Apparently, paying parents to care for their own children is a pretty controversial idea. J.D. Vance’s proposed child-care plan has sparked a firestorm over who deserves government help—and, perhaps more importantly, what we value when it comes to marriage, motherhood, fatherhood, and family.
For the children,
Wendy Wixom, President
United Families International
Paying Parents to Parent
Alexis Tarkalson
Earlier this month, J.D. Vance riled up conservatives, liberals, and independents alike when the New York Times reported on his draft plan to pay stay-at-home parents. Its most vocal critics have called it “anti-feminist reverse-Robin Hood,” an “old-fashioned notion of family,” a tool that uses moms as “political pawns,” a “trap,” “social engineering,” “socialism,” and “reactionary tradwife nonsense.” What kind of proposal could cause such ire, especially one that you would think could be a bipartisan slam dunk?
One that the Democratic Party is mad it didn’t get to introduce first. An article stated, “While the Trump administration aims to help a minority of parents who are living in the traditional fashion that some right-wing white men extol, a Democratic-led agenda that helps all families to raise children…is undoubtedly popular with a much broader swath of America.” And Democrats have their own “Project 2029” going on, wherein they already urge a child-care credit for parents.
Let’s establish something right now: there is currently a problem with the way this country handles child care. And that is something both sides can agree on.
As the issue currently stands, child care costs commandeer 10–20% of family income. That could cover a monthly mortgage payment or pay college tuition. Rampant fraud plagues the daycare domain, particularly the government’s own poor-quality option, Head Start. And research shows daycare can have a negative effect on children under the age of three.
As for the federal child care credit through the $12 billion Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), only one in seven children eligible for subsidized child care actually receive it because of limited funds. Of the nearly 900,000 families receiving the subsidies, 80% come from single-parent homes.
And 72% of parents want more time with their children. A Gallup poll found that 54% of the working moms surveyed would prefer to be home.
What exactly is Vance proposing?
Now that we know where child care stands and the attitudes toward it, let’s take a look at what exactly Vice President Vance is proposing.
Using funds from the CCDF, a new option for “parent-based care” would let families claim a $9,000 credit for every child so that a parent could stay home with their child(ren).
To qualify, you would need one spouse working 35 hours per week, and your income must fall below 85% of the state’s median income. And the red flag to a bull: you must be married (in case you didn’t catch it).
That last part appears especially irksome to those on the opposing side, although they don’t state it explicitly. But what is explicitly stated (time and time again) as the reason for their irritation is this: “Yet instead of providing solutions, this plan would rob an underfunded child care system to push an extreme right-wing agenda that seeks to strip moms of choice and opportunity.”
Essentially, money is scarce, and it should prioritize working single mothers.
More on why it’s considered undesirable
Aside from the extreme accusations that the whole proposal seeks to basically entrap women in the home and erase them from existence, one might find a couple of valid reasons to oppose such a policy proposal.
The first appeared above: it takes money from arguably the poorest parent and gives it to one who might be better off, which, naturally, doesn’t seem fair. Much of the commentary surrounding the issue primarily takes issue with the fact that the plan takes from the existing pot of child care funds rather than opening its own funding source. This then inherently creates animosity between working moms (specifically single moms) and married stay-at-home moms.
A second undesirable consideration: should we really ask a hard-working person to fund someone to watch their own children all day? Shouldn’t the message to children be this: your parent turned down a second income because she (or he) loves you and wants what is best for you?
Where did the proposal come from?
This plan is not the brainchild of J.D. Vance alone, if at all. The Heritage Foundation’s “Saving America by Saving the Family” report and its polarizing “Project 2025” map it out heavily.
Others have accused the “Saving America by Saving the Family” report of this: “The plan is, essentially, to make women drop out of school, marry young, have tons of babies, rely financially on their husbands, be unable to divorce, and wind up in the poor house if they don’t follow these rules.” That is, at best, radically extreme and, at worst, deeply misleading.
So let’s allow the Heritage Foundation to redeem itself by explaining its actual plan and the reasons leading to it.
To keep it concise (as the report runs 137 pages), the state of the family in the U.S. has deteriorated for some time. Children experience undeserved instability through the cultural upheaval of cohabitation, sexual permissiveness, no-fault divorce, soaring abortion rates, subsidized single motherhood, and the paternalistic state overreach.
In addition to unstable homes, the family also experiences the “birth dearth,” the U.S. fertility rate crisis: we sit below replacement levels at 1.6 births per woman. The culprits vary, with some blaming couples too worried about finances to consider reproducing, and others who “suggest that recent declines in fertility may instead reflect changing priorities. Today’s adults may favor autonomy and personal development over raising children more than earlier generations did. Thus, greater opportunity cost rather than greater actual cost may be a better explanation.”
What is the Heritage Foundation’s solution to these problems? Returning marriage and family to their rightful place as the foundation for a thriving America.
