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At the beginning of June, Indiana’s Office of Early Childhood and Out-of-School Learning proposed of the rules governing licensed child care providers in home- and center-based settings. Some of the most notable changes concern the qualifications necessary to be a child care center director or caregiver: if the rules are approved, center directors would no longer need bachelor’s degrees and lead caregivers would need only a high school diploma or equivalent rather than a child development associate credential. Child care advocates in the state that the lessening of educational requirements will move the state backwards and sacrifice quality. They that it’s mostly low compensation and burnout that causes high levels of staff turnover rather than the current educational requirements. 

Other proposed changes will likely prove to be less controversial: requirements would be loosened regarding the mixing of different age groups at the start and end of the day, children would be able to bring lunch from home, and centers would be allowed to use sleeping bags or mats rather than cots for nap time. For his part, Indiana Governor Mike Braun the proposed reforms, stating that, “By reducing administrative burdens and unnecessary expenses, Indiana is empowering child care businesses to grow and innovate.”

The debate currently happening in Indiana is simultaneously occurring in several states across the country and reflects a genuine tension in child care policy between reducing burdens on providers and maintaining the health, safety, and quality standards that protect children and help them thrive. Over the last several years, there has been for streamlining licensing requirements for providers. While conservative groups have traditionally criticized overregulation in child care, a growing number of groups affiliated with the left have also started to to ease burdens on providers and improve child care access. It is, admittedly, an uncomfortable conversation to have at a moment when top officials in the federal government are engaged in a raising concern that any criticism of existing rules will be used to justify cuts that endanger child health and safety.

Indiana’s proposed overhaul has been years in the making. In 2023, the state legislature required the Early Learning Advisory Committee (ELAC) to conduct a comprehensive assessment of the state’s child care regulations and what the review found was striking. According to the 2024 , Indiana’s providers “face a complex, confusing, and often duplicative regulatory environment. There are seven sections of Indiana Code that define the requirements of child care providers to legally operate, eight administrative rule sets that have been promulgated based on the Indiana Code, and eight interpretive guideline documents that provide rationale and act as a tool for determining compliance.” 

The report recommends that the state maintain current ratio and group sizes but streamline the regulations by focusing on health and safety standards. It also recommends more flexibility for facilities so that providers are able to submit an alternative plan that meets the intention of a particular regulation. “Where Indiana is now is really trying to make most of our regulatory framework focused on health and safety issues,” says Sam Snideman, . Snideman notes that, “The goal has continued to be to ensure that kids and staff remain safe, that in making the adjustments we’re not taking a step back from making sure that these are safe environments.” 

According to the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration, the proposed rules child care businesses between $7.7 million and $8.9 million while costing about $98,000 to implement. There will undoubtedly be pushback to many of the proposed changes, however, because there’s no consensus on exactly which regulations are burdensome to providers and which are essential to child health and safety. For example, the proposed rules would no longer require centers to have first aid directions, a list of emergency phone numbers, and diapering procedures posted within each classroom – the sort of change that could be viewed as a sensible reduction in paperwork clutter or as the removal of a basic safeguard, depending on whether you think posting that information in a visible location is bureaucratic box-checking or a meaningful prompt that keeps staff prepared. Indiana’s proposed rule overhaul was until July 6.

Iowa is another state that has spent the past few years seeking to reform their child care regulations. In 2021, a Child Care Task Force formed by Governor Kim Reynolds issued with recommendations to address the state’s child care shortage. Among the recommendations are some that are non-controversial, such as creating consistency and transparency in fire and safety code requirements in child care centers. Those requirements were sometimes interpreted differently among inspectors, leading to unplanned costs and enrollment delays for providers. Other recommendations included in the task force report generated unease, including the plan to “re-examine staffing restrictions and child-staff ratios to determine whether regulatory changes should be made.” In 2022, the state when it passed a law that allows 16- and 17-year-olds to provide child care for school-age children without additional supervision.

In 2023, Governor Reynolds issued requiring a review of all state regulations, including rules governing child care. That review eventually led to for centers and preschools. In an interview, a state official specifically noted that the previous licensing standards could result in providers being unable to use a school playground due to potential safety violations despite the fact that the playground was being used during the school day without issue. Iowa is now attempting to streamline the licensing standards for home-based child care providers.

Reforming regulations that are genuinely burdensome is good and necessary, and the examples from Indiana and Iowa make clear that there is real work to be done in streamlining rules that are duplicative, inconsistent, or disconnected from actual health and safety outcomes. But the changes being pursued in both states go beyond streamlining, and the long-term consequences for child safety and quality of care are worth taking seriously. Lowering caregiver qualification requirements, increasing child-to-staff ratios, and allowing teenagers to supervise children without additional oversight may reduce costs in the short term, but these are precisely the factors that shape the quality of care young children receive during some of the most consequential years of their development. And regulatory reform alone will not solve the child care problem in this country regardless: the sector is fundamentally labor-intensive, and child care workers are already among the most poorly compensated in the workforce, making it difficult to compete with other low-wage jobs . The goal of reform should be to make it easier for providers to deliver high-quality care, not to make it easier to deliver cheaper care at the expense of quality. As states continue to revise their licensing frameworks, that distinction will need to remain at the center of the conversation.