Overview
Should the government decide how families choose child care? In this 6-minute John Stossel video, students examine the soaring cost of child care — now averaging more than $13,000 a year — and ask why prices keep climbing even as politicians promise to make care more affordable. Do well-intentioned regulations protect children, or do they drive up costs, crowd out affordable options, and leave parents with fewer choices? The lesson uses real examples from Illinois, Oklahoma, Washington D.C., Michigan, Missouri, and Minnesota to explore the gap between what a rule intends and what it actually produces.

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Lesson Insights

Grade level and subjects
• Recommended for middle school, high school, and undergraduate students
• Subjects: economics, government and civics, current events
• Works in traditional classrooms, hybrid settings, and homeschool

What students will learn
By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:
• identify examples of government regulations that affect the cost and availability of child care;
• explain how regulations intended to protect children can produce unintended consequences for parents;
• examine the trade-offs between greater government oversight of child care and greater parental choice; and
• evaluate whether the regulations described in the video primarily protect children or primarily raise costs.

Key concepts and terms covered
Incentive, regulation, occupational license, subsidy, trade-off, unintended consequence, in-home daycare, and taxpayer-funded spending.

Sample discussion questions
• According to the video, what is the average annual cost of child care in the United States?
• Why does requiring a college degree for daycare teachers raise the cost of child care for parents?
• Do you think it is possible to protect children without driving up the cost of child care or reducing the number of providers available to parents?
• How do incentives differ between a parent choosing a daycare for a specific child and a government official writing general daycare rules?
• Who benefits from long and detailed child care regulations, and who bears the cost?

What’s in the free teacher’s guide
The downloadable guide includes a lesson description and objectives, a vocabulary list, a preview activity, a viewing guide with answer key, 20 discussion and analysis questions, lines and sourced quotes for discussion, more than a dozen classroom activities, two infographics with question sets, a five-question quiz with answer key, a political cartoon activity, PMI and K-W-L charts, an exit ticket, a claim-evidence-reasoning activity, and the full video transcript.

Standards alignment
Aligned to state standards — use the SITC Standards Tool to match this video to the standards in your state.

Related resources
• Lessons in Lyrics: “Incentives Matter” — why changing the reward changes the behavior, from student choices to government policy.
• Equal Shares: Why Collectivism Fails — the unintended consequences of collectivist policies, and why voluntary cooperation produces better outcomes.