“Normal Americans,” JD Vance wrote in 2021, “want a family policy that doesn’t shunt their kids into crap daycare so they can enjoy more ‘freedom’ in the paid labor force.” Now vice president, Vance is moving to turn his words into actions. The New York Times reports that Vance is championing a White House plan to give thousands of dollars a year to stay-at-home parents whose spouses are working full time for pay.
Now, you might be thinking: Do families need government subsidies if they can already afford to have one parent stay home full time? Yet the fiscal reality of stay-at-home parenting is hardly flush. In a survey I conducted in 2022 with more than 2,000 U.S. parents of kids under 18, 41% of married stay-at-home parents had household annual incomes under $50,000, and 60% were getting by on less than $75,000 a year.
When a parent — typically the mother — leaves the workforce to stay home with the kids, it’s usually because the jobs she could take don’t work with her caregiving obligations and/or don’t pay enough to cover the cost of childcare.
The interviews I conducted for my book “Holding It Together” tell a similar story: When a parent — typically the mother — leaves the workforce to stay home with the kids, it’s usually because the jobs she could take don’t work with her caregiving obligations and/or don’t pay enough to cover the cost of childcare, especially for more than one child at a time.
One mom (who, for privacy reasons, I’ll call Erin) left her job at a grocery store to stay home with her infant and her toddler. Her husband makes only $35,000 a year at a mining facility, but with Erin also working, they earned too much to qualify for childcare subsidies. After leaving the workforce, Erin described feeling isolated and exhausted by the demands of stay-at-home parenting. Yet when she thought about going back to paid work, she calculated that her whole paycheck “would go towards daycare anyway.” Plus, if the kids got sick and had to stay home, she would still have to pay for childcare, and she could still end up losing her job.
Nine thousand dollars a year per child — the amount Vance proposed — would go a long way to support mothers like Erin, who described herself as “going broke for insurance”: struggling to pay the premiums on her family’s healthcare plan, keep food on the table and afford a roof over her family’s heads.
But we ought to be wary of politicians who rob Peter to pay Paul –– or, more accurately in this case, rob Patricia to pay Pauline. Which is precisely what Vance’s plan would do.
You see, the Trump administration isn’t proposing to spend new money on stay-at-home parents. Instead, the plan reallocates federal childcare subsidies to subsidize stay-at-home parenthood. This would mean taking money away from the low-wage working parents who currently qualify for childcare subsidies — most of whom are unmarried mothers — and giving it to married breadwinner-homemaker couples with kids.
From welfare to food stamps, Republicans (with help from moderate Democrats) have sought to ensure that eligibility for what little support the U.S. government does offer to families is based not simply on need but on the potential recipients’ personal choices.
Like the “Mommy Wars” of decades past, the vice president’s plan would attempt to pit stay-at-home mothers against employed mothers. In that battle, Vance and the rest of the White House would clearly be taking a side — holding up marriage and at-home parenting as the right choices for women and the only ones deserving of government support.
GOP politicians seem to love this kind of purity-test approach to policymaking. From welfare to food stamps, Republicans (with help from moderate Democrats) have sought to ensure that eligibility for what little support the U.S. government does offer to families is based not simply on need but on the potential recipients’ personal choices. If, for example, a single mom is struggling to keep her kids fed and clothed and housed, she may have to pass a drug test before getting assistance. And to keep those benefits, she’ll have to quickly find a job, then regularly recertify that her income is still low enough to qualify.
Purity-test policymaking, however, ignores the fact that the choices Republicans have labeled as the right ones for women are not equally accessible. Barriers to contraception, for example, can push women into motherhood before marriage, particularly in the context of abortion bans. High rates of incarceration (particularly among men in Black and rural communities) can limit the pool of desirable partners. This reduction happens both in the short term and in the long term, given how histories of arrest and incarceration make it difficult for applicants to find jobs. And even apart from incarceration, economic precarity pushes women away from marriage by straining relationships and increasing the risk of intimate-partner violence, particularly for women who are pregnant or have recently given birth.
And what are supposedly the right choices may come with risks too. Imagine, for example, a married stay-at-home mom whose husband is violent. The White House’s plan would incentivize her to accept that treatment. If she left her spouse, after all, she would not only lose the subsidy for married stay-at-home parents, but the childcare subsidies, which could otherwise help her to find a job and support her children on her own, would be reduced as well.
Vance, however, thinks Americans have gotten too comfortable with divorce. In 2021 he told a group of high schoolers that people today “shift spouses like they change their underwear.” He also suggested that couples with children should stay together even if their marriages are unhappy or violent — though the research suggests otherwise, showing that having parents in a high-conflict marriage tends to be worse for kids academically, behaviorally and psychologically than if those parents were to divorce.
The purity-test policymaking the White House is pursuing is especially destructive for people whose marginalization — whether from racism, sexism, economic oppression or a combination of these — hinders or prevents them from making the decisions that policymakers have deemed the right ones. Even those who comply with the right’s vision of motherhood might have every reason not to otherwise. But those are choices Vance is willing to force women to make.
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