Red tape and the dystopia of relying on others
Of North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson’s many outrageous scandals, his time in child care is likely not top of mind. But his story is the first stop in our exploration of the motivations behind the Republican push for child care deregulation. In his 2022 book, Robinson wrote that running a child care center with his wife, Yolanda Hill, “was hard at times to operate effectively because there were so many regulations...” and that, ultimately, they sold the business because Hill was burnt out and “no longer wanted to deal with the frustrations of running the daycare under so much red tape.”
When you meet with Republican legislators or give testimony at a hearing as a child care advocate, you hear a lot about “red tape.” Wouldn’t child care be cheaper for families without all this pesky red tape? Wouldn’t it be easier to open new programs? Wouldn’t families have more choice? When informed that the most expensive regulations are the labor required to meet adult-to-child ratios and maximum group sizes that keep children safe, they tend to respond with something like “well, of course not those regulations! You should help us identify other regulations that are problematic.” Time and time again, it is made apparent that a certain type of legislator does in fact mean those regulations. Specifically, they are waiting for someone to attend a hearing and say “yes, my program can care for more children safely with less oversight, and I should be allowed to do it.”
No one exemplifies this conflation of “red tape” with eliminating bare minimum health and safety requirements better than Mark Robinson. This summer, the real “red tape” that supposedly got in the way of efficiently running his child care program from 2000-2007 came to light when his opponent made it the subject of an attack ad, highlighting regulatory violations that endangered children’s health and safety. Reports from local media in North Carolina outlined inspection reports that detailed alarming violations, the most serious of which included:
1 and 2 year olds being left unsupervised while sleeping
Infants not being placed on their backs to sleep
Two staff being responsible for the supervision of 18 children
Falsified North Carolina Early Childhood Credential Certificates presented to inspectors
Falsified background check completion documents for Robinson and his wife presented to inspectors
Ultimately, Robinson and Hill sold the center in the midst of investigations that could have resulted in the suspension or revocation of the program’s license. Running a child care center is an extremely daunting undertaking, and few programs have survived the pandemic without significant struggles with staffing. It is not the mere violation of these regulations that are the heart of the issue, but Robinson’s assertion that the regulations themselves were the problem, and his pursuit of an office that would give him tremendous power to undermine and eliminate them.
The specific types of violations outlined above are among those that anti-regulation conservatives usually publicly agree should be protected – supervision, background checks, and safe sleep. Scratch the surface and you will find that many, like Robinson, don’t really believe that. They are not interested in addressing the types of small but meaningful regulatory changes that will make the system work better for everyone. Time and time again, Republican legislators who refuse to adequately fund their states’ child care systems instead roll back health and safety regulations by allowing minors to supervise large groups of young children on their own, raising ratios, cutting training, and shifting more children to unsafe group sizes in unmonitored child care settings.
A good faith effort to find common ground with a bad faith position
In my career as a nonpartisan advocate, I had productive conversations with Republicans who really cared about addressing their constituents’ child care struggles. Most of those conversations were with fiscally conservative moderates in the New York State Legislature who previously worked in local government; they had experience in being held directly accountable by voters for systems that didn’t work. But to be honest, some of those productive conversations were with the staff of members of Congress who I consider to have morally abhorrent positions on most other issues. I got out of the business of talking to them — and I’ve recently urged a more cautious approach when deciding which “pro-family” conservatives to work with as nonpartisan advocates — but the common thread in those productive conversations was that, across the ideological spectrum, Republicans who really want to solve problems in child care do not start and end with deregulation. They asked questions about it, they drilled down, and they came up with alternative solutions.
Because many of us have had those productive, friendly conversations, I think advocates go out of their way to make a good faith effort to frame deregulation as a natural extension of conservatives’ professed small government, pro-business ideology. It can’t be denied that many libertarian Republicans sincerely do believe that deregulation would fix most problems with our country, including child care. Often, nonpartisan sources of information and education (like NAEYC’s brief, The Cost of Deregulating Child Care) can help minimize the influence of those who genuinely believe child care would be better off without regulation.
However, Republicans’ overarching strategy is set by those who see deregulation for what it is: a tool to reshape the policy preferences of voters by turning the public against child care. Discarding the veneer of pro-business policy, the strategists behind Project 2025 and conservative “pro-family” think tanks understand that the utility of deregulating child care extends beyond a libertarian desire to maximize profits and minimize the role of government. In fact, the former head of Project 2025, Paul Dans, stated “I mean, what Project 2025 really is: It's not a threat to democracy, it’s a threat to bureaucracy.” Deregulation creates unsafe conditions, then exploits the danger and tragedy that follows to erode public support, weakening the case for government investment and demonizing mothers who rely on it.
Deregulation creates unsafe conditions, then exploits the danger and tragedy that follows to erode public support, weakening the case for government investment and demonizing mothers who rely on it.
