Trump Admin Preparing Plan to Boost Nuclear Families by Paying Stay-at-Home Moms: Report
Should we be paying for parenting? The Trump administration has a plan to incentivize parents to stay at home.
The collapse of the nuclear family is something worrisome to Americans, who understand that a stable country starts at home. Children need parents who care for them and raise them. Women, however, find themselves working and paying for child care or foregoing family life altogether for a career, rather than trying to balance those roles.
GovFacts.org reported in August that the birth rate in the United States sits at 1.6 children per woman. That is considerably lower than the 2.1 needed to reach replacement.
Now, through a policy advocated by Vice President J.D. Vance, officials are looking at allowing families with a stay-at-home spouse to collect child care subsidies, according to a report by the New York Times.
The program would use money from an existing fund for working parents.
The Child Care and Development Fund is operated by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Started in the 1990s, it helps 870,000 families, of which 80 percent are single parents and most of them mothers, get care for children up to age 13. The New York Times said the fund currently helps 1.3 million children.
The money — funds are currently $12 billion — goes to individual states that set an income level to qualify, with some putting it at 85 percent lower than the median income and some at 60 percent. The program spends about $9,000 per child, per year.
A draft the Times viewed says the new policy “creates the option for a new category of care, parent-based child care, that will allow one married parent to receive CCDF assistance to care for their own child, while a spouse works at least 35 hours per week.”
Needless to say, this would be a new path forward in how this country encourages Americans to build families.
We spent too long shaming mothers for being mothers as a form of slavery or an indication of failure.
To be sure, with every legal hurdle the Trump administration has faced, we should not be surprised if there are some here. Fiscally speaking, while the idea is good, it’s a sad state of affairs that we need it at all.
Ideally, the government should be out of homes and away from family life.
Unfortunately, a cultural barrage of denigrating families in service of women working away their child-bearing years has led to this. However, for a fiscal conservative who begrudgingly accepts spending, at least it would be going toward a good cause.
As Newsmax noted in its coverage, potential fraud is also a concern. Instead of funds going to providers, it would go directly to recipients. That means a lot of vetting should be done to ensure the money falls into the right hands.
That outlet also quoted Joshua McCabe of the Niskanen Center, who raised concerns about funding this policy with an existing pot of money without any expansion of it.
“Expanding the eligibility without increasing funding would mean more parents competing for the same dollars, and leaving more parents — particularly single working parents — worse off,” he commented.
So, this administration will definitely have some hurdles to clear. But this is long overdue. If we don’t have strong families, we don’t have a country.
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