FINALLY A GOOD ARTICLE in the Toronto Star!!!!

[bright sparks]

I am in the U.S. so forgive me if this has been asked before, but why would a provider NOT want to be licensed? What is the upside to staying unregulated or unlicensed?

Where I live, a provider can only care for ONE unrelated family's kids (1 kid or 100 as long as they are from one family) before having to be licensed.

If you read sassy girls post above this sums it up nicely. I don't think any of us actually don't want to be licensed or unregulated as their are obvious benefits to being so. What none of us want is to have our numbers and age groups restricted and/or have to pay a cut to an agency. Right now I have a 9 mth old, 14mth old, 18mth old and a 2 year old. I'd have to get rid of two of my younger ones and would lose half of my income. Most daycare centres in my area do not take under 18mths so the majority of my enquiries are for 18mths and younger. It just would not be a viable option for most to keep running our home daycare businesses as we just wouldn't make close to enough money to live on after all our expenses.

Our income would go down if an agency were to take a cut of our money but our expenses would stay the same. We would in effect have to raise our rates per day by anything up to $10 a day just to compensate for this which would probably result in more people staying home and working for cash on the quiet for friends and neighbours. The restrictions that would be placed on us in order to apparently benefit the children and their parents, would likely be counterproductive and result in greater amounts of inadequate people offering home childcare for cheap, under the table, making it even harder for providers to fill spots and make a living. There is already a shortage in licensed centres so what happens to the surplus of children we can no longer care for due to the ratio restrictions? The centres pretty much always have wait lists so they won't be able to accommodate them. It will cost so much money on people having to go on Social assistance because they can not afford to work.