Inside the conservative movement to remake American day care

In March 2024, Kelli and Austin Emry welcomed their son Logan, a little brother for their toddler Mila and the final piece of the family they had always wanted. Born with a full head of black hair, Logan was a healthy, happy baby who thrived in his first weeks of life.

When Kelli returned to her job as a physical therapist assistant, she arranged for her son to attend an in-home day care — the same place she sent Mila. The owner had been in business in Idaho for decades and came highly recommended by several families.

On June 10, 2024, when Logan was just 11 weeks old, Kelli received a panicked call at work. Racing to the day care, she arrived to find emergency vehicles lining the street. Inside, she learned the unthinkable: Logan was dead.

The next day, the coroner’s report confirmed that the baby had died of asphyxiation. Logan had been left unattended for more than three hours in a separate room, with his face positioned too close to a firm pillow that obstructed his breathing.

A state investigation revealed that the provider had been caring for 11 children alone — far exceeding Idaho’s legal requirement of one staff member per six children, especially with infants present. (The National Association for the Education of Young Children recommends a maximum of four infants per staff member in day care settings, while some states like Maryland and Hawaii limit it to three.)

Idaho already has the second least restrictive child care regulations in America, according to a study released last year by West Virginia University. In February, Republican lawmakers introduced a bill that would loosen regulations even further, making Idaho the first in the nation to abolish maximum staff-to-child ratios in day cares — precisely the safety standards Logan’s provider had fatally violated eight months earlier.

The ensuing fight exposed a widening partisan gulf in American child care policy. Idaho’s bill represents the outer reaches of a growing national movement to deregulate the child care sector — a campaign that maintains that fewer rules might make child care more affordable, more accessible, and even boost birth rates. Wisconsin, Utah, and South Dakota have recently increased the maximum number of children each provider can legally supervise. And states including South Carolina, Iowa, and Kansas have relaxed their qualification requirements for child care workers.

​​This deregulatory approach is gaining momentum on the federal level, too. The Trump administration recently tapped Alex Adams, Idaho’s director of health and welfare — the agency overseeing child care rules and licensing — to join the Department of Health and Human Services. If confirmed to his new post at the Administration for Children and Families, Adams will oversee billions in federal funds for early learning and child care.

At its core, the debate is about whether expanded government support or deregulation is the best way to solve America’s child care crisis. Yet this isn’t just about cutting red tape. Behind the regulatory battles lies a conservative vision reshaping the future of child care — one that restructures the market to prioritize less expensive home-based programs, de-emphasizes professional credentials and academic curricula, and backs more mothers staying home to raise their children.

Idaho has a severe labor shortage, with just 53 available workers for every 100 open jobs. Business leaders say a lack of child care is hampering the economy by preventing them from hiring parents into vacant roles. More than a quarter of Idaho parents say child care has affected their employment, according to one US Chamber of Commerce Foundation report, which also found that the resulting absences and business turnover cost the state $65 million in tax revenue every year.

Roughly half of Idaho women of childbearing age remain outside the workforce, according to Alex LaBeau, the longtime president of the Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry. “The number one issue [in our survey] was lack of available child care,” he told me. “Not quality, not any of those questions — child care just didn’t exist.”

Such issues aren’t unique to Idaho. Across the country, businesses lose anywhere from $400 million to $3 billion annually due to employee disruptions caused by child care challenges. Taking care of one’s home and family remains the top reason mothers don’t participate in the workforce, and for those who wish to work, accessible and affordable child care is a major barrier.

The sponsors of Idaho’s child care legislation, H243, believe the solution is fewer and looser regulations on child care businesses. Their deregulatory bill also aimed to revoke the ability of cities to set stricter safety rules than the state. Proponents say that it’s time to let market forces solve what government subsidies haven’t. Liberal protest — rooted in the belief that there is no path to affordable child care without more public investment — only fuels their determination.

To better understand this conservative reimagining of child care, I sought out the legislators behind H243. In mid-March, I sat across from state Rep. Barbara Ehardt, a Republican from Idaho Falls who co-introduced the bill. Five years ago, she became the first lawmaker in the country to introduce legislation banning transgender women from participating in women’s sports. In her office, a large banner reading “SAVE WOMEN’S SPORTS” hangs by her desk, positioned just above a sign acknowledging when she and Tucker Carlson were named “Assholes of the Year” by a national LGBTQ sports magazine.

