The College Fix

Here’s another reminder that big government is a threat to your family.

There’s a “cooperative play school” for 2-year-olds that meets a few days a week at a church in my neighborhood. Parents oversee it. They get to make adult friends and get child care. Their toddlers get to meet other toddlers.

Naturally, swamp bureaucrats hate it.

Washington, D.C. officials are threatening to shut down the 45-year-old Capitol Hill coop on the theory that it’s an illegal daycare. What’s their basis?

It has rules. I’m not kidding.

Karin Lips, president of the Network of Enlightened Women and would-be coop mom next year, writes in The Washington Post that the coop got a visit from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education in September. (D.C. identifies as a “state” in some office names.)

These bureaucrats claimed the basic safety rules instituted by the coop made it more than an “informal parent-supervised neighborhood play group,” which are exempt from regulations governing “child development facilities.”

Because these parents in the coop aren’t idiots, they require supervising parents to supervise the kids during playtime and not play with their phones. They must turn over emergency contact information and medical treatment forms for their kids and report when a kid is infectious. The coop has “a plan for what to do in the event of an emergency,” Lips writes.

If these are considered rules that require you to be a regulated child development facility, presumably the most useless officials in D.C. also want to regulate sleepovers.

The practical incentive offered by the Office of the “State” Superintendent, however, is to get rid of safety rules to avoid regulation.

While the D.C. Council passed emergency legislation to exempt these play groups from regulation for 90 days, it should consider the broader impacts on “voluntary associations” when this exemption ends, Lips writes:

From nanny-shares to babysitting co-ops to regularly scheduled times to play at public parks, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education investigators could find new opportunities to crack down on the voluntary ways that D.C. families approach playtime and child care for their children.

As “Free Range Kids” movement found Lenore Skenazy puts it in Reason, these bureaucrats saw a multi-generational group “meeting, playing, and perfectly content” and imposed an imaginary problem that they must solve.

No wonder Ronald Reagan said the most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

MORE: The state is coming for our children unless our view of the body changes

IMAGE: Shutterstock

Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter