These discussions make me so very happy to live in Canada, particularly Quebec. It’s a wholistic system that just works - no pitting different types of families against each other; no patchwork of subsidies requiring endless paperwork. I sincerely believe it works only because ALL of these elements are in place:
1. 12 months of leave (for either parent) paid (at 55-75%) by a government program that every worker pays into.
2. Option of an additional 12 months unpaid leave, during which you can work part time or not at all, but the employer has to hold your position.
3. A robust network of subsidized daycares that cost ~ $10/day. For families who can’t find one or choose otherwise, they can receive a subsidy to help pay for private daycare, a babysitter/nanny, a family member etc.
(The daycare subsidy can also be used for after-school care and summer camp!)
Honestly, it makes so much sense to pay parents to care for their kids for the first months of life. We’re doing essential work for the country, why shouldn’t we be paid? And no one I know thinks group care at this age is the ideal arrangement (by 1-2 years old, it’s much different). But it shouldn’t mean either parent needs to make the lifelong decision of abandoning their career altogether.
Tl;dr: Maternity/Parental leave is the obvious answer that the US seems bent on ignoring. The rest of the world is thoroughly puzzled.
I want to add that the ideas for irregular/drop-in care, while innovative, don’t sound great to me. Integration into a new daycare is hard on everyone- most daycares will purposely stagger new arrivals, knowing it can take several weeks for a new child to feel truly comfortable. Constantly switching environments, based on whoever is available, sounds so stressful!
The need for infrequent care, or for parents with irregular work hours, is a legitimate problem, even with a robust system like we have here. I wouldn’t say we’ve solved it by any means. Some things that do help: some private daycares will allow “spot sharing,” where two families can arrange to take, say, 2 days and 3 days of the week respectively (but this depends on having a regular schedule, and also finding another family to work with). And, at $10/day, some families are comfortable paying for a full time spot even if they won’t use it every day. But it’s not perfect, and informal networks of family remain important.
It works really well honestly. Most of the time it’s not too hard to fill a 12-18 month replacement position, with 9 months of lead time. Lots of people want these jobs and it’s how a lot of new grads get a foothold in careers that might not otherwise have a lot of openings. And the leave itself doesn’t cost the company anything since the government pays.
It’s how a lot of us got started including me! Then more recently a student intern that I mentored took my maternity leave replacement. When I came back she was offered a permanent position in another department. Having more movement and a pipeline for training/advancement is probably a net positive for the employer (if it’s the kind of place where people actually want to work and come back to).
The system has a lot of issues for sure. I personally have had great experiences (across three kids) but I live in a major city, in a family-friendly neighbourhood with a lot of resources. Certainly not everyone’s experience, especially in rural areas.
I do think some of this is a matter of perspective. “80 percent of children aged 1–4 in Quebec have a spot in a licensed educational child care service (SGEE) or in preschool” is presented as a failing because 1/5th of kids don’t have a spot. But 80% uptake for any program is a great success by most standards.
Reading between the lines, the real argument this article is making (not surprisingly, from a socially conservative publication) is ideological. It is true that the Quebec model disproportionately supports one type of family arrangement: one where both parents want to work, at least some of the time, not right away but within 1-2 years of a child’s birth. This is very explicit in the rationale for the program, since it’s the way it pays for itself: enabling more adults to work means more tax revenue and more people paying into the parental leave program.
Not everyone agrees that this is the best model to encourage at a societal level. And that’s fair enough! It’s a policy choice, and it’s important to acknowledge that.
Nevertheless, I would push back on the argument that other types of families are completely left behind. The low cost of daycare means it’s accessible even to families with one income or parents working part-time, and many families in this situation do take advantage of this (at $10/day, it’s still less expensive than even a few hours per week of babysitting). I also know some families with a SAHM where the dad took the parental leave, since it can be taken by either parent. This meant they had TWO parents at home for the first 6 months or more of a baby’s life, which is honestly pretty awesome.
I'm glad that it's worked out well for your family!
On the policy front, I'm in favour of policies that offer families more straightforward choice and flexibility. The Quebec model has 80% of kids in a licensed facility (though if I am reading the report correctly fewer than 30% are receiving the $10/day care, with more children in more expensive—though definitely still subsidized—licensed arrangements). But 50% of Quebeckers say they would prefer a different arrangement for their family. I'm assuming there's a fairly wide range of preferences as to the precise arrangements people are interested in.
I'm also a big fan of the parental leave being offered to either parent, or the father being able to take parental leave alongside the mother's maternity leave. My family has definitely benefitted from my husband being able to take advantage of this arrangement, and we really cherished that time together. I wish Canada offered a higher percentage than 55% (I'm not in Quebec, where I assume from your first comment that there's a provincial top-up, which is great) so that parents, especially lower-income parents, don't need to weigh a higher paycheque against the reduced parental leave income in deciding whether to have that time with their infants. But then again, we have longer leave duration than some other countries (e.g. the Netherlands), which meets the preference of most parents to have their young infants cared for at home and/or by a family member.