In the report, they show “that married couples on average have more children than unmarried ones. Couples who marry earlier—in their early twenties—are more fertile and tend to have more children than those who marry later, say in their mid- to late-thirties. As a consequence, if more people marry earlier, that will likely boost the married fertility rate and alleviate a multitude of social problems described in this report.”
And we have learned that American families reproducing above the fertility rate are more likely to come from families with one married parent who stays home.
So how do you make marriage popular and more common than ever? By subsidizing it, the Heritage Foundation claims. Because if we are being honest, subsidizing single motherhood did wonders to make it common and normalized. So, create a parent-based care credit that only applies to married couples.
And, as marriage has many, many benefits for the individual, ranging from the social to the economic to the mental, it is neither wrong nor impertinent to seek an incentive for it rather than the current incentivization of single parenthood.
The Heritage Foundation’s own plan offered significantly less than Vance’s: only $2,000 per child under the age of five.
Should the government support stay-at-home parents?
Upon reading the plethora of articles out there covering the topic, one might be persuaded that this proposal from J.D. Vance is a poor one that will neither succeed for those it targets nor benefit those outside its scope.
But let’s consider a few reasons to remain supportive.
- CCDF already permits funds to go to family members who care for children, just not the parents of those children. And that doesn’t make sense. Why not? In Texas, family members can receive subsidies of $700 per month, with Florida offering up to $300. If we want to use the critics’ train of reasoning, this practice excludes parents who don’t have a community surrounding them to help out.
- We already pay taxes to fund some form of child care, whether that be center-based daycare, private daycares, or a friend, family, or neighbor (FFN) caregiver. And if you were to ask a pro-family advocate, “If you had to choose between paying a daycare or a parent of a child to watch that child, who would you choose?” they would always choose the parent. Now, of course, we support single moms, but what does the prioritization of support for that family dynamic say about our culture? It’s not as if CCDF is the solitary program out there for a single mom trying to make ends meet. She also has Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), Medicaid, Housing Choice Vouchers (Section 8), and much, much more.
- Many are trying to claim this initiative will not nearly cover the costs of leaving a career salary and so does not deserve consideration. Although that could potentially be true for parents with one child, things change for families with several children. Consider a family with three or four children. That totals upwards of $27,000 in pay, which, for some, is more than enticing when coupled with getting to be home with your children every day.
- Another argument in favor is that some married couples with a stay-at-home parent actually need assistance. Consider one left-leaning article that surveyed married stay-at-home parents and admitted that nearly 50% of those surveyed lived below an annual household income of $50,000. With the federal poverty line at $33,000 for a family of four, many of these married couples live at or barely above it. The Democrat-led agenda “Project 2029” also says, “And families higher up the income ladder — who also struggle with high costs of child care — receive almost no help.” They propose an income cap of $400,000.
- One article claimed “that a typical family needs to earn $145,000 a year to make ends meet.” This is not necessarily true, as a very insightful article from the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) shows. We read, “They argue that most Americans with and without families are doing well, and that our objective standard of living has never been better. Americans live in bigger homes than ever, eat out frequently, and carry $1,100 computerized phones around in their pockets today…It’s easy to live a ‘tradlife’ in contemporary America, he says—it would just require a financial haircut, and people don’t want to take one.” Another reason people hesitate to take the plunge into the stay-at-home parent life: they will take a big hit to their social status, as many women are looked down on for choosing to stay home. IFS writes, “Trad and neotrad families are quite literally shouldering the heaviest burden of sustaining society, and it’s often a thankless job.”
The Bigger Question
There are certainly legitimate questions surrounding this proposal. Should the government create yet another program—and ask taxpayers to fund it? Would it actually make child care more affordable, or simply add another layer to an already complicated system? And if government funds are limited, how should those dollars be distributed among the many families who need help?
Those are questions worth asking. But there is another question that deserves equal consideration: If taxpayers are already going to subsidize child care, why should the parent who stays home to care for her own children be considered less worthy of that support than the parent who works outside the home and pays someone else to provide that care?
A mother who works outside the home and pays for child care is caring for her family. A mother who gives up a second income to care for her children is caring for her family, too. One choice should not diminish the value of the other.
Perhaps the larger lesson is that whenever we talk about supporting child care, we should remember what we are ultimately trying to support: children, parents, motherhood, and families. If public dollars are going to be used to help parents provide care for their children, there is a reasonable argument that the parent providing that care herself should not automatically be left out.
Whether creating another government program is the wisest way to accomplish that is a question worthy of serious debate. But if we are going to spend taxpayer dollars supporting child care, perhaps it is time to recognize that caring for your own children is child care, too—and supporting the mother who chooses to do it is supporting the family.
Alexis Tarkalson graduated from Brigham Young University-Idaho with her degree in Political Science and an emphasis in American Government. She loves spending time with her husband and two children, reading, hiking mountains, and learning new hobbies. The family unit is immensely important to her, as is protecting the associated rights, which is why she volunteers her time towards United Families International.