Recently in the early care and education field, there has been a great deal of discussion about deregulation of early care and education standards/rules/regulations in order to have increased access to child care which has become even more of a problem since the COVID19 Pandemic. This discussion or controversy has been going on for a long time, it is nothing new. Either we have too few rules/regulations/standards or we have too many. The pendulum has swung both ways depending on the political will and grass roots advocacy efforts. But I think there is a better way to deal with this discussion which is driven by the regulatory science and the empirical evidence that has emerged over the past 50 years. Let’s take this discussion out of the political domain and place it where it needs to be, firmly within the newly emerging regulatory science field and focus on regulatory compliance.
So where do we start? In a very familiar place, with Caring for Our Children which is the default set of health and safety standards in the early care and education field. Over the past 30+ years it has been the reference for child care licensing agencies as they think about promulgating new or revised rules/regulations/standards in their respective states. It is based upon the latest science in developmental psychology, pediatrics, and public health fields related to early care and education settings. It has gone through 4 editions so we know it is up to date. But it is a daunting document, 700+ standards are within this reference manual for the early childhood field.
Advocates point to Caring for Our Children as the go-to document because it provides a solid floor to quality while building on this base to demonstrate best practices. Others, mostly in the political arena, point to it as an example of over-regulation, too many rules to follow. But let’s not forget what Caring for Our Children is all about, protecting our children while in out of home care. Yes, child care is critical to parents who need to work, but it is equally important (many will argue that it is more important) that our children are safe while in out of home care. This is a delicate balance and all part of the child care trilemma of availability, affordability and quality. As we adjust one, the others are impacted proportionately or disproportionately depending on your vantage point.
So, what is a potential solution to the child care trilemma? Let’s look at regulatory science for potential guidance. As I said earlier, regulatory science is an emerging field, it is not well developed as the other physical and social sciences but it is making tremendous strides in the past 20-30 years. Albeit, mostly in the pharmaceutical industry but some very interesting innovations have occurred in the human services, in particular in early care and education. As the title suggests, a course of action should be not over-regulating and not deregulating but identifying the “right rules/regulations/standards”. Within the regulatory science field this has occurred in early care and education and it applies directly to Caring for Our Children. It was evident to the original designers of Caring for Our Children that there was a problem with the sheer volume of the set of standards. The designers started to look at ways to distill it down to a more manageable size. And this is where regulatory science came into play with a new methodology that was emerging around risk assessment and key indicator rules/regulations.
Initially there was more focus on the risk assessment methodology to determine if certain Caring for Our Children standards placed children at increased risk of morbidity and mortality if regulatory non-compliance occurred. The resulting document, Stepping Stones to Caring for Our Children, came about based upon this risk assessment rule methodology. It took the 700+ standards to distill it down to approximately 120 standards. It became a much more manageable document that state licensing agencies could use.
Later in the development and evolution of Stepping Stones to Caring for Our Children, again borrowing from the regulatory science field, the key indicator rule methodology was utilized to determine if there were a smaller set of standards that had more of a predictive value in protecting children when it came to regulatory compliance in an overall sense. This resulted in Caring for Our Children Basics (approximately 65 standards) which was originally proposed as a voluntary set of standards for all early care and education. I think it was a good idea back when it was first proposed and I still think it is a good idea.
In fact, let’s begin there in attempting to address a revised solution to the child care trilemma. In this discussion about where the child care field is headed and the most recent call for deregulation, let’s pivot and think about using Caring for Our Children Basics as our point of discussion rather than arbitrarily removing rules with this deregulation mind set because it is politically expedient. Let’s be driven by the empirical evidence and the science which Caring for Our Children Basics is derived from, solid regulatory compliance methodologies of risk assessment and key indicator rule/regulatory/standard identification. See how your state’s child care rules size up with Caring for Our Children Basics in making sure that at the very least all these standards are in place. Templates from regulatory science have been developed to do this comparison.
Then once this is done in the aggregate, begin to look at the individual standards within Caring for Our Children Basics. Let’s be honest, probably the most discussed standard is Staff-Child Ratios and Group Sizes. It has the greatest impact on cost (staff), numbers (children), and quality. This has been clearly demonstrated in the research literature over the past 50+ years. Nothing has changed, it was the focal point back in the 1970’s and it is today. But let’s think outside the regulatory compliance box for a minute and maybe we don’t look at staff-child ratios in isolation but cross it with another standard/rule such as the qualifications of staff and suggest an alternate rule where staff-child ratio can be increased slightly but only with the most highly qualified staff?! Like I said, let’s think outside the regulatory compliance box. And while we’re there, the fee that is attained by the program with the additional child should go to the more qualified staff as an add on to their salary. Yes, they have an additional child but they also have the revenue generated as a salary increase with the addition.
As with staff-child ratio and group size, we perform the same type of critical analysis utilizing the empirical regulatory compliance data available to make changes in the existing set of rules. As has been pointed out in the regulatory science research literature, regulatory compliance with rules is a measurement issue, so it should be solved in a corresponding way, use the data, don’t ignore it and leave it up to the whims of the political process to determine what stays and what gets pitched.
The point of this research abstract position paper is for us to take a step back and avoid a knee-jerk reaction to dealing with the child care crisis and that the only solution is to increase availability and affordability at the expense of health and safety via deregulation. We now have an emerging regulatory science to guide us and I hope we use it for making educated and informed choices as we move forward in attempting to solve the continuing child care trilemma.
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Richard Fiene PhD, Research Psychologist/Regulatory Scientist, Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center, Penn State University, rfiene@rikinstitute.com
RIKI - Research Institute for Key Indicators Data Laboratory 
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