In principle, I’m all for choice and flexibility. What worries me in these discussions, though, is that the people advocating for “choice” are often trying to replace existing resources (like paid leave and subsidized childcare) with programs that don’t even come close to the same level of support.
“Put your baby in daycare at 6 weeks old for $20k per year” or “quit your job and give up $1M+ in lifetime earnings” are not good choices IMO, and a bursary or a tax credit of a few thousand dollars is not going to meaningfully offset that. You would have to replace a significant portion of one parent’s salary, for years on end, something like a UBI I guess? As much as I’d love to see this, it would be an expensive and quite socialist program even by Canadian standards.
The current Canadian system splits the difference by paying parents to stay home during the time when group care makes the least sense (0-1 year), then supporting parents to stay in the workforce and keep paying into the system. We could decide, as a society, to extend this period to 2 or 3 years or even longer, and in some ways that would be amazing (I say as I prepare to return to work from mat leave TOMORROW 😭) - but realistically we’d have to keep weighing the cost and political feasibility. So I understand why the system is the way it is right now.
I’m curious though - what do you (or anyone else here) think a more flexible system could look like?
As a SAHM a few months away from having my third baby, this topic is close to my heart. Generally I think the idea of giving parents the option to receive payment for caring for their own infants at home is a good one. But what we seem to know about this particular policy, particularly the fact that it would majorly expand eligibility without expanding funding, makes it seem like the entire point is to pit two-parent families with a stay at home mom against the working parents (and their children) who already rely on these subsidies. I fear it's going to poison the whole issue, turning childcare into another battle ground for the culture war.
Appreciate being in dialogue with your work, Leah ! And yes, as some other comments have pointed out, what seems to many in the US like an oddity or a politically charged option is a standard part of family policy in lots of countries, including mine (though the French at-home education stipend is pitifully low). The obstacle, as I also point out in the article (with the example of Burkina Faso paying both a breastfeeding mother to do construction work and a childminder to watch her child, instead of just paying the mother to watch her own child at home and not on a construction site), is that policies are typically designed through an employment lens, and not a care lens. Job creation and productivity trump people's preferences for caregiving because caring for one's own children is not seen as work.
And I think treating it as employment (vs a child allowance) does ring hollow to many moms, including at least one so far in this thread, who see what they're doing at home as strongly differentiated from "a job."
I don't love the "all moms are *working* moms" rhetoric for this reason. You don't dignify care by saying it's almost the same as "real" work.
Oh man I really, really want you to go on Elizabeth & Matt Bruenig's podcast to revive talks on their 'Family Fun Pack' and related pro-family-care policy. Blowing out candles and making a big wish.
What I find interesting and of note about the Nordics is how small the families are. If there are massive benefits, it seems the implication is that it's a blip on the woman's lifespan - so only a few short years of investment. Whereas that's not really the reality of the choices of childbearing/prioritizing home for many others.
Definitely a supporter of the general Matt Bruenig Family Fun Pack model of 'help every kind of childcare choice', but I'm particularly interested in the proposal in the second half of this piece. Was talking to a friend about this the other day and she was saying that flexibility, not cost, is the big barrier for the majority of women who want some childcare but not full-time daycare. I wonder what the main downsides of the CALD model would be: someone else in the comments mentioned that getting children used to a particular childcare environment takes some time: if you're constantly changing them would that make things harder on the kids? Because otherwise this sounds great.
Tbh, I think if you're going back and forth between two options (home and a specific drop in childcare center) that's easier for a kid than being dropped on in a large range of places.
Our babysitters are drawn from a large pool of competent sitters. And our kids are comfortable with the category of babysitter, and some variability.
Something I don't often see addressed is the way the math and logistics of subsidies work with subsequent children (vs. the first). With a subsequent baby, additional help is very welcome to lighten the childcare load for the *older* child/ren. I know folks that have done full-time WFH with a pre-mobile baby, but that gets less and less feasible with a toddler AND a new baby.
The other thing people don't always seem to realize is the retirement savings aspect. I have been out of the paid workforce for seven years (three babies) and counting, and that's a fairly significant amount of time to be (not) paying into a retirement plan, especially earlier in life.
SAHPs can still make use of childcare, especially if they have multiple children.
But IIRC, my family wasn't able to claim the childcare tax credit when we had one of our kids in preschool, because we also had a stay-at-home parent. Apparently that disqualifies you.
I sort of get why, and changing that is lower priority to me than improving some other areas of childcare policy, such as vastly expanding maternity leave, and ideally paying for SAHPs (or, more simply, just replacing the entire childcare tax credit with a higher child credit).
But yeah, not only does the government love paying childcare businesses and hate paying families, they apparently will refrain from paying those same businesses if it's even for the benefit of families with a SAHP. Who, as a reminder, are disproportionately low-income.
