More moms wish they could stay home — our tax policies should help them

The ongoing fights over tax policy present another opportunity for Republicans to put their best pro-family foot forward. While many important details remain to be hashed out, the initial proposal released by the House Ways and Means Committee indicates that influential Republicans are serious about making sure working families will see a real benefit from the tax talks.

A high-profile element in the bill is an expansion of the child tax credit. For those who care about families’ well-being, an expansion would be worth celebrating. It recognizes the costs that parents bear in raising the next generation, and helps families with the cost of everything from diapers to groceries.

The text proposes a bump in the top-line value of the credit, from its current value of $2,000 to $2,500, before a scheduled drop back down in 2029, at which point it would be indexed for inflation. This would mean that the average middle-class couple with two school-age kids would see an additional $1,000 in tax relief for the remainder of President Trump’s term in office.

But equally importantly, the credit is a much more egalitarian form of support for families than more targeted tax breaks, such as child care subsidies. The child tax credit respects the fact that different families structure their work and home life in different ways, and that policymakers should appreciate that diversity rather than work against it.

In a 2023 poll commissioned by the Institute of Family Studies and the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where I work, we asked parents of all walks of life what their “ideal” work-life balance would look like. On average, fathers tended to say that full-time work was their “ideal” situation.

But mothers expressed a much more wide-ranging set of preferences. Their diversity of views is ill-suited by policy discussions that simply assume most moms share the preferences of the college-educated, high-powered couples that shape much of the policy discussions in D.C.

Among moms with kids at home, only 42 percent said their “ideal” arrangement was to be working full-time. One-third said they would ideally be working part-time and 22 percent said they'd prefer to not be working for pay at all. This was largely consistent among both married and unmarried mothers, but there was a major difference between mothers by educational background.

Just under half of all moms with bachelor's degrees or more said they wanted to be working full time, with another 38 percent ideally working part-time. Ten percent of moms with college degrees said they preferred not to work at