Key takeaways
• Conservative policymakers say they want more parents to stay home with their children, but it’s not clear that approaches like baby bonuses or bigger child tax will work.
• One possibility is to pay lower-income parents to stay home, potentially by pairing a national paid parental leave program with no-strings-attached cash allowance for new parents. Such a policy would also help to address infant care shortages.
• The focus of any plan to pay parents to stay home should be on providing a choice, not incentivizing one option or the other.
MAGA thinks the country needs more stay-at-home parents, especially mothers. The goal isn’t just to boost plummeting birth rates, but to help children and families with policies that are more family-focused than work-focused. “It’s not just about increasing the total number of children,” Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri told the New York Times. “It is increasing the number of families, mothers and fathers, and the ability of the family to spend time together.”
Over the past several months, Republican lawmakers and conservative thinkers have offered a number of bills and ideas to help more parents stay home with kids. But as Vox journalist Anna North noted, none are likely to trigger a stampede of moms from cubicles to kitchens. When North asked whether baby bonuses or heftier child tax credits could persuade women to give up the benefits gained through decades of paid work, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin deadpanned: “Are we giving them a million dollars?”
Still, conservatives need not give up the dream. If they want more parents at home, the most effective way may be to focus their efforts and pay on low-wage parents.
My reporting on families has pointed repeatedly to this group of parents as one especially willing to reduce paid work to spend more time with their children, if given the chance, and for whom a little investment could go a long way. Such investment could help address the child care shortage, bolster child development, and create more family-friendly workplaces and more vibrant neighborhoods.
Our national obsession with seeing poor mothers work
Of course, there is one very obvious hurdle to this idea: historically, poor parents — and especially single mothers of color — are the group that US lawmakers have been most eager to see working for pay.
“There are a lot of folks who pay lip service to believing moms should be home with their kids, but don’t seem to think that applies to people with very low income,” said Elizabeth Lower-Basch, formerly of the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) and an expert on public benefits.
Take cash assistance for low-income parents. For decades, the so-called mothers’ pensions were available primarily to white widowed and abandoned moms. Caseworkers routinely discriminated against Black and other nonwhite mothers, often presuming they should work while the white moms shouldn’t. After the civil rights movement made welfare available to all parents who needed it, lawmakers quickly imposed stringent work requirements and time limits on parents seeking financial help. Even in proudly progressive cities like New York, mothers were routinely pushed to take the first job they found, regardless of how long the commute, how late the hours, or how low the pay.
While the Clinton-era reform succeeded in forcing new moms into paid work, their babies and toddlers suffered. In one study, mothers who were pushed into work showed “significant and substantial negative effects on… provision of emotional support” toward their young children when compared to similar mothers in states that had not yet implemented the reform. Another study found that, among young children of welfare-eligible mothers, a mother’s employment led to the child spending less quality time with parents. Children of these working moms were also less likely to be read to, and had more behavioral issues, such as needing constant attention or struggling to fall asleep, as reported by their mothers.
Chris Herbst — an economist at the University of Arizona who conducted the second study — told me that the problem wasn’t that the mothers worked. Most research shows that women’s work has no impact on young children’s child development, he said.
Herbst attributes the welfare studies’ findings to three factors:
- The working mothers likely felt forced to return to work before they or their children were ready
- The low-wage jobs available to poor parents — often with “erratic” work schedules, and menial labor — are not compatible with caring for infants
- The quality of child care available to poor families is rarely the high-quality kind found to boost child development. (Mothers receiving welfare were often encouraged to use whatever child care arrangement they could secure, and Herbst’s earlier research has linked subsidized child care with lower cognitive scores and more behavioral issues during kindergarten, though effects had largely faded a year later.)
But perhaps the most insidious legacy of welfare reform was ideological. The rules allowed a mother to meet her work requirements by caring for other people’s children for pay, but not for caring for her own. It defined parental responsibility solely in terms of financial support, presuming that parenting itself is not labor, Emily Callaci, historian and author of Wages for Housework: The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise, said.
Callaci sounded alternately skeptical and cautiously optimistic when we spoke about the new conservative-leaning thinkers who are challenging this legacy by arguing that parenting itself is crucial to the entire economy — some referring jokingly to their own kids as “future taxpayers.”
While there are certainly some conservatives who hope to leverage this framing to undo the myriad advances women have made in the workplace, others seem genuinely interested in rewarding and recognizing unpaid caretaking. They understand that high-quality child care is expensive, that low-quality child care can harm, and that the first year of life is a singularly fragile developmental window when many parents who would like to stay home with their children cannot afford to.
A little investment could go a long way
Were conservatives to focus their efforts on low-earning parents, it could pay off big.
Poor mothers — and especially those with minimal education, for whom work may be more exploitative than empowering — may be the parents most likely toreduce hours to care for a baby if given more money. And helping low-income parents work less, including single mothers, could alleviate the shortage of infant care, which is especially pronounced in poorer neighborhoods. This could also allow mothers to wait for jobs — and child care — with the hours, location, and set-up that works for their families.
Lower-Basch told me that this is exactly what parents do in states that waive work requirements for new parents. “It’s not necessarily that the parents don’t go back to work within the year, but it lets them hold out for a job that fits better with being the parent of a newborn,” she said.