The policy discussion needs to be a full, legislative discussion, not a half-baked aside designed to show one party's idea about who gets support. In other words, the families who get daycare subsidies because they're trying to work should continue to get them because that's what the program was designed for. Most states have waiting lists even for those funds. Those funds should not be redirected. The discussion about at home subsidies for parents should be its own legislative debate. And also, will it contain the perverse incentive that the benefit phases out the more the breadwinner makes? Will it discourage moms from wanting to make their own money? This is what they do with the child care tax credit now. It phases out to the minimum at income of around 43,000 a year agi. I am not opposed to consideration of some benefit for stay-at-home parents for some period of time. But it's just a different kind of program and policy from one designed to keep people in the workforce. Also, too, it's my understanding and most countries that offer something like a paid leave, it applies to everyone, not just people below the median household income. Here, increasingly, a lot of people are not paying any taxes and getting a lot of subsidies, while the upper middle class, usually with two incomes, don't get a lot of tangible benefits for their money.
> This is what they do with the child care tax credit now. It phases out to the minimum at income of around 43,000 a year agi.
Are you thinking of the EITC (a wage subsidy for low-income workers)? The CTC doesn't phase out till 200k for single parents and 400k for married parents, which I think is high enough to avoid perverse incentives.
Child and Dependent Care expenses (IRS form 2441). It is neither the EITC nor the child tax credit. The point is that it is out there, but it is very small, and hasn't been adjusted in a long time.
Oh yes. I think the CDCTC is so poorly designed for what it's supposed to do ($600 for childcare expenses... with some weird phase ins and phase outs) that the whole credit should be scrapped and should either just be a $600 plus up to the CTC or a young child (5y and under) plus up.
Paying a parent to care for an infant is close to going back to Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) prior to the Clinton dismantling of that -- except for this new idea that one parent could still be in the home, yet working. Another exception is that AFDC children were checked on once a month to be sure parenting was done reasonably well. That would obviously be a sticking point for any new proposal -- based on the administrative cost, plus the question of how evaluating child safety and reasonably good parenting could be evaluated. (The current DFCS monthly monitoring swings between brief casual checks, and intense scrutiny, depending on the state's budget priorities, politics, and the outrage when a child is injured or killed during an open DFCS case.)
I'm also struck by the idea that this new proposal is because parents usually prefer to care for an infant at home, because it's good for the family. The old AFDC program was based on the idea that caring for an infant or child was good for society. I think that's still a better way to put it.
Keep in mind that a similar situation comes into play when an older person ends up in a nursing home because close family members all have to work. If the older person is eligible for Medicaid, the nursing home cost is more expensive to the government than covering the cost of care at home by a relative, friend, or paid caregiver. I don't believe the well being of older people matters less than the well being of infants.
A few troubles: The more strings are attached the more a family must confirm to universal state expectations rather than have the flexibility to take the shape family life in their particular demands it. One size fits all frays around the edges, and IMO the edges are the place you especially want to be helping people with a program like this.
Second, as my wife put it, she doesn't want to be paid for her work raising our children. It's not done for professional or economic reasons. She feels her life's work is cheapened by being paid for. Something of its dignity and integrity is lost when there's a governmental homemaker salary.
Third, related to the first, if there were a hard limit of six months to a program like this then it would take the shape of a birth benefit more than a childcare benefit. Far from helping families have a spouse at home to economize the household, provide a living home base for children, and revitalize neighborhoods, it would create isolated women in the big empty communities which already exist. Here, there there are no children, there is no support. Women (typically) may be paid to watch their own children, but then where would they go? Would they sit alone and go stir crazy? There are no older women with the benefit who can help younger mothers learn the ropes. There are no friends to help cook meals or watch the older kids. All of those services would remain for paid professionals. I don't know how many times a meal train involved somebody giving us a Doordash gift card. Of course it does. Nobody's at home to cook during the day.
It's much easier to be a SAHP in a lively community with a significant number of SAHPs. A friend of mine had a very lonely time as a SAHM in a neighborhood where she only met nannies and au pairs at the playground.
With respect, is the second one actually a policy problem? Lots of families would really benefit from this kind of assistance. The idea that getting a government subsidy for doing something valuable cheapens said valuable thing doesn't seem right to me: does a child benefit payment cheapen having children?
I don't think of a child allowance / paid leave / baby bonus as "paying your mother to love you" but as giving your mom the financial freedom to live out her love as she hopes.
(but this is a reason I don't like it as much framed as "wages for housework" or "wages for childcare")
That's exactly how my wife takes it, though, as her being an employee of the state, providing a service for King and country. But that's not the reason she's doing it at all.
I don't think that's the same kind of thing at all. Just to check your intuitions on this: let's say that people got a tax credit or subsidy if they were doing a lot of live-in care for their elderly parents. The justification for this would be is that caring for your elderly parents is hard, it's expensive, it's demanding, and it's also very valuable. The government wants to help out people doing it and make it easier for more people to do it. Do you think that taking money from such a programme would cheapen caring for your elderly parents?