“Sometimes a state has to be first,” she told me, as we talked about her child care bill. “I just think that every state right now is facing the same problem.”

To conservatives like Ehardt, giving more subsidies to day care so they can pay their bills or lower parent fees is a failed approach.

Existing day cares will adjust to looser rules, insists Rep. Rod Furniss, the other co-sponsor of H243. He believes the entire industry would benefit from more competition. “I’m a businessman. My degree is in finance,” he said. “I understand revenue, I understand expenses, I understand fixed costs. I also understand markets, and I think those people are really smart that run those day care centers, and I think they’ll get creative. They’ll sharpen their pencil.”

Krystal McFarlane, the director of the TLC for Tots center in Nampa, Idaho, rejects the idea that deregulation would improve child care access. “You could create 100 in-home day cares directly around my business, but no amount of competition will decrease my operating costs,” she told me.

A conservative who voted for Trump, McFarlane supports giving parents more choices. But without quality control enforced by regulation, McFarlane said, she’d have to cut costs to compete, undermining the care and staff support she’s committed to providing.

She believes gutting regulation would force reputable centers like hers to close or to loosen their standards. (TLC for Tots operates with a 1-to-4 ratio for infants, lower than the state requirement.) Ultimately, while deregulation might create more child care slots overall, McFarlane thinks parents would have fewer options that prioritize safety and quality.

The real reason for expensive child care is insufficient government investment, McFarlane stresses. Her family-owned facility, operating in its current form for 17 years, now enrolls about 50 students — fewer than in previous years, as rising costs have forced some families to seek alternatives. Rate hikes at TLC for Tots stemmed partly from skyrocketing insurance premiums, as many insurers have abandoned the child care market over the last five years, citing increased liability risks and low profit margins. The pressures have been compounded by the industry-wide recognition that centers need to pay workers more.

“One of the biggest problems has always been that staff are considered ‘non-skilled workers’ and that families don’t believe we are worth very much,” she said. When the pandemic hit, child care teachers at TLC for Tots earned about $9 an hour, which quickly became too low to attract and retain staff. The center’s new average salary is about $13 to $14 an hour, still well below the state’s average hourly wage of $26.75.

Mary Clements, who has run a Montessori day care in Boise for the past two decades, agrees that more public aid is necessary. She kept her child care rates artificially low for years, but when staff retention became too difficult, Clements “knew [she] had to make a tough decision...and now I pay them livable wages.”

The trade-off is that she now serves only wealthy Boise families who can afford care without subsidies. “There is only one thing that will offer cheaper child care in today’s day and age, and that’s government subsidies,” she told me, as we sat together in her center’s library, surrounded by some 6,000 children’s books. She admitted she had little faith her Republican state government would accept this solution.

Her clients can find safe child care, but “what about everybody else?” Clements asked. “They deserve to have a child here. Children of poverty belong in a place like this.”

Behind the deregulatory push lies a broader conservative pivot from state-guided preschool toward more informal options.

When Idaho won an $18 million federal grant for preschool development back in 2021, Republican legislators rejected the money, alleging it would fund far-left “woke” ideas and assist moms in working.

“Any bill that makes it easier or more convenient for mothers to come out of the home and let somebody else raise their child, I just don’t think that’s a good direction for us to be going,” one state representative argued during the legislative debates.

Though Idaho residents often support more traditional gender roles, believing that mothers would raise young children at home, this cultural aspiration regularly collides with economic reality. Most households still require two incomes to pay the bills, a pressure especially pronounced as men without college degrees earn less than their counterparts in previous generations.

Given the financial constraints, H243 proponents envision a future where easing regulations could help more women open home day care businesses. “There are serious gender dynamics at play with the [child care] bill,” Rep. Chris Mathias, a Democratic state lawmaker from Boise, told me.

To be sure, many parents say they would not want to send their children to a day care center, even if one were free and accessible to them. The new home businesses could serve families who are reluctant to use such centers due to their higher costs and mixed feelings about the values or curricula taught.

