Few times in life are more precious than those first days and weeks after a child is born. Meal trains are scheduled, texts pour in with congratulations, and the parents have to adjust to the new reality of interrupted nights and heart-melting snuggles.
Too soon, reality intrudes — bills need to be paid and the inbox starts to overflow. Some moms have the luxury of taking paid time away from work when baby is born, but most don’t — and even fewer dads are able to.
As fertility rates fall, a growing number of new parents report financial strain, and as childcare costs rise, there’s a growing interest in finding new approaches to supporting families. The time is ripe to ask whether the government could be doing more to help new moms be able to afford staying home with the newest member of their family.
One of the biggest new moves on this front was introduced in Congress earlier this month: a one-time tax credit of $2,000 (a so-called “baby bonus”) that new parents would receive a few weeks after the birth. This would provide meaningful support for families dealing with the income volatility and expenses surrounding the first few weeks of a child’s life.
That direct support could function as a kind of floor for parents who don’t have access to paid leave through work. Right now, there is a stark gap in access to paid leave. Forty-four percent of workers in the top 25% of income have access to at least some paid family leave. Access is much more rare for those working for lower pay; just 13% of workers in the bottom income quartile have paid leave access. And, of course, for families who desire to have a parent stay at home with a new baby and not return to work, there is extremely limited external financial support.
But as the politics of family and fertility begin to shift, state and local governments are exploring new options to support parents, particularly those with new babies.
One solution might be to tweak existing safety-net programs to allow for a greater array of new-child support. Take the Child Care and Dependent Fund, which gives low-income parents assistance for childcare at the provider of their choice.
The purpose of the program is to allow parents to work; for many low-income families, childcare is necessary to enable them to put food on the table. Thus, some might see including at-home parents as eligible “child care providers” as something like mission creep. After all, only families below a certain income threshold (generally making less than 85% of the median income) qualify for childcare assistance. Paying for low-income families to have a parent at home while their middle-income neighbors are stuck going it alone might feel like dicey politics.
On the flip side, infant childcare is tremendously expensive; in Utah, for example, the average cost of center-based childcare for a child under 2 is $14,160. As kids get older, they get cheaper to care for (in Utah, one childcare worker can legally watch no more than four infants at a time, but is allowed to mind 15 4-year-olds at once). So for those with young kids, giving moms a little more financial support up front could allow tax dollars to be stretched further, while giving more moms more time to physically recover from the act of giving birth (and enjoy more of those irreplaceable newborn cuddles).
Such an approach would have to be carefully tailored to the earliest months and would need permission from federal regulators or Congress. The purpose of the Child Care and Development Fund is to improve options when children are “out of their parents’ care,” so turning childcare assistance dollars into general purpose family support funds would be a stretch and push the price tag up too high. Taxpayers may rightly look askance at limited childcare dollars going toward enabling the mom of a 4-year-old to stay home full time.
But for babies under the age of 1, when costs are highest, receiving federal permission to give families who want to use federal childcare dollars to enable a parent to stay home could make fiscal sense. Indeed, Montana and Minnesota each piloted a similar option in the early 2000s, experimenting with welfare reform to fund At-Home Infant Care rather than subsidizing pricey childcare.
Today, only families whose babies are cared for by someone who is not the child’s parent are eligible for CCDF support. That approach might make sense as kids gets older; after all, 80% of households receiving childcare assistance are single parents, who we may rightly want to help establish a connection to work. For newborn and infants, however, we should explore more flexibility.
We could dream bigger. A pro-family state like Utah could even supplement existing federal childcare dollars with its own funding to give even more moms, including those who are not technically low-income, the option of having a little more financial assistance during those initial months of motherhood.
There are other incremental options on the table as well. The Trump administration recently issued guidance on two-parent families receiving assistance through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, program. The administration offered that the family should be able to jointly qualify for the program’s work requirement, rather than each parent needing to hit a certain number of hours worked individually. This means that the relatively small number of married families who receive assistance from TANF could continue to receive benefits even if one parent opted to stay home with young children.
Again, these tweaks work best when focused on the earliest ages. Infant childcare in a center will always be expensive, and more parents report a desire to be home full time with a 4-month-old than a 4-year-old. Expanding the definition of “childcare” for children under 1 year of age to include a parent could meaningfully expand the choices facing many families without massively increasing the budgetary cost.
For a long time, these discussions got wrapped up in gender-war politics. Progressives accused conservatives of wanting to turn back the clock to 1950s gender norms that trapped women in the kitchen. Some conservatives would accuse other conservatives of being enablers of big government nanny-statism. But given the decline of family and fertility across the board, upfront assistance to new families should be top of the agenda for any conservative legislature.
Some ideas, like child tax credits and newborn “baby bonuses,” require real money. Others, like allowing parents of infants to benefit from at-home care dollars, won’t. All of them should be on the table.