Regulations reflect the abuses of the past, and sometimes the present, but circumstances the potential of the future . The rules and regulations governing the field today are an outgrowth of institutional abuse and are designed with institutions in mind. For every form of evil and abuse that has been found at institutions, someone has come up with a rule or regulation to address it. Regulations are not without their rationales. When taken out of the institutional context, regulations lose their rationality.
Regulations presume the impersonal, hierarchical, and bureaucratic structure of institutions.
The further removed from this structure, the more irrational and counterproductive they come. As the field tried to move toward more person-centered and less institutional approaches to supporting people with developmental disabilities and their families in the community, regulations threaten to drag it back to the institutional model. This is the surest way to destroy the home-cooked quality of the meals. Regulations are best suited to unnatural environments but encourage investment in those environments . Because institutions represent the most extreme form of unnatural settings, it follows that they should be subject to the most stringent regulatory requirements.