For years, Vice President JD Vance has railed against universal child care and made snide comments about working families with little ones at home. On Twitter in 2021, he claimed that “normal” non-affluent Americans prefer “a family policy that doesn’t shunt their kids into crap daycare so they can enjoy more ‘freedom’ in the paid labor force.”
Of course, no parents want their kids in “crap daycare.” But what American mothers prefer is far more complicated than Vance’s caricature of the desires of frivolous and wealthy parents who don’t want to care for their own children. According to a November 2025 analysis from the conservative policy and research organization the Institute for Family Studies, a majority of all moms with children under 5, regardless of education level or marital status, prefer to work rather than stay home full time. Unmarried mothers without a college education constitute the group least likely to say their “ideal status” does not involve a job, which makes sense, since single mothers tend to be the most financially vulnerable.
But instead of crafting policy that might help hard-working single mothers — like his own mother — Vance is reportedly championing a federal policy that would take funds earmarked for child care for low-income parents and change the eligibility requirement to include married families with a parent who does not work.
The money, about $9,000 per child, comes from the Department of Health and Human Services. The $12 billion Child Care and Development Fund was created in the 1990s to support low- to moderate-income parents so they could work or get an education. “About 80 percent of the 870,000 families who currently get the child care subsidies have single working parents, most of them mothers, according to Health Department data,” reported my newsroom colleague Coral Davenport. About 40 percent of American children are born to unmarried parents.
The money is currently distributed to states via a block grant, and it typically goes directly to child care providers. The proposal viewed by The Times would not increase the amount of funding, but it would create “the option for a new category of care, parent-based child care, that will allow one married parent to receive C.C.D.F. assistance to care for their own child, while a spouse works at least 35 hours per week.” If this draft rule goes into effect, it will almost certainly hurt child care providers who rely on this funding to stay afloat. And because stay-at-home, married parents will likely be battling for the same pot of funds, it could also prevent single parents from earning money for their families.
In the past Vance has said he approves of unpaid caregivers like grandparents and other relatives in lieu of center-based child care, but the funding under discussion is for stay-at-home spouses. Extended kin would likely not be eligible for the benefit, either, to offset the cost of work they may be foregoing.
This proposal is especially cruel in light of recent cuts to programs that support low-income working families. The Trump administration is already hard at work trying to gut Head Start, a program that provides child care and other services to poor children from up to age 5. First, the administration tried to zero out funding for Head Start in a budget proposal. Then, it illegally withheld funding from the program, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office. Now, it seems to be trying to destroy Head Start by deregulating it, eliminating the program’s requirements to provide disability services, home visits, health screenings and other benefits.
That’s not the only part of the safety net for children that has been shredded. Even as grocery prices continue to rise, the administration’s policies have cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, to the bone. An analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank, suggests that more than one million children have lost food assistance since the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was passed in July 2025 and made it harder to qualify for the program.
Cuts to federal health care also seem to be harming children. According to Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families, enrollment in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program has declined by 2.4 million since January 2025. This suggests that the number of uninsured children is on the rise, Joan Alker, the executive director of the center, noted on X.
While Vance policy’s orientation is pronatalist, the evidence from international experiments of the effects from giving people money to marry or have children is not conclusive. In China, for example, the government has tried to carry out a range of policies, from cash vouchers for newlyweds to baby bonuses, and yet marriage and fertility rates continue to decline. “Marriage registrations in China fell 6.2 percent year on year in the first quarter and are about half 2017 levels,” Reuters reported in May, and the Chinese birthrate is at a record low.
Hungary, where Vance campaigned on behalf of the former prime minister Viktor Orban, adopted some of the most generous family policies in the world, spending over 5 percent of the country’s gross domestic product to boost fertility rates mostly among married, heterosexual parents. The policies did not work in the long run, and Hungary’s fertility rates are about where they started before the pronatalist push.
The state of American family policy is so poor that our federal government could do about a million and one things to help parents that would be more effective and more desired. According to the survey I cited earlier from the Institute for Family Studies, 85 percent of mothers ages 25 to 55 with children under 18 said that paid parental leave would be “extremely” or “very” helpful to them and 80 percent said that child tax credits would be extremely or very helpful to them. Lower-income moms support the tax credit at a higher rate than wealthier moms, while higher-income moms prefer parental leave, but a vast majority of both groups want both of those things.
Few are asking for what Vance and the administration are proposing. While this rule, if it ever goes into effect, might help a small number of one-income, married families in the short term, it could actively harm single and married parents who rely on day care if their centers go into a death spiral from losing a big chunk of federal funding.
I can only conclude that the administration’s plans are either meant to pit stay-at-home parents against working ones, or to punish single parents — and their children — who need support the most.
End Notes
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Jon Ronson is one of my favorite nonfiction writers. His 2015 book, “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,” basically predicted the next decade of culture war cancellations. I highly recommend his new book, “The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men.” When I first saw the title, I admit I inwardly groaned, because I thought it was going to be another “woe-is-men” book. But it’s so much weirder and deeper than that. Unlike many other books about unmoored men, “The Castle” understands that male unhappiness is infectious and has a blast radius. Ronson actually bothers to ask the question: What havoc is male purposeless wreaking “on the lives of their loved ones — their partners, mothers, children?”
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The post JD Vance Doesn’t Want to Help Married Parents. He Wants to Hurt Single Mothers. appeared first on New York Times.