I agree with most of your comment, but one part confused me. I don't see how a six-month SAHP stipend (as opposed to no stipend) would result in fewer SAHPs being around.
Furthermore, without minimizing the fact that my life as a SAHM was a lot better when I lived around more SAHPs, there is still plenty to do in my current town even with fewer SAHPs.
I don't sit alone or go stir crazy. In my nine years as a SAHM, I don't think I've ever been bored for a full minute, which I certainly can't say about my decades in the workplace.
Although, as an extrovert, I do wish I had more of a village experience, doing chores with peers and watching how they parent, I'm hardly alone. My kids are real people, and I like them a lot.
Babies typically have enough needs to keep me busy all by themselves. Their snuggliness and their discovery of the world are good antidotes to feeling stir crazy. With the first few babies, there is enough time to pop them in the carrier and take walks or run errands easily. And there's plenty of sitting down nursing time that for better or worse lends itself well to phone time. (I do wonder if nursing mothers were bored before smartphones or at least kindles, since books are hard to hold in one hand.)
Toddlers love being outdoors for hours, exploring uneven terrain in nature, and helping water and weed the garden. Indoors they love helping too: sorting silverware, pushing the buttons on the laundry machines, etc. They like being read to, and they can also play by themselves while I do other chores or attend to siblings.
Preschoolers love going on adventurous walks in the rain and splashing in puddles. They like scooters, playgrounds, and more interesting books. Many of them can be taught to read, and then they have a nearly unlimited supply of self-entertainment. They can learn more advanced chores like gathering laundry and putting it in the washer or dryer, folding small towels, setting the table, chopping soft foods, and picking up clutter indoors and yard debris outdoors. They can have more complex conversations.
Apart from interacting with my children, there are several friends and family I have regularly scheduled phone calls with, and my neighborhood has several retirees I often chat with while they're taking walks and I'm out front with the kids.
I have also managed to find some SAHP friends to hang out with here, but my point is that even if I hadn't, yes, I'd feel the ache of not having enough friends, but I'd hardly be sitting around losing my mind. Those aren't the same.
Six months paid turns into a six-month cap, and mothers only of up to six-month old being around. It creates the social expectation that being a SAHM should only last 6 months and creates the culture that looks down on staying longer. You've had you payment, now get back to work like the rest of us. That kind of thing.
In theory I'm not against parents receiving monetary help while raising their kids. In fact, I think it's one of the best ways to use welfare benefits. However, this policy simply seems like a way to make benefits seem high-status, and I'm skeptical that will work. I personally feel allergic to anything that seems like an attempt to cozy up to elitism, and this gets too near the flames for my liking. Why not just use EBT? I get that it doesn't give a mother (or SAHP) any special acknowledgement, but I don't think we need recognition for being parents. That's simply our duty.
I think that is mostly a good thing! Although my family never benefited from it because we don't have social security numbers so those of us who pay taxes never qualify for returns, which is our choice, so that's fine.
But do the other countries you cite limit the availability of these funds to just married couples? While encouraging keeping family units intact is a laudable policy objective, using it here feels like a cudgel, and specifically excludes the single moms who would most benefit from these funds (both in this form and in the childcare subsidy it is usurping funds from). It also creates a dangerous incentive to keep women in marriages that may not be healthy or safe- it ties their income and means to their married status.
Here I think it's a mix of trying to use the law to steer behavior and... I think this program's establishing law would make it very very hard to create a benefit for a household with no working adults. It's debatable whether you can exempt *one* parent from the work requirement under the language of the law, and I think there's no way you could exempt the only parent (in a single parent house) in the long term. (I think there is more legal room for a short term exemption after child birth, but it would be on firmer ground with Congressional action, not mere rule making)
What of parents who do a poor job of raising their children? They aren't doing the rest of us any favors. The current US program was created to encourage low income mothers to work, not to support them staying home.
Not sure if you have concrete examples in mind, but when I think about the problem you're describing, I think of parents who could likely do better with more support (education on best practices, budgetary slack to create time for attunement etc, social support) not less.
These discussions make me so very happy to live in Canada, particularly Quebec. It’s a wholistic system that just works - no pitting different types of families against each other; no patchwork of subsidies requiring endless paperwork. I sincerely believe it works only because ALL of these elements are in place:
1. 12 months of leave (for either parent) paid (at 55-75%) by a government program that every worker pays into.
2. Option of an additional 12 months unpaid leave, during which you can work part time or not at all, but the employer has to hold your position.
3. A robust network of subsidized daycares that cost ~ $10/day. For families who can’t find one or choose otherwise, they can receive a subsidy to help pay for private daycare, a babysitter/nanny, a family member etc.
(The daycare subsidy can also be used for after-school care and summer camp!)