Conservative strategists recognize that deregulation provides a pain point to divide popular support for child care, diminishing the pressure to invest by promising that cutting regulations will make care cheaper in the short term, while knowing the fallout will cause it to be stigmatized in the long term. As covered in part one of this series, Republicans are under serious pressure from voters to do something about child care. Strategists on the Christian right, in particular, have vested ideological reasons to diminish this pressure not by solving the problem, but by making child care less popular. They do not want to fund child care, so they use scare tactics and tragedies to undermine confidence in regulated care while creating the conditions that make it less safe. These Republicans assert that deregulation gives families more choice, knowing that what it really does is ensure no choice feels safe.
What is choice?
Advocates for deregulation mask the truth in the rhetoric of “access” to “more choices” for families.
Is choice when you don’t know if a 14-year-old is covering breaks for your toddler’s teacher? Is it worrying how your child care provider will evacuate 12 children alone, including babies who can’t walk yet, if there’s a fire? Is it five teachers leaving in three years for better paying work in fast food?
Is choice consolidation under private equity when directors of small programs get exhausted but don’t want to let down the families that rely on them? Is it paying a fee to be placed on a waiting list before you conceive, in hopes that your future baby will have a spot when you need it? Is it your sister being excluded from the subsidy system even though she can care for your child during your overnight shift when no programs are open? Is it quitting your job and risking your financial future because you live in a child care desert?
Is choice knowing that you can’t miss a shift at work even though you don’t feel safe leaving your child with an unsupervised teenager caring for 10 toddlers? Is it burning out 16-year-olds, derailing them from graduating high school? Is it burning down the pipeline of future passionate educators by exposing them, alone and unsupported, to the low point of our hollowed out non-system?
Nothing described above is a choice most parents would make if they had viable options. Anyone who pretends otherwise has a political or financial incentive to do so.
There are conservative strategists working every day to create a care dystopia where no decision can be trusted because the safety of every option has been undermined. Where only the wealthy can opt out of unsafe, false choices. Where exhaustion, decision fatigue, cost, long days, tough commutes, and only seeing your child for an hour before bedtime wear you down.
The transformative power of (de)regulation
There is so much work to be done to modernize child care regulations from health and safety, child development, and workers’ rights perspectives. It is no secret that regulations can be wielded as reactionary, punitive, racist, and classist tools that, in our direly underfunded child care system, are rarely developed through healthy, transparent partnerships between the state, families, and child care programs. They can be burdensome and difficult to comply with in the absence of strong, holistic systems investments. We are “doing too much, but not enough.”
This year, the Biden administration demonstrated the positive, transformative power child care regulation has to shape our country for the better and strengthen the public’s belief in the government’s ability to improve our lives. This important step, taken within the constraints of an outdated law, truly exemplifies the importance of capable public servants who are deeply experienced in and devoted to systems that work.
On the other side of the coin, deregulation capitalizes on the fact that we as a society pay much more attention to tragic accidents and outrage stemming from the actions of individual bad actors than the systemic decisions that allowed those tragedies to occur. When people fear for the safety of child care because it is unregulated and pushed out of the sphere of public inspection, it feeds into our culture of skepticism. If this erosion is allowed to continue, it will likely turn some voters against investing in child care. At the same time, deregulation squashes the limited capacity of advocates who must turn their fight from systemic solutions to reinstating basic safety measures. What Republican strategists want, ultimately, is to stop hearing about the fact that the system can only change for the better through meaningful public investment. To put it bluntly, they are deeply angered that they have been forced to pretend to care about policy they could, for decades, openly refer to as women nagging.
Deregulation forges the environment that pushes more and more Americans towards a narrow, pessimistic vision of what is possible. Where do women turn when child care is rendered unsafe? Some are forced out of jobs they are passionate about and into the home, others are pushed into relying on unsafe, unmonitored care. Working mothers are scapegoated and demonized when structural policy decisions harm their children. In a world where every choice feels scary, it’s no wonder more and more young women are falling prey to the idyllic allure of tradwife content.
When government maligns and dismantles its own systems, reliance on others becomes a dystopian gamble. Communal care and trust are replaced by skepticism and scarcity. The myth of the isolated, self-sufficient nuclear family is idealized — a delusional, false utopia. The tradwife appears to live in a world without anxiety, without politics, without financial strain, without overwork. We’ll explore the influence, or rather influencers, of this false utopia and the harsh reality of what it looks like when these values are imposed in place of adequate child care policy in the next piece.
For paid subscribers:
My first paid subscribers-only post, At the nexus of child exploitation, child endangerment, and profit, is coming early next week. As part of my research on regulation, I went down a rabbit hole on Republican attempts to address child care staffing shortages with child labor. It was too long to include in this piece but I can’t wait to share it with you!
Private Equity Will Trigger a Child Care Crisis by Kathryn Anne Edwards, Bloomberg
The Chasm Between Oklahoma and Connecticut by Kalena Thomhave, The American Prospect
Breaking the Public Schools by Jennifer Berkshire, The American Prospect