At the end of a rocky summer for the economy, President Donald Trump’s administration scored a win with the August jobs report.
It found that the labor market added 162,000 jobs, or triple expectations. Boasting that 98% of those jobs last month went to women, predictably due to the beginning of the school year, the president quipped that it’s “no wonder” that women like him.
At the same moment, the Trump administration was reportedly planning to siphon off funds from the Child Care and Development Block Grant, which Congress has authorized to temporarily subsidize daycare for low-income parents while they develop job skills to transition away from government dependence, using that money instead to bankroll subsidies for stay-at-home mothers to avoid the labor force.
This would probably have garnered less attention if it hadn’t devolved into a polarizing debate over whether women belong in the labor force whatsoever.
Although the CCDBG is only a $12 billion program of our annual $2 trillion deficit and unlikely to stand legal muster, the rumored White House reform has been quickly lauded by top surrogates of Vice President JD Vance, who reportedly spearheaded the project. Top Vance ally Michael Knowles specifically praised Vance on his podcast for diverting funds from mothers who “work in the widget factory” to mothers who “want” to “raise their kids themselves.”
In slightly less genteel terms, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, Vance’s friend who consulted on the vice president’s latest memoir, quipped that the administration “punishes enemies” and “rewards friends.” The discussion among the American Principles Project, the Heritage Foundation, and top Vance backers exploded into a metanarrative over whether women belong in the workplace and away from their children at all.
But while the CCDBG serves under a million families who indeed need paid childcare to fulfill disproportionately on-site shift work, the dichotomy between a working parent (mother) and a present one, or even a working parent (mother) and one who relies on paid childcare, is a false one.
For starters, statistics prove that mothers working is not synonymous with captivity in a cubicle or shipping off their babies to Kindercare for 50 hours a week. In fact, despite the fact that the majority of all mothers, including of infants, work and work full-time, few children attend daycare.
More than 2 in 3 mothers of children younger than 5 already work, with a majority working full-time. But according to 2022 census data, fewer than a quarter of those 4-and-unders attend daycare. The notion that most working mothers, even of pre-school-aged children, rely on formal daycare or even paid daycare is a false binary. In fact, a Federal Reserve study from just earlier this year found that among parents of children younger than 6, only a third used any paid childcare at all. Among dual-income households with children younger than 13, 46% used unpaid childcare in a given week and 36% used paid childcare.
Which brings us to the second false dichotomy: that one parent not working means that parent does not outsource childcare. Rather, the Fed found that 37% of two-parent, single-earner households used unpaid childcare and 11% used paid childcare in a given week.
But what explains how dual-earner households skirt the amounts of formal, paid, and full-time childcare that the number of hours worked would theoretically require? It’s not that a working mother is synonymous with a wholly outsourcing one, but rather that families act as units that rearrange themselves around jobs, parenting, and marriage.
Before the pandemic, a major factor was that both mothers and fathers were more likely than childless workers to work nonstandard schedules. The census found in 2014 that 61% of children in dual-earner households had at least one parent working a nonstandard schedule. If a father works as an accountant in a 9-to-5 and a mother works three 12-hour overnights as a nurse, the father parents when the mother is working.
But since COVID-19 has revolutionized remote work, mothers have seen the greatest benefit. Two in 5 women who worked full-time worked from home on a given day last year, averaging five hours of WFH per day. And according to last year’s Current Population Survey, 30% of mothers with children younger than 5 reported working remotely or hybrid.
None of this is to say that the paid childcare affordability crisis is not real and that it does not disproportionately affect the lower-income and less-educated workers with positions less likely to allow remote or hybrid work or flexible hours. It is precisely for this reason that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich reformed CCDBG-subsidized daycare for the least-skilled parents.
Individual families should decide how to divide paid labor. Policy should respect those choices without pretending that parenting and employment are mutually exclusive for either gender.
Tiana Lowe Doescher (@TianaTheFirst) is an economics columnist for the Washington Examiner.