Honestly, it makes so much sense to pay parents to care for their kids for the first months of life. We’re doing essential work for the country, why shouldn’t we be paid? And no one I know thinks group care at this age is the ideal arrangement (by 1-2 years old, it’s much different). But it shouldn’t mean either parent needs to make the lifelong decision of abandoning their career altogether.
Tl;dr: Maternity/Parental leave is the obvious answer that the US seems bent on ignoring. The rest of the world is thoroughly puzzled.
I want to add that the ideas for irregular/drop-in care, while innovative, don’t sound great to me. Integration into a new daycare is hard on everyone- most daycares will purposely stagger new arrivals, knowing it can take several weeks for a new child to feel truly comfortable. Constantly switching environments, based on whoever is available, sounds so stressful!
The need for infrequent care, or for parents with irregular work hours, is a legitimate problem, even with a robust system like we have here. I wouldn’t say we’ve solved it by any means. Some things that do help: some private daycares will allow “spot sharing,” where two families can arrange to take, say, 2 days and 3 days of the week respectively (but this depends on having a regular schedule, and also finding another family to work with). And, at $10/day, some families are comfortable paying for a full time spot even if they won’t use it every day. But it’s not perfect, and informal networks of family remain important.
I wonder how number 2 “works” for the employer. It’s hard for me to imagine a small business being able to make that work.
It works really well honestly. Most of the time it’s not too hard to fill a 12-18 month replacement position, with 9 months of lead time. Lots of people want these jobs and it’s how a lot of new grads get a foothold in careers that might not otherwise have a lot of openings. And the leave itself doesn’t cost the company anything since the government pays.
Oh, I never thought about the secondary benefit to new grads! They could stand to catch a break too.
It’s how a lot of us got started including me! Then more recently a student intern that I mentored took my maternity leave replacement. When I came back she was offered a permanent position in another department. Having more movement and a pipeline for training/advancement is probably a net positive for the employer (if it’s the kind of place where people actually want to work and come back to).
I'm very thankful for Canada's parental leave options. But there are issues with the subsidized daycare model—there is some research here exploring that, looking particularly at Quebec as a model: https://www.cardus.ca/research/family/reports/neither-universal-nor-equitable/
The system has a lot of issues for sure. I personally have had great experiences (across three kids) but I live in a major city, in a family-friendly neighbourhood with a lot of resources. Certainly not everyone’s experience, especially in rural areas.
I do think some of this is a matter of perspective. “80 percent of children aged 1–4 in Quebec have a spot in a licensed educational child care service (SGEE) or in preschool” is presented as a failing because 1/5th of kids don’t have a spot. But 80% uptake for any program is a great success by most standards.
Reading between the lines, the real argument this article is making (not surprisingly, from a socially conservative publication) is ideological. It is true that the Quebec model disproportionately supports one type of family arrangement: one where both parents want to work, at least some of the time, not right away but within 1-2 years of a child’s birth. This is very explicit in the rationale for the program, since it’s the way it pays for itself: enabling more adults to work means more tax revenue and more people paying into the parental leave program.
Not everyone agrees that this is the best model to encourage at a societal level. And that’s fair enough! It’s a policy choice, and it’s important to acknowledge that.
Nevertheless, I would push back on the argument that other types of families are completely left behind. The low cost of daycare means it’s accessible even to families with one income or parents working part-time, and many families in this situation do take advantage of this (at $10/day, it’s still less expensive than even a few hours per week of babysitting). I also know some families with a SAHM where the dad took the parental leave, since it can be taken by either parent. This meant they had TWO parents at home for the first 6 months or more of a baby’s life, which is honestly pretty awesome.
I'm glad that it's worked out well for your family!
On the policy front, I'm in favour of policies that offer families more straightforward choice and flexibility. The Quebec model has 80% of kids in a licensed facility (though if I am reading the report correctly fewer than 30% are receiving the $10/day care, with more children in more expensive—though definitely still subsidized—licensed arrangements). But 50% of Quebeckers say they would prefer a different arrangement for their family. I'm assuming there's a fairly wide range of preferences as to the precise arrangements people are interested in.
I'm also a big fan of the parental leave being offered to either parent, or the father being able to take parental leave alongside the mother's maternity leave. My family has definitely benefitted from my husband being able to take advantage of this arrangement, and we really cherished that time together. I wish Canada offered a higher percentage than 55% (I'm not in Quebec, where I assume from your first comment that there's a provincial top-up, which is great) so that parents, especially lower-income parents, don't need to weigh a higher paycheque against the reduced parental leave income in deciding whether to have that time with their infants. But then again, we have longer leave duration than some other countries (e.g. the Netherlands), which meets the preference of most parents to have their young infants cared for at home and/or by a family member.
In principle, I’m all for choice and flexibility. What worries me in these discussions, though, is that the people advocating for “choice” are often trying to replace existing resources (like paid leave and subsidized childcare) with programs that don’t even come close to the same level of support.
