Vance Wants to Reward Stay-at-Home Moms by Punishing Single Parents

Vice President J.D. Vance has long been a proponent of “traditional marriage” and the nuclear family: one man married to one woman, with multiple children between them. In an apparent bid to build his reputation as a serious 2028 contender for the White House, Vance is now promoting an even more old-fashioned notion of family: stay-at-home moms.

Vance wants to pay married parents to stay at home and care for their children. He’s proposed diverting resources from the federal Child Care and Development Fund to a new program that would give $9,000 a year to married couples with children where one parent is a stay-at-home spouse.

There is no question that Americans are experiencing a crisis of affordability. Whether they’re married or single, people are struggling to make ends meet. Add children into the mix and their financial struggles are compounded.

But for many families, Vance’s proposal would only make the crisis worse.

On the surface, Vance’s plan to assist stay-at-home parents sounds tantalizing, in the vein of the Wages for Housework campaign that began in the 1970s. For decades, feminists fought to recognize housework and child care as wage-worthy labor.

They demanded the world recognize women’s humanity — if women were relegated to the home, they argued, it was only fair they be paid to do the work of the home. The idea behind the campaign was that economies rely on the unpaid labor of women, therefore government intervention was needed to compensate them for it.

But there’s a big catch to Vance’s proposal to pay stay-at-home parents in two-parent households: It would tap a fund that currently helps nearly 900,000 families pay for child care — 80 percent of which are single-parent households. And the majority of children served are cared for in child care centers, not at home.

In short, Vance’s proposal would take help away from struggling single parents who need child care to work and give it to married couples where one parent can stay at home. That likely hurts more families than it helps.

If Vance, or President Trump for that matter, truly cared about helping struggling families with children, he would not have championed gutting social safety net programs.

The so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” Trump’s signature 2025 legislation, enacted serious cuts to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program to fund tax breaks for the wealthy. The bill also eviscerated the federal government’s food stamps program aimed at low-income people, including families with children. Millions of people lost benefits at a time when the cost of groceries continues to climb.

To President Trump, inflation was a problem when Joe Biden was president. Under his own leadership, Trump simply calls it a hoax. The real ruse is the broken promises that Trump and Vance have repeatedly made to families.

Take the President’s claim that his steep tariffs would result in $2,000 checks to Americans as a result of revenues collected from corporations. Companies merely raised prices on consumers to pay those tariffs. And when the Supreme Court ruled the tariffs were illegal, the administration issued refunds to those companies — not consumers. In other words, Trump’s tariffs helped corporations squeeze more money out of Americans.

The administration never delivered its promised “DOGE refunds” after firing countless federal workers either. People would be wise to treat these proposed $9,000 payments to parents — and not to mention President Trump’s brazen $5,000 per voter bribe to ensure Republicans win the midterms — similarly.

The most direct and elegant solution to assisting families with children — who desperately need help in Trump’s economy — is a universal child care program of the sort that New Mexico and the city of New York are implementing.

To counter the argument that there isn’t enough money to fund such a program, taxpayers could remind Trump of the his own words that there is plenty of money for bribes and wars. So, why not child care?

This piece was first published on our sister site OtherWords.