I was surprised to learn that child-care licensing is not the law for family day care. It's a timely question. The Bush Administration has put the spotlight on literacy and school readiness.
Many states provide little or no oversight and require zero training.
This is also quite a dilemma for small-business owners. But if they take off their business-owner hats and think about it as parents, they would probably favor the imposition of government guidelines to make day care safer and more educationally enriching. Like education in general, this is a state issue, and there are marked differences in family care from one locality to the next. Michigan does license its family-care providers. But the National Association for Family Child Care, the premier monitoring organization for these home-setting providers, has accredited only 17 homes in the whole state.