Child care professionals deserve love, which is why the nation honors them each year on the Friday before Mother’s Day. But what they get in Washington, D.C., is hassle, especially when they work from home.

Onerous district regulations, which help explain why Washington has the highest child care costs in the nation, are about to get worse. Starting on Dec. 2, 2023, anyone who teaches at a day care business in the district will need college-level credentials to keep their jobs. The mandate will add one more hurdle for in-home providers, who already must navigate a multipronged approval process that takes up to three months to complete.

Many of these businesses, run predominantly by women earning barely more than livable wages , could collapse under the bureaucratic weight. As of August 2022, about half of in-home providers lacked the required education.

Some of these people already have college diplomas but in the wrong fields. A master’s degree in social work , nursing, or nutrition is not good enough. Neither is an elementary school teaching certificate. The only thing regulators will accept for in-home providers who care for seven or more children is an associate’s degree in early childhood education or a closely related discipline. Operators of smaller businesses can also clear the hurdle with a Child Development Association credential, which requires at least 120 classroom hours.

Those who can afford to put their careers on hold while they sit in class might be ready when the mandate takes effect. The D.C. Office of the State Superintendent of Education, which enforces child care rules in the district, has been offering scholarships to offset costs. But the barrier is not just time and money.

Many in-home providers are immigrants. They can speak English, but they lack the proficiency to pass college-level courses unavailable in their native languages. Other in-home providers have family obligations that make college attendance difficult, which is often why they set up home-based businesses in the first place.

For all of these people and many more, the education mandate is not just an inconvenience. It’s a deal-breaker. They must either change jobs or go underground.

As they disappear into the shadow economy, essentially becoming criminals for changing diapers and singing lullabies, the superintendent’s compliance data will grow increasingly unreliable. Child care providers who cannot meet the new standards will hide from regulators, but desperate parents will continue to hire them. Even officials and business leaders could be tempted. Prominent figures nationwide have a long history of exploiting illegal service providers for personal benefit.

Our public interest law firm, the Institute for Justice, represented day care providers in a lawsuit to stop the education mandate. We lost. Following a four-year legal battle, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled on Aug. 12, 2022, that regulators may proceed because they have a “conceivably rational” justification — a low standard of proof that favors policymakers.

“Although we are sensitive to the burdens that [these] regulations impose on daycare workers, our role is not to assess the wisdom of the agency’s policy choices,” a three-judge panel held.

But while the case played out, in-home providers and other small business owners scored a victory on a second front. The district's council passed reforms in 2022 to streamline the startup process. The result has been less complexity, fewer delays, and lower costs.

Nevertheless, significant red tape remains for in-home providers. Besides completing the forced schooling, caretakers must obtain a Home Occupation Permit from zoning officials and a Child Development Home License from education officials. Getting the second document alone involves at least 29 steps , but the real number is higher. Instructions to make an emergency response plan fill 26 pages — not counting a 35-page appendix. This is a single checkbox on the to-do list, but the task involves multiple action items.

Other requirements are similarly convoluted. Overall, in-home providers must pass at least five inspections, obtain multiple certifications, fill out stacks of forms, and deal with at least six agencies. If in-home providers need any college education at all, it should be a law degree to help them navigate the maze.

Renee Flaherty is a senior attorney and Daryl James is a writer at the Institute for Justice in Arlington, Virginia.