“Put your baby in daycare at 6 weeks old for $20k per year” or “quit your job and give up $1M+ in lifetime earnings” are not good choices IMO, and a bursary or a tax credit of a few thousand dollars is not going to meaningfully offset that. You would have to replace a significant portion of one parent’s salary, for years on end, something like a UBI I guess? As much as I’d love to see this, it would be an expensive and quite socialist program even by Canadian standards.
The current Canadian system splits the difference by paying parents to stay home during the time when group care makes the least sense (0-1 year), then supporting parents to stay in the workforce and keep paying into the system. We could decide, as a society, to extend this period to 2 or 3 years or even longer, and in some ways that would be amazing (I say as I prepare to return to work from mat leave TOMORROW 😭) - but realistically we’d have to keep weighing the cost and political feasibility. So I understand why the system is the way it is right now.
I’m curious though - what do you (or anyone else here) think a more flexible system could look like?
As a SAHM a few months away from having my third baby, this topic is close to my heart. Generally I think the idea of giving parents the option to receive payment for caring for their own infants at home is a good one. But what we seem to know about this particular policy, particularly the fact that it would majorly expand eligibility without expanding funding, makes it seem like the entire point is to pit two-parent families with a stay at home mom against the working parents (and their children) who already rely on these subsidies. I fear it's going to poison the whole issue, turning childcare into another battle ground for the culture war.
Appreciate being in dialogue with your work, Leah ! And yes, as some other comments have pointed out, what seems to many in the US like an oddity or a politically charged option is a standard part of family policy in lots of countries, including mine (though the French at-home education stipend is pitifully low). The obstacle, as I also point out in the article (with the example of Burkina Faso paying both a breastfeeding mother to do construction work and a childminder to watch her child, instead of just paying the mother to watch her own child at home and not on a construction site), is that policies are typically designed through an employment lens, and not a care lens. Job creation and productivity trump people's preferences for caregiving because caring for one's own children is not seen as work.
And I think treating it as employment (vs a child allowance) does ring hollow to many moms, including at least one so far in this thread, who see what they're doing at home as strongly differentiated from "a job."
I don't love the "all moms are *working* moms" rhetoric for this reason. You don't dignify care by saying it's almost the same as "real" work.
That's a good point. Regardless of the specific language, though, the central issue is about being paid for it, which an allowance achieves.
Oh man I really, really want you to go on Elizabeth & Matt Bruenig's podcast to revive talks on their 'Family Fun Pack' and related pro-family-care policy. Blowing out candles and making a big wish.
I'm a big fan of Matt's work on this topic.
What I find interesting and of note about the Nordics is how small the families are. If there are massive benefits, it seems the implication is that it's a blip on the woman's lifespan - so only a few short years of investment. Whereas that's not really the reality of the choices of childbearing/prioritizing home for many others.
I think the benefit would do more in America where religiosity is higher.
I think it’s relevant to remember that all together the Nordic countries are only 28 million people. The state of Texas has more people.
Definitely a supporter of the general Matt Bruenig Family Fun Pack model of 'help every kind of childcare choice', but I'm particularly interested in the proposal in the second half of this piece. Was talking to a friend about this the other day and she was saying that flexibility, not cost, is the big barrier for the majority of women who want some childcare but not full-time daycare. I wonder what the main downsides of the CALD model would be: someone else in the comments mentioned that getting children used to a particular childcare environment takes some time: if you're constantly changing them would that make things harder on the kids? Because otherwise this sounds great.
Tbh, I think if you're going back and forth between two options (home and a specific drop in childcare center) that's easier for a kid than being dropped on in a large range of places.
Our babysitters are drawn from a large pool of competent sitters. And our kids are comfortable with the category of babysitter, and some variability.
Interesting! It makes intuitive sense to me keeping the locations the same would help with variability of the people.
Something I don't often see addressed is the way the math and logistics of subsidies work with subsequent children (vs. the first). With a subsequent baby, additional help is very welcome to lighten the childcare load for the *older* child/ren. I know folks that have done full-time WFH with a pre-mobile baby, but that gets less and less feasible with a toddler AND a new baby.
The other thing people don't always seem to realize is the retirement savings aspect. I have been out of the paid workforce for seven years (three babies) and counting, and that's a fairly significant amount of time to be (not) paying into a retirement plan, especially earlier in life.
Yes, Ivana Greco has been great in emphasizing SAHPs can still make use of childcare (e.g. a 3yo in preschool while mom is home wiht a newborn).
A lot of policy here imagines you will have 2 kids max, so the at-home time before school will be fairly limited, not an long-term arragement.
SAHPs can still make use of childcare, especially if they have multiple children.
But IIRC, my family wasn't able to claim the childcare tax credit when we had one of our kids in preschool, because we also had a stay-at-home parent. Apparently that disqualifies you.
I sort of get why, and changing that is lower priority to me than improving some other areas of childcare policy, such as vastly expanding maternity leave, and ideally paying for SAHPs (or, more simply, just replacing the entire childcare tax credit with a higher child credit).