“The entire business model of child care is focused on preschools, when what people really want is Tia and Maria’s house down the street, with a sandbox, and a snack, and a loving grandmother who can take care of four or five kids at the same time,” John Foster, an Idaho lobbyist who worked on H243, told me. “The person who figures out that business model is going to make a billion dollars.”

Rep. Ehardt told me she wanted to design legislation that helped make it less of a psychological leap for stay-at-home moms to open their own businesses. “They know how to love kids, they know how to care for kids, but maybe they haven’t exactly been in the workforce, and I’m just telling you, it can be intimidating,” she said.

Testifying before a Senate committee in early March, Rep. Furniss emphasized that Idaho is built on small businesses, and “perhaps the most important” small business of them all is the home day care, “where moms can stay home and supplement the household income and watch a few kids.”

While other states have relaxed child care regulations, Idaho’s H243 pushed the boundary furthest — becoming a flashpoint with national implications.

While sitting together in his office at the state Capitol in Boise, Furniss took out his phone and showed me a criminal background check app he pays $20 per month to use. He believes similar tools could help parents trying to do their own research on a day care.

“I don’t think there’s any mother — regardless of income — who would walk into a place and see 18 babies on the floor and say, ‘I can leave my baby here,’” he said.

When asked whether he had spoken with the Emrys about Logan’s death, he said no but expressed regret for the situation. “I think that those things are going to happen regardless of how much regulation we have,” he said. “There’s always going to be a bad actor.”

State records obtained by Vox through a Freedom of Information Act request suggest these “bad actors” are more prevalent than lawmakers typically acknowledge.

Documents detailing “substantiated” child care complaints in Idaho over the past five years revealed dozens of instances of physical abuse, alarming neglect, and repeated violations of staff-to-child ratios.

In 2019, investigators found a provider caring for 30 children alone, while another home day care owner, overseeing 10 children by themselves, was found to be living with someone who had been convicted of a felony and lacked a required background check. In one incident from last year, a child was left alone in a van for four hours, and staff had been threatened to keep quiet about it. These findings highlight the types of situations that occur even with the current regulatory system in place to report and investigate them.

Others have pushed back against the idea that parents can really assume the type of due diligence governments typically shoulder. “When you have two parents working full time or even multiple jobs, they don’t have the time to be fully vetting or running their own background checks on every provider,” Justin Snyder, who founded several Boise preschools, testified in February.

With the Trump administration tapping Idaho’s Alex Adams to lead in Washington, DC, the direction of national child care funding itself may be poised for significant change. The White House has already levied major cuts on Head Start staff and proposed in its first budget to gut funding for the program entirely.

Conservative leaders told me they expect that the federal Child Care and Development Block Grant Fund, which distributes billions to states for child care, could soon come with far fewer strings attached. Its longstanding focus on “quality” — including requirements for states to demonstrate that providers have specific educational credentials — might be replaced with a simpler mandate: Solve your workforce problem, however you see fit. Conservatives have argued that tying child care programs to learning goals represents mission creep and government overreach, needlessly driving up costs.

The stakes are high as policymakers pursue these questions. In late March, Idaho lawmakers, including the bill sponsors, voted to approve an amended version of H243 that restored maximum staff-to-child ratios. Idaho’s 1-to-6 ratio for infants remains in place, but the ratios were loosened for all older children.

The amended legislation, which takes effect in July, still takes away the ability of local cities to set their own safety standards, and conservative advocates remain adamant that liberals and the traditional child care establishment have ultimately been too resistant to change. Notably, lawmakers also agreed at the last minute to spend $14 million in federal child care funds that had been allocated to Idaho but remained unused. Political insiders say Idaho Republicans would not have approved spending those dollars without passing the controversial deregulation bill first, effectively linking the much-needed subsidies to their policy priorities.

Kelli Emry, for her part, is relieved that public protest defeated the elimination of state staff-to-child ratios, though lawmakers could very well revisit the idea next year.

For now, at least, the basic guardrails remain intact. “Logan’s story,” Emry wrote on Facebook, “is making a difference.” Whether that difference lasts remains to be seen — one more chapter in America’s story of freedom, safety, and the true cost of both.

This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.