Nancy Folbre is professor emerita of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The Trump administration is drafting a rule that would pay parents to stay home with their children. That sounds like something a feminist economist like me should welcome. Raising children is work, it is socially valuable, and the people who do it deserve public support. But this proposal’s most important feature is not whom it pays but whom it leaves out.
According to The New York Times, the draft would allow married couples to collect a child-care subsidy of roughly $9,000 per child per year if one spouse works at least 35 hours a week and the other stays home. But it does not propose creating any new funding.
Instead, the money would come out of the Child Care and Development Fund, a program created in the 1990s to help low-income working parents — regardless of marital status — afford care so that they could work outside the home. The fund in 2023 served about 870,000 families, and roughly 80 percent of them were headed by a single working parent.
So a pot of money that now goes overwhelmingly to employed single mothers would be opened to married couples with a stay-at-home spouse, and the two groups would compete for the same dollars. The one thing the new beneficiaries must have that the old ones lack is a spouse with a full-time job.
Roger Severino of the Heritage Foundation, who wrote the child-care section of Project 2025, told the Times that the proposal would end “discrimination against stay-at-home parents” and that “it doesn’t get more pro-family than that.” Apparently he thinks there’s only one kind of family.
The plan punishes single parents in three ways. The first punishment is the crowd-out, and it is straightforward arithmetic. The eligible pool of married couples is enormous relative to the number of families currently served by the child-care program. Even a small fraction of married couple families could consume all the resources of the existing program.
Second, the child-care providers who accept subsidy payments, roughly 225,000 providers in fiscal 2022, would lose revenue too. The single mother who manages to keep her subsidy may find that the provider who accepted it has closed.
The third punishment is the one nobody in the administration seems to have thought through, and it is where the rule turns from ungenerous to perverse. The benefit is conditioned on a marriage and on a spouse’s employment. Around two in five first marriages end in divorce. If this happens, the stay-at-home spouse becomes an unemployed single parent, most likely to be the mother. She then enters the labor market with a resume gap the government paid her to acquire.
As of 2022, only about half of the roughly 13.9 million custodial parents in the United States had any child support agreement. Among those who were owed support, the Census Bureau found that in 2017, fewer than half received the full amount and about 25 percent received nothing. Custodial-mother families had a poverty rate above 25 percent in the 2020 census. The government that proposes to make a woman’s child-care benefit contingent on her husband’s continued presence and employment is the same government that has never managed to make his support payments reliable.
A benefit that follows the marriage rather than the child leaves the caregiver holding the loss if divorce occurs. A rule written only for married couples with a full-time-earning spouse is not a family policy. It is a marriage subsidy paid for at the expense of the mothers it excludes.
Consider instead a design that recognizes the value of care, pays at-home parents, and does not convey benefits based on marital status. It would combine a universal child allowance with free, publicly financed child care. The allowance takes the form of a monthly payment for every child, delivered to whoever has custody, regardless of marital status and regardless of whether or how much either parent is employed. In a recent report for the Game Changers project of the Political Economy Research Institute, I proposed roughly $426 a month per child, pegged to the difference between the poverty lines for a one-person and a two-person household, which is about $5,100 a year.
This allowance — which can also be construed as a basic guaranteed income for children — can be complemented by free public child care, along the lines of New Mexico’s new universal program and the free pre-K and child care that New York City is phasing in.
Public policy in the United States should support all those raising children instead of punishing those who are bravely doing it on their own.