Chill Pills Panic: Legal Constructions of Play, Race, and the Policing of Care in California's Administrative Courts

US legal‐administrative interpretations of children's play offer critical insight into the production of racial difference and reproduction of economic disparities under the aegis of the postwelfare state. This article analyzes ethnographic observations in an administrative court in Los Angeles and transcripts of childcare license revocation hearings for an African American home‐based early education provider serving working‐class families via welfare‐to‐work systems. As courtroom ethnography reveals, US postwelfare institutions view play through an ideological prism that enshrines White middle‐class patterns of consumption as normative. Tasked with an ill‐defined postwelfare state mandate of early intervention, street‐level bureaucrats not only assess young Black and Latinx children as continual future threats but also as vulnerable in the present to their guardians’ poor choices. [childhood, race, care, administrative courts, play, postwelfare state]