But yeah, not only does the government love paying childcare businesses and hate paying families, they apparently will refrain from paying those same businesses if it's even for the benefit of families with a SAHP. Who, as a reminder, are disproportionately low-income.
The policy discussion needs to be a full, legislative discussion, not a half-baked aside designed to show one party's idea about who gets support. In other words, the families who get daycare subsidies because they're trying to work should continue to get them because that's what the program was designed for. Most states have waiting lists even for those funds. Those funds should not be redirected. The discussion about at home subsidies for parents should be its own legislative debate. And also, will it contain the perverse incentive that the benefit phases out the more the breadwinner makes? Will it discourage moms from wanting to make their own money? This is what they do with the child care tax credit now. It phases out to the minimum at income of around 43,000 a year agi. I am not opposed to consideration of some benefit for stay-at-home parents for some period of time. But it's just a different kind of program and policy from one designed to keep people in the workforce. Also, too, it's my understanding and most countries that offer something like a paid leave, it applies to everyone, not just people below the median household income. Here, increasingly, a lot of people are not paying any taxes and getting a lot of subsidies, while the upper middle class, usually with two incomes, don't get a lot of tangible benefits for their money.
> This is what they do with the child care tax credit now. It phases out to the minimum at income of around 43,000 a year agi.
Are you thinking of the EITC (a wage subsidy for low-income workers)? The CTC doesn't phase out till 200k for single parents and 400k for married parents, which I think is high enough to avoid perverse incentives.
Child and Dependent Care expenses (IRS form 2441). It is neither the EITC nor the child tax credit. The point is that it is out there, but it is very small, and hasn't been adjusted in a long time.
https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/smart-money/child-and-dependent-care-tax-credit
Oh yes. I think the CDCTC is so poorly designed for what it's supposed to do ($600 for childcare expenses... with some weird phase ins and phase outs) that the whole credit should be scrapped and should either just be a $600 plus up to the CTC or a young child (5y and under) plus up.
Paying a parent to care for an infant is close to going back to Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) prior to the Clinton dismantling of that -- except for this new idea that one parent could still be in the home, yet working. Another exception is that AFDC children were checked on once a month to be sure parenting was done reasonably well. That would obviously be a sticking point for any new proposal -- based on the administrative cost, plus the question of how evaluating child safety and reasonably good parenting could be evaluated. (The current DFCS monthly monitoring swings between brief casual checks, and intense scrutiny, depending on the state's budget priorities, politics, and the outrage when a child is injured or killed during an open DFCS case.)
I'm also struck by the idea that this new proposal is because parents usually prefer to care for an infant at home, because it's good for the family. The old AFDC program was based on the idea that caring for an infant or child was good for society. I think that's still a better way to put it.
Keep in mind that a similar situation comes into play when an older person ends up in a nursing home because close family members all have to work. If the older person is eligible for Medicaid, the nursing home cost is more expensive to the government than covering the cost of care at home by a relative, friend, or paid caregiver. I don't believe the well being of older people matters less than the well being of infants.
A few troubles: The more strings are attached the more a family must confirm to universal state expectations rather than have the flexibility to take the shape family life in their particular demands it. One size fits all frays around the edges, and IMO the edges are the place you especially want to be helping people with a program like this.
Second, as my wife put it, she doesn't want to be paid for her work raising our children. It's not done for professional or economic reasons. She feels her life's work is cheapened by being paid for. Something of its dignity and integrity is lost when there's a governmental homemaker salary.
Third, related to the first, if there were a hard limit of six months to a program like this then it would take the shape of a birth benefit more than a childcare benefit. Far from helping families have a spouse at home to economize the household, provide a living home base for children, and revitalize neighborhoods, it would create isolated women in the big empty communities which already exist. Here, there there are no children, there is no support. Women (typically) may be paid to watch their own children, but then where would they go? Would they sit alone and go stir crazy? There are no older women with the benefit who can help younger mothers learn the ropes. There are no friends to help cook meals or watch the older kids. All of those services would remain for paid professionals. I don't know how many times a meal train involved somebody giving us a Doordash gift card. Of course it does. Nobody's at home to cook during the day.
It's much easier to be a SAHP in a lively community with a significant number of SAHPs. A friend of mine had a very lonely time as a SAHM in a neighborhood where she only met nannies and au pairs at the playground.
With respect, is the second one actually a policy problem? Lots of families would really benefit from this kind of assistance. The idea that getting a government subsidy for doing something valuable cheapens said valuable thing doesn't seem right to me: does a child benefit payment cheapen having children?
How much would you pay for your mother to love you? Either this question stings or you won't get it.
I don't think of a child allowance / paid leave / baby bonus as "paying your mother to love you" but as giving your mom the financial freedom to live out her love as she hopes.
(but this is a reason I don't like it as much framed as "wages for housework" or "wages for childcare")
That's exactly how my wife takes it, though, as her being an employee of the state, providing a service for King and country. But that's not the reason she's doing it at all.
