Doing Too Much but Not Enough: The Child Care Quality Conundrum*
*Disclaimer: The focus of this blog is quality in early childhood education programs in homes, centers, and school buildings. Constructs raised here do not apply to “trusted caregivers,” another important but distinct child care option. Learn more about these child care options here.
“Child care is both underregulated and overregulated.”
– Lauren Hogan, Strategic Advisor and Content Writer for the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC)
This statement succinctly summarizes the data we continue to receive from “proximity experts” (i.e., families, early childhood educators, and administrators). Proximity experts name inconsistent quality, constant regulatory changes, and top-down regulations as pain points of the current child care system. When it comes to addressing issues of quality, they feel limited by what they can afford and not what is good for young children.
Yet, the child care sector continues to advance outdated mindsets about quality that hold these pain points in place.
For example, the underregulate-mindset downplays the importance of quality and advocates for solutions that:
- Deregulate: Lowers standards like staff-children ratios and educator qualifications.
- Hibernate: Avoids the inherent messiness of defining quality.
- Hyper-fixate quality: Limits quality to one seemingly isolated indicator, such as teacher-child interaction, to make a “shiny object” product or policy push more appealing.
- Manipulate: Embrace the current sector’s low-quality bar to maximize profits or serve a larger number of children.
Meanwhile, the overregulate-mindset complicates quality and advocates for solutions that:
- Duplicate: Creates separate definitions of quality for each funding stream (family fees, philanthropic grants, public PreK, Head Start, Early Head Start, child care subsidy) and setting where early childhood education services are provided (home, center, school building).
- Inflate: Make important value statements, such as inequitable access to higher education and national credentials but further complicate quality with expectations that are difficult to understand, measure, or incentivize on a large scale.
At its core, the proximity experts’ ideal child care system is one that allows them to make child-centered and quality-centered decisions.
They want quality expectations that all early childhood education programs (one of the two main child care options) must meet and families should expect and receive regardless of where they receive care and how it is funded. Similar to other industries, this baseline should be defined by the professional organizations they trust. This quality baseline serves as the floor, not the ceiling, to make way for other specialized approaches to quality.
Most importantly, at the center, they want increased funding and resources from federal, state, and local government agencies— not from families or child care workforce wage suppression — to meet the baseline quality.
Below is a sketch of what this could look like. What if each aspect is defined, monitored, and reinforced by the appropriate entities? What if — instead of underregulating and overregulating quality — we advance solutions that calibrate and elevate quality to make the ideal child care system real?
Note: The graphic illustrates how this would look in the context of early childhood education programs, regardless of settings. For “trusted caregivers” (e.g., family member, stay-at-home parent, nanny, au pair, etc.), all aspects of the quality baseline would be defined by the families themselves with government agencies providing some financial relief.