Across Party Lines, Stakeholders Are Calling for Regulatory Reform in Child Care

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The elements required to build up child care supply may seem fairly obvious: the system needs potential operators who can open and manage programs, trained child care providers to staff those programs, and enough revenue for programs to pay the bills. There is, however, another factor in the equation that can act as either a catalyst or an inhibitor: licensing regulations. 

Every state has its own licensing requirements which are outlined in some version of a regulatory handbook. Recently, child care stakeholders on both sides of the political aisle seem to be converging on the idea that regulatory reform focused on streamlining the steps needed to become and stay licensed — while leaving critical health and safety regulations in place — is one necessary part of a healthy child care ecosystem.

There are two sides of the licensing coin: the number and complexity of requirements that must be met, and the capacity of licensing agencies to process applications and conduct inspections. Take Illinois for example, a state that has been making major investments in its child care system. Despite the improvements, ProPublica reported in January that the state’s licensing requirements present barriers for child care providers:

“Adding to the difficulties in Illinois, prospective [child care] providers say they struggle to navigate a maze of complex requirements largely on their own, leading to delays in opening. They also point to regulations that are contradictory or outdated. One directs providers to place a blanket in every crib, even though the state prohibits using blankets to reduce the risk of SIDS. The state also directs providers to carry coins on walks so they can use a pay phone in an emergency, a relic [child care program owner] Heather Casner called ‘ridiculous.’

Providers also say their applications can get stuck in limbo for weeks or months, with little explanation for the delays or news about when they’ll be licensed. The state’s own data supports this claim: For more than a third of applicants, the state misses its 90-day timeline to approve applications.”

The ProPublica story goes on to note that staff shortages at the state level play a role. “In Illinois, offices that oversee child care centers are severely short staffed, with a roughly 20% vacancy rate. On average, each state licensing representative is responsible for about 120 facilities, while [NAEYC] recommends a caseload of 50.” Similarly, in states where providers may speak multiple languages, a lack of bilingual staff or interpreters can pose a major barrier to the success of regulatory reform.

When it comes to licensing, it is easy to understand how a child care regulation book can get needlessly complex, as they do in many other sectors. At one point, it made sense to have providers carry coins on walks for phone calls; it is likely that there was once an emergency in which that came into play. But regularly updating these regulations is key. To modernize their requirements, some states have been engaged in processes to pull out the regulation book and revisit each line. In a recent report published by the Buffett Early Childhood Institute, Iowa state child care administrator Ryan Page explained what this process looked like for her team:

“We reviewed each rule related to its purpose,’ Page said. ‘Was it necessary? Was it clearly understood? We reviewed for duplicative requirements and transparency. … We reviewed all rules for simplicity and common sense. For example, if school-age children used the playground during school hours, was it really necessary for monthly child care inspections of the playground or for us to say that the playground can’t be used by the licensed child care program at the same location?’”

United Women’s Empowerment, a nonprofit focused on women’s economic leadership, has been working to make the case for similar licensing evaluation processes in Kansas and Missouri. It is not only red states leading the way; last month, Oregon and Washington state provided automatic zoning permissions for child care centers in nearly all neighborhoods, meaning providers interested in opening or expanding child care programs do not need to wait for additional local zoning approvals. There is empirical evidence that thoughtful licensing reforms like these can have a real impact. In Boise, a series of reforms in 2023, including consolidating applications and removing a zoning approval step, helped reduce the average approval time for a family child care license from about three months to 25 days.

That said, there is a crucial distinction between updating licensing requirements and jettisoning health and safety regulations, such as mandatory child-to-adult ratios. The Center for American Process recently distinguished between “harmful deregulation” and “helpful reform.” Loosening ratios, or eliminating them altogether, which almost happened in Idaho this year, exemplifies the former. Similarly, there is no amount of regulatory reform that will ever obviate the need for major, permanent public investment in child care. And, as proven in Illinois, cleaning up the regulation books is not enough to change the lived reality of regulation if state capacity remains inadequate.

Notably, the idea of rethinking child care regulation has crossed party lines. Over the past decade, calls for regulatory reform in child care have mostly come from conservative groups. And indeed, some right-wing organizations continue to assert that overregulation is the only thing holding back a functional system. Liberal groups have tended to see these calls as a red herring, substituting regulatory reform for a real investment of public money into a sustainable child care system.

However, on May 22, a group of child care stakeholders, including major left-leaning groups, held a webinar to talk about the need to improve child care regulations. The webinar was co-hosted by the Center for American Progress, Children’s Equity Project, National Association for the Education of Young Children, Buffett Early Childhood Institute, Home Grown and Opportunities Exchange, six organizations that have published recent reports on child care regulations. 

A reasonable synthesis of the groups’ rationale for developing a new vision for regulatory reform was summed up by a quote from Megan Irwin, author of a 2024 report published by Opportunities Exchange:

“Somehow when we say, ‘it’s time to right-size child care regulations’ it is frequently heard as ‘we need to de-regulate child care’ or ‘we need to increase child:staff ratios.’ The misaligned message essentially paints the field into a corner. Industry leaders know that the current approach isn’t working but often feel it’s too risky to admit that something’s got to change because as a field, we fear that opening a conversation could lean too far in the opposite direction, de-regulating the industry to the point that children are in harm’s way.”

Modernizing child care regulations is not going to inaugurate an era of child care abundance. The core barrier to a child care system that works well for parents, practitioners and children remains a lack of funding. As The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey has written, “The math does not work. It will never work. No other country makes it work without a major investment from government.” Right-sizing regulation does not make the math math differently. 

What right-sizing regulations can do — and what nearly all corners of the child care debate now seem to acknowledge — is improve supply-building today, while building infrastructure that will be needed in a future when child care finally gets the public support American families need and deserve.

Further Reading: Recent Reports on Regulatory Reform in Child Care

• Rethinking Child Care Regulations and Standards (Buffett Early Childhood Institute, March 2025)
• Four Evidence-Based Reasons Why Increasing Child Care Ratios Would be Dangerous and Counterproductive (Buffett Early Childhood Institute, 2025) 
• A Path Forward on Child Care Regulation: Differentiating Between Harmful Deregulation and Helpful Reform (Center for American Progress and National Association for the Education of Young Children, 2025) 
• The Costs of Deregulating Child Care: Decreased Supply, Increased Turnover, and Compromised Safety (National Association for the Education of Young Children, 2024)
• Reimagining State Child Care Licensing: Improving the Foundation for Quality and Equity in Early Care and Education Environments (Children’s Equity Project, 2024)
• Building Belonging: Valuing Family Child Care via State Licensing Systems (Home Grown, 2024)
• Right Sizing Child Care Regulation: Crafting Standards That Encourage Supply and Protect Children (Opportunities Exchange, 2024)

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