The parents of young kids don’t have it easy in the United States. The country doesn’t have mandatory paid parental leave. It does not send out a child allowance. It doesn’t offer universal prekindergarten or provide day-care subsidies to all families in need. For the first five years of their kid’s life, parents are mostly left to figure it out on their own, negotiating a complex patchwork of federal, state, and local initiatives and spending far more than they can afford on diapers, formula, nanny shares, and the like.
These policies—or the lack of them—have harmed long-range educational and employment outcomes, eroded public health, entrenched inequality, discouraged couples from having children, and stressed the bejesus out of parents. For this crisis, Vice President Vance has a solution: send cash to married parents who stay at home with their kids.
According to a report by The New York Times, the White House has drafted a plan to allow nonworking married parents to collect payments from the federal Child Care and Development Fund. It will not surprise you to learn that I, the author of a book called Give People Money, think that providing cash to families taking care of their kids at home isn’t a bad idea at all. Yet given how rickety and stingy the country’s system of early-childhood support already is, the specifics of Vance’s proposal could produce astonishingly cruel results. That’s because he proposes to fund this new benefit by taking financial resources away from working single parents.
[Kendra Hurley: The biggest obstacle to universal child care: babies]
Currently, Washington distributes a $12 billion pot of CCDF money to the states each year. Governments use the cash to subsidize the cost of day care for low-income parents who are working, enrolled in school, or attending a training program. The typical beneficiary receives $700 a month, in the form of a voucher or a direct payment to their child-care provider. Four in five recipients are single mothers, many living on poverty wages. If the White House makes the changes under consideration—which Congress would not have to approve—low-income married couples with a stay-at-home parent could apply for cash transfers from the CCDF too. The $12 billion pot, however, would not get any bigger.
The proposal is a priority for Vance, who has championed policies to pay parents instead of child-care centers for years. Such initiatives would support women who want to care for their babies and toddlers, rather than encouraging them to work and thus imposing “the values of an increasingly isolated American ruling class” on the public, he wrote in a 2021 op-ed co-authored with Jenet Erickson of Brigham Young University. These initiatives would “mean happier parents and healthier children,” they argued, citing studies showing that kids in day care have worse social outcomes than kids cared for at home.
By paying women to remain out of the labor force, the White House’s proposal would indeed nudge parents away from day care. It would also deprive low-income single parents of financial support, and encourage married couples to earn less. As Patrick T. Brown of the Ethics and Public Policy Center has observed, a married couple in Kentucky with two kids might get a large transfer if they earn $81,500 a year, and zilch if they make a few hundred dollars more. Meanwhile, the country’s broader system of early-childhood support would remain broken, leaving babies and toddlers at risk.
The most obvious issue with Vance’s proposal comes down to simple math. The White House is not expanding the CCDF budget so that states can provide benefits to stay-at-home and working parents. Rather, it is making millions of additional people eligible for a capped pool of money, far too small to meet demand as is. In any given month, five out of every six families who qualify for subsidies do not receive them, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Some families don’t know they exist or don’t bother applying. Some desperately need the help, but get put on a waitlist or denied aid. If the White House has its way, states will redirect some of this money from single parents to married couples. But the former generally have lower incomes than the latter. Even when a single parent makes as much as a married couple do, they typically have a tighter budget because they can’t rely on a partner for child care.
Vance and other conservatives have suggested that the policy would encourage unwed parents to get hitched, which they believe would reduce the poverty rate and promote children’s well-being in the long term. Individuals who follow the “success sequence”—get an education, get a job, get married, then have a kid—tend to make it to the middle class and stay there, after all. Yet many government policies discourage low-income parents from marrying by reducing the value of credits and transfers when couples file a single 1040. Some evidence suggests that eliminating so-called marriage penalties would boost the marriage rate. No evidence suggests that altering eligibility for an arcane, non-guaranteed child-care benefit would do so. The White House would just be steering cash to couples who had already made it to the altar.
As for those single mothers: If they lose access to child-care subsidies, their day-to-day expenses would increase precipitously. They might have no choice but to drop out of the labor force. If they do, they might lose access to other forms of government support. That’s because Washington has spent the past 60 years tying financial aid to work. The earned-income tax credit and child tax credit scale up with earnings. Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, better known as welfare, requires mothers to be enrolled in school or have a job. Just last year, the Trump administration created or expanded work requirements for parents receiving Medicaid coverage and food stamps.
[Faith Hill: The unglamorous truth about the average tradwife]
Vance has called the Medicaid policy “totally reasonable.” His memoir Hillbilly Elegy promulgates the notion that simple government transfers do not end poverty, and often make it worse. The book is an indictment of the Appalachian community that his extended family calls home: a “hub of misery” populated by do-nothing, take-everything welfare queens. But now, he’s proposing a policy that seems to instantiate the idea that married, stay-at-home mothers cannot be welfare queens. Vance seems to believe that when a wife with no income takes cash from the government, she is raising her kids right—but that when an unmarried woman receives a child-care voucher from the government, she better be on the job, because she is sapping the public coffers.
This double standard has a clear racial valence: Two in three Black women who gave birth in 2024 were unmarried, versus one in four white women. Black kids are about three times as likely to be raised by a single mother as white kids are. Thus, the White House would not just be taking from highly financially vulnerable families to give to slightly less financially vulnerable families; it would be taking from Black families to give to white ones.
Remaining on the job might even get harder, given that the proposal would expand the country’s already formidable child-care deserts. Paying stay-at-home parents from this fixed pool of funds would deprive day-care centers of revenue. Some would offer fewer hours or hire less-qualified teachers. Some would close down. Working parents might end up having to enroll their toddlers in less convenient or lower-quality centers, or paying more for care.
The country’s parents need comprehensive reform, not this kind of regressive, zero-sum nanny-statism. They need Washington to amp up the child tax credit, mandate parental leave, eliminate marriage penalties, finance public preschool programs, and create universal-child-care subsidies. Pitting stay-at-home mothers against single mothers isn’t the answer.
The post A Plan to Pay Married Mothers Not to Work appeared first on The Atlantic.
