Trump’s new stay-at-home-parent plan misses the mark

In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.First things first — the federal government absolutely should be doing more to support parents. That includes families who choose to have a parent stay home with young children. About 1 in every 4 families with children under 18 have at least one parent who isn’t in the labor force. Among married couples with children, one-third had a parent not working. That means that the usual progressive focus on “increasing childcare affordability” will not be responsive to the actual needs of many American families. Yet there are better and worse ways to expand family benefits. The gold standard would be meaningful expansion of the child tax credit, rather than the modest incremental expansion pursued in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. With Congress unlikely to do much of anything, the Trump administration is reportedly getting creative. According to the New York Times, the White House is considering a draft proposal that would allow families with a stay-at-home parent, whose incomes are below the required threshold, to be eligible for federal childcare subsidies. Its impulse is laudable. We need more creative approaches to support families, rather than just the predictable shouts of “socialism!” Unfortunately, the administration’s best-laid intentions could be leading them into a political minefield. The way to invest more in strong families is not to take benefits away from single parents — it’s to invest more in families.To understand the reported approach’s flaws, we need to understand the program they’re trying to alter. The Child Care and Development Block Grant, our primary way of subsidizing childcare for low-income families, was born out of the welfare reform era. Its logic is simple — with the elimination of cash welfare for single-parent and low-income families, and the imposition of work requirements in exchange for public assistance, the federal government needed to do something to enable access to affordable childcare for poor parents. The program was engineered to help poor parents, usually unmarried — 4 out of every 5 CCDBG recipients are single parents — stay connected to work, and it works fairly well. In most cases, parents who are eligible for the program receive the equivalent of vouchers to take to the provider of their choice. In many states, this includes the options of grandparents and relatives (about 6% of children in the program are looked after by a relative). States can even allow homeschooling parents to count their teaching hours to qualify for the program. Julia Sargent, 2, of Brattleboro, Vermont, waves an American flag as she’s carried by her mother during the Fourth of July parade on Saturday, July 4, 2026. (Kristopher Radder/The Brattleboro Reformer via AP) CCDBG recipients can use the vouchers at the childcare provider of their choice, including auntie, abuela, or the neighborhood church down the street. But all parents present in the household must be working (or looking for work) to be eligible to receive the voucher (or “certificate,” as they are called). For married households, that means they can receive subsidized care if both parents are working, but they cannot use that money to subsidize their household expenses with a stay-at-home parent. This is what the Trump administration is reportedly proposing to adjust. After all, if the federal government will subsidize childcare when it is provided by a center, church, or relative, why shouldn’t it also do so when care is provided by a parent? While details have yet to be released, this could mean stay-at-home parents could claim all or some of the average cost of care, around $9,000, as federal payment for their “childcare.”Unfortunately, there are two flaws with this approach. The first is definitional; “childcare,” as a category, is generally understood to be non-parental care, provided so that a child’s parents can be involved in another activity, be it work, volunteering, homeschooling older children, or anything else. In policy, as well as in everyday speech, we don’t refer to parents as “providing childcare,” because they’re not — they’re just living life as a family. Categorizing the work of stay-at-home parents as a “childcare provision” could lead to undesirable outcomes. How hard do we want government officials investigating families receiving federal “childcare” dollars for fraud?More importantly, the broadening of eligibility comes with real trade-offs. Already, the CCDBG doesn’t serve all children eligible for childcare support, because its funding levels are set by Congress. Not even 1 in 7 children who could be eligible for CCDBG funds get assistance; 17 states operated waiting lists for CCDBG slots in 2025. Adding more families to the list of those eligible would be like selling more lottery tickets without increasing the size of the jackpot.Eligibility varies across states, so any estimate of how many children would be newly eligible is necessarily imprecise. But a conservative estimate is that the population of eligible children might double after the new rules. As a result, the odds of being a CCDBG-eligible child who actually received the assistance would go from 1 in 7 to 1 in 14 — or about the odds of getting accepted by Northwestern University. We have already seen a version of this in New Mexico, which expanded eligibility for childcare assistance to all families, regardless of income — only to see the number of low-income children accessing childcare fall because their slots were taken by other families, higher up the income scale.The White House and Congress could ameliorate this concern by dedicating more money to the program — on the order of tens of millions of dollars a year. If they didn’t, the result could turn a program aimed at helping low-wage workers into a bizarre sweepstakes. Some lucky families would get a nice boost, maybe up to $1,000 a month. Others — including those much worse off in every respect — would be left with nothing. The intention is good, but without more funding, it’s not a great way to design a fair and legible policy for helping families thrive.The White House’s reported proposal has the virtue of trying to build off an imperfect status quo, rather than just defaulting to tired starve-the-beast-style domestic policy. Too many right-wingers see childcare assistance as simply a budget line item to be slashed, rather than as a program that could be made better. The way to a pro-family agenda is not to take benefits away from poor families to benefit middle-class ones. It’s to invest in egalitarian solutions, like the child tax credit, which support families regardless of their work-life choice.‘OCT. 7 ISN’T OVER YET’If the White House wants to deliver on the energy behind its proposal, it would need to tell congressional Republicans that expanding support for low-income and working-class parents is a political priority. That is the kind of vision we haven’t seen, and likely never will, under President Donald Trump. Perhaps whoever his successor is — whether it be his secretary of state, who first proposed a version of this idea in 2024, or his vice president, who has spoken eloquently about the need to expand childcare options — will be willing to put his political capital where his mouth is.Until that happens, this proposal will be accused of robbing Peter to pay Paul — taking childcare assistance away from low-income single parents to give a small, lucky segment of two-income parents a windfall. A real pro-family political vision needs to be more comprehensive than that.