I don't think that's the same kind of thing at all. Just to check your intuitions on this: let's say that people got a tax credit or subsidy if they were doing a lot of live-in care for their elderly parents. The justification for this would be is that caring for your elderly parents is hard, it's expensive, it's demanding, and it's also very valuable. The government wants to help out people doing it and make it easier for more people to do it. Do you think that taking money from such a programme would cheapen caring for your elderly parents?
Or the french program where time out of the workforce to care for children still gets scored for your pension instead of being counted as zero.
I cited my source, and you're welcome to consider that when framing the question.
I agree with most of your comment, but one part confused me. I don't see how a six-month SAHP stipend (as opposed to no stipend) would result in fewer SAHPs being around.
Furthermore, without minimizing the fact that my life as a SAHM was a lot better when I lived around more SAHPs, there is still plenty to do in my current town even with fewer SAHPs.
I don't sit alone or go stir crazy. In my nine years as a SAHM, I don't think I've ever been bored for a full minute, which I certainly can't say about my decades in the workplace.
Although, as an extrovert, I do wish I had more of a village experience, doing chores with peers and watching how they parent, I'm hardly alone. My kids are real people, and I like them a lot.
Babies typically have enough needs to keep me busy all by themselves. Their snuggliness and their discovery of the world are good antidotes to feeling stir crazy. With the first few babies, there is enough time to pop them in the carrier and take walks or run errands easily. And there's plenty of sitting down nursing time that for better or worse lends itself well to phone time. (I do wonder if nursing mothers were bored before smartphones or at least kindles, since books are hard to hold in one hand.)
Toddlers love being outdoors for hours, exploring uneven terrain in nature, and helping water and weed the garden. Indoors they love helping too: sorting silverware, pushing the buttons on the laundry machines, etc. They like being read to, and they can also play by themselves while I do other chores or attend to siblings.
Preschoolers love going on adventurous walks in the rain and splashing in puddles. They like scooters, playgrounds, and more interesting books. Many of them can be taught to read, and then they have a nearly unlimited supply of self-entertainment. They can learn more advanced chores like gathering laundry and putting it in the washer or dryer, folding small towels, setting the table, chopping soft foods, and picking up clutter indoors and yard debris outdoors. They can have more complex conversations.
Apart from interacting with my children, there are several friends and family I have regularly scheduled phone calls with, and my neighborhood has several retirees I often chat with while they're taking walks and I'm out front with the kids.
I have also managed to find some SAHP friends to hang out with here, but my point is that even if I hadn't, yes, I'd feel the ache of not having enough friends, but I'd hardly be sitting around losing my mind. Those aren't the same.
Six months paid turns into a six-month cap, and mothers only of up to six-month old being around. It creates the social expectation that being a SAHM should only last 6 months and creates the culture that looks down on staying longer. You've had you payment, now get back to work like the rest of us. That kind of thing.
In theory I'm not against parents receiving monetary help while raising their kids. In fact, I think it's one of the best ways to use welfare benefits. However, this policy simply seems like a way to make benefits seem high-status, and I'm skeptical that will work. I personally feel allergic to anything that seems like an attempt to cozy up to elitism, and this gets too near the flames for my liking. Why not just use EBT? I get that it doesn't give a mother (or SAHP) any special acknowledgement, but I don't think we need recognition for being parents. That's simply our duty.
How do you feel about the child tax credit?
I think that is mostly a good thing! Although my family never benefited from it because we don't have social security numbers so those of us who pay taxes never qualify for returns, which is our choice, so that's fine.
But do the other countries you cite limit the availability of these funds to just married couples? While encouraging keeping family units intact is a laudable policy objective, using it here feels like a cudgel, and specifically excludes the single moms who would most benefit from these funds (both in this form and in the childcare subsidy it is usurping funds from). It also creates a dangerous incentive to keep women in marriages that may not be healthy or safe- it ties their income and means to their married status.
Here I think it's a mix of trying to use the law to steer behavior and... I think this program's establishing law would make it very very hard to create a benefit for a household with no working adults. It's debatable whether you can exempt *one* parent from the work requirement under the language of the law, and I think there's no way you could exempt the only parent (in a single parent house) in the long term. (I think there is more legal room for a short term exemption after child birth, but it would be on firmer ground with Congressional action, not mere rule making)
Amazing that Rs are the ones coming out to propose wages for housework
What of parents who do a poor job of raising their children? They aren't doing the rest of us any favors. The current US program was created to encourage low income mothers to work, not to support them staying home.
Parents don't pass a parenting test now to receive the CTC.
I favor only a program that encourages women to work rather than going on or continuing on taxpayer paid welfare.
Not sure if you have concrete examples in mind, but when I think about the problem you're describing, I think of parents who could likely do better with more support (education on best practices, budgetary slack to create time for attunement etc, social support) not less.