2011 were in unregulated settings, according to the state
Department of Social Services.

Those “unregulated settings” were in fact babysitters, as
opposed to home-based day cares (see
page 10). More importantly, three—not four—children died from abuse
or neglect. The report says four caretakers were
implicated in child deaths, but two babysitters were involved in
the same death (page 17).

Still, that’s only one year of data, so I requested more from
the Department of Social Services. Seven children died from neglect
or abuse in licensed day cares from 2000 to 2011. Twenty-five died
in unlicensed care—but, in addition to home-based caregivers, that
number includes babysitters and providers who are regulated but not
licensed. (Virginia allows day cares affiliated with a religious
organization to operate without a license, but they must abide by
certain rules like minimum staff-to-child ratios.) A breakdown was
not available.

Again though, since there is no data on the total number of
children (or hours spent) in regulated versus unregulated care, it
is impossible to tell which is more dangerous on average. What
available numbers do show, though, is that children are vastly more
likely to die from neglect or abuse at the hands of parents and
family members than at either regulated or unregulated day cares.
In fiscal 2011, for instance, parents, relatives, and paramours
were implicated in 34 of 40 child deaths where a caregiver was at
fault.

One can certainly understand and respect the motives that lead
the mother in the story to push for licensing. But more regulation
may be a bad thing for child safety, on balance. Licensing would
force unregulated providers to either increase their prices or exit
the market. Thousands of parents would then keep their kids at home
or turn to relatives, which is an order of magnitude more dangerous
for children.

As state senator Steve Martin (R-Chesterfield) tells the
Post, parents don’t need a license to have kids. Should
they?