That, in turn, could prompt employers to compete for workers by creating more family-friendly work environments. Under-resourced neighborhoods, meanwhile, might benefit from having more parents to, say, keep an eye on children as they make their way to and from the school. For example, Wendy Mamola, a parent leader at Raising Illinois and mother of four, began volunteering in her older children’s school and at a family advocacy organization after taking time away from restaurant work following the birth of her twins. This allowed her “to not only be there for [her own kids], but to advocate for everybody’s babies.”
Radical as this might sound to Americans, giving parents of all incomes this kind of breathing room during their children’s first few months has plenty of precedent. Most developed countries offer child allowances along with paidparental leave to care for new family members. Some policies allot more money or time off for single parents, and have floors for how little a parent can get paid when pausing work to care for a baby.
But in the United States, receiving money to stay home with a baby is an option typically available only for wealthier parents with jobs that offer paid parental leave. And while a handful of states do offer paid parental leave programs, they often haven’t worked well for poor families. In California, for instance, the wage replacement given to new parents taking leave was not enough for many low-earning parents to take time off to care for their newborns. This meant these families paid into the program, but then couldn’t afford to use it, said Lower-Bash in an email. (California has since upped the amount it gives parents on leave.)
A handful of innovative programs designed specifically for poor families have failed to gain traction. In the early days of welfare reform, Montana and Minnesota experimented with paying welfare-eligible mothers to stay home — disbursing to parents about the same amount that would have otherwise gone towards subsidizing their child care.
In its first few years, Minnesota’s program served hundreds of families, but neither of the programs ever found reliable funding. Similar programs for low-income parents have been proposed by both Democrats and Republicans in the years since, but have also faltered in large part because policymakers have trouble categorizing them, Joshua McCabe, director of social policy at the Niskanen Center, said in an email. “It’s not quite childcare, not quite paid parental leave, and not quite welfare so doesn’t have a strong set of champions relative to the more established groups pushing for these other policies.”
How this could work
So what kind of program would rally support?
Most experts I spoke with recommend offering parents a program that neither incentivizes nor discourages working out of the home, but lets parents choose.
Many suggested that a national paid parental leave program — with a floor specifying a minimum amount that parents be paid — should be coupled with a no-string-attached cash allowance for new parents, similar to what other countries offer for raising children generally. (While Republican lawmakers have suggested forms of cash assistance, they have not shown the same enthusiasm for a national paid leave program.) Such cash assistance programs offer parents the flexibility to use funds as they see fit and are very effective at reducing child poverty.Because low-wage parents must work more hours for the same pay as higher-wage workers, it’s reasonable to assume that extra cash given to all families would enable some parents to spend more time home. Research supports this; when the child tax credit was temporarily expanded during the pandemic to give parents with young children about $300 a month, unmarried mothers with young children and low levels of education were the ones most likely to use the extra cash to spend more time at home.
A permanent increase to the child tax credit, then, could allow more low-wage employees to work less in order to take care of their children. The more generous earned-income tax credit, which is already earmarked for low- and middle-income workers, could also be reworked to include at-home caretakers, including parents, as a few Democratic politicians have proposed.
But to give low-wage parents with newborns more choices, tax credits of any kind must be made fully-refundable so that families with no income, or very low incomes, can receive them, instead of only those who owe taxes. In addition, they need to be made available to families as soon as a baby arrives, so that parents need not wait out the tax year for the money. Otherwise, the funds have less benefit for families without savings to draw from. And any cash assistance program must be generous to single parents, a group that Republican proposals often neglect, and sometimes penalize.
The verdict is still out on exactly how much cash it will take for low-income parents to have the choice to work less. Baby’s First Years, a cash allowance pilot that gave new, low-income mothers about $300 a month, did not impact parents’ employment generally. But it did reduce the time mothers spent working for pay during the peak of the pandemic — a time when parents also received additional funds from the expanded child tax credit.
On the other hand, one study in New Hampshire linked “generous” increases in cash benefits for low-income single- parent families — where a parent with one child received more than $800 a month — to families not only having more food in the fridge, but parents working less. All of this suggests that $300 a month is not enough for a single parent with a new baby to spend more time home, but $800 could be. Families with more children at home would likely need more, while low-income families with two parents might choose to reduce paid work with less generous cash assistance.
Whatever the payment amount, money must be offered not as a handout, but as compensation recognizing parents’ contributions, allowing parents “to enter the workplace in a more empowered position,” Callaci told me.
Herbst, the economist, added that the goal must stay focused on giving parents “power over a bunch of critical decisions: whether to or not to work, when to start working, whether to choose child care, and what kind of child care, and how to pay for it.” For decades, lawmakers have treated low-income families with “a lot of paternalism, whereas high-income families are the ones who get all the choices,” Herbst said, adding that this duality “is not good for policy making, and not good for society.”
Mamola, the mom of four, agrees. She still chokes up talking about how she returned to restaurant work when her son was just three weeks old, waking him after night shifts to nurse and be close. Several years later, when she had twins, their home’s mortgage had been paid off, letting her and her partner take time off work. Her partner was there to support her through postpartum depression, and Mamola was able to breastfeed exclusively, as she’d always wanted, and provide “even just the basic things” like lots of skin-to-skin contact, which babies thrive on, but child care workers “legally cannot provide.” It was “wonderful,” she said, “beautiful.” It’s a choice she thinks all parents should have.
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