The Trump Proposal to Pay Moms for Childcare May Sound Like a Good Thing. But There’s a Truly Disturbing Catch.

Politics But there’s a truly disturbing catch. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. For decades now, American feminists have asked our government to do more to support families and children. We have agitated for paid parental leave, universal childcare, better public schools, child allowances, and other help for struggling parents. Many feminists, especially socialist ones, have demanded wages for housework as well as childcare—salaries, in other words, for mothers who stay home. Now the Trump administration is reportedly doing something along those lines: extending financial support to mothers who choose to care for their children at home rather than put them in daycare. Good news, right? Wrong. The exact details of the plan are not yet official, but the gist has been shared with reporters. And as it turns out, the administration isn’t expanding support to parents at all. The policy will draw from funds that currently largely cover the care of children of low-income single moms. What’s more, the new policy will benefit only mothers who are married. It’s something like an anti-feminist reverse–Robin Hood: Take from poor single mothers to give to more stable ones. In the 1990s, the government created a program to help low-income families afford childcare so that parents could work or go to school. The benefit is fairly modest, averaging about $9,000 per child annually, in a country where childcare costs can exceed $30,000 a year. The overwhelming majority—80 percent—of the recipients of this federal childcare credit are single parents, and the overwhelming majority of them are single mothers. Given the Trump administration’s emphasis on this plan as a boon for stay-at-home mothers, you may wonder if the single moms presently in the workforce could use childcare funds to pay themselves to stay home. The answer is no. If the new policy is implemented, the payment would apply solely to married stay-at-home moms. The single mothers who rely now on the childcare subsidies would have to keep working (i.e., meet the current requirement to get the subsidy) or marry a gainfully employed man. (If only they had thought of that!) Parents who are unmarried by cohabitating also wouldn’t qualify for the stay-at-home benefit. Married mothers, though, could collect a government payment to stay home, so long as their husbands work full time and for pay. (The rule applies to parents, but the vast majority of stay-at-home parents in America are stay-at-home moms, and conservatives are explicit to state that they believe it’s best if mothers stay home and men work for pay.) Conservatives might argue that the government has no business paying single mothers to stay home. And fair enough—but then it shouldn’t be paying married ones to stay home either. And, worse, the administration is contemplating expanding funding eligibility without actually increasing the amount of money up for grabs. That would mean that there would be “more parents competing for the same dollars,” as one fellow at a conservative think tank put it. As a result, some money that is currently earmarked largely for poor single moms will end up going to mothers with working husbands who choose to stay home. This initiative is transparently not about helping all children to have a parent at home if that is what their parents desire. If it were, then it would apply to all lower-income families equally, regardless of whether a breadwinner spouse is in the picture. This is the government paying only for married moms to stay home. Single moms apparently don’t deserve that luxury. This is especially galling given that conservatives correctly point out that children of married couples tend to do better than children of single parents. Children raised in two-parent families in which one parent is employed full time already have a host of advantages, while children raised in low-income single-parent households are more likely to face significant challenges. Why in the world would we take from the least privileged to give to the group conservatives themselves say are the best off? The only explanation is that this isn’t really about supporting children. It’s about rewarding some mothers and punishing others. This is all part of a broader conservative effort to push women out of the workforce and back into the home, as well as into traditional family structures. Earlier this week, Katie Miller (wife of White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller) lamented how “terrible” it is that women now outnumber men in the workforce—a comment she made on The Katie Miller Podcast, which is her job. In the Heritage Foundation proposal, titled “Saving America by Saving the Family,” that seems to be the blueprint for this proposed Trump policy, the group argues: “In promoting new family policies, one must be mindful of mistakes of the past. For example, credits designed specifically to benefit poor single mothers may be well intended, but they have proven to incentivize single motherhood in poor communities and trap women there through marriage penalties.” The result, according to the proposal, is that “the growth of the federal government displaced men from their traditional role as providers. Welfare moved the primary responsibility to provide for a family from fathers to the government. … The expansion of welfare programs, particularly AFDC, made the federal government the de facto husband for millions of poor women across the country.” The implication is that the federal government should stop supporting poor single moms so that they might hitch themselves to a man, and that the federal government should financially reward women who follow the traditional script. The Heritage Foundation is particularly explicit in this aim. Its version of a policy that would support stay-at-home parents would actually impose income minimums for a household to qualify—in other words, the support would go not to the poorest families but to those who are more stable. Heritage proposes tax breaks that would apply only to two-parent married families with one stay-at-home spouse, and that would offer even more generous payments when those families have multiple children. It also proposes special bank accounts exclusively for people who marry young (before the age of 30). And Heritage is explicit that this shift in resources (which also involves ending the Head Start program) is part of a broader right-wing project that includes attacks on contraception, abortion, in vitro fertilization, and LGBTQ+ rights. From “Saving America by Saving the Family”: “A large share of the blame for the present malady lies in moral and cultural trends that have both fed and been fed by government policy. Chief among these is surely the sexual revolution, which separated the sex act from marriage and childbearing. It is not just that sexual mores were revolutionized. Technology and policy also played key supporting roles. Starting in the 1960s, the Pill and other contraceptives swept the country—which promised to reduce the unwanted consequences of casual sex with multiple partners across a lifetime.” The Heritage report points a finger at no-fault divorce, child protection laws, and government secularism as further causes of our culture’s alleged decline. And it really zeros in on women going to college: “Social pressures, from popular culture to guidance counselors to parents, now encourage almost everyone to go to college and delay getting married and having children,” the report states, before spotlighting a study that found that “women who complete 4 years of college are less likely to have a child, while completion rates of 4 years of college rose 10 percent for women over the past decade.” The connection is clear: Conservatives want more women to marry and have babies; women going to college is an impediment to that. If we’re giving parents money for childcare, it does indeed seem fair to allow that money to support at-home care too, whether the carer is the child’s parent or a nanny. The French system does something like this. It offers paid parental leave, then a variety of care options afterward, largely cost-adjusted according to family income. Parents who wish to stay home may qualify for some cash; parents who want to hire a nanny may qualify for a subsidized rate; parents who want to send their children to France’s much-beloved crèches can do that too, paying an amount that varies according to what they can afford. If “pro-family” conservatives were pushing this kind of system, I promise you feminists would cheer—even those, like me, who think it’s generally a good thing when women work. But that isn’t what this Trump policy does. This policy is essentially a financial reward system for married stay-at-home mothers, funded at the expense of poor single moms. It’s punishing the children of women whose lives don’t align with the right-wing feminine ideal. And it is part of a larger agenda to push women out of school, out of the workforce, into early motherhood, and into the home—whether we want to be there or not. Donald Trump Family Feminism Marriage Parenting Women Workplace Finance J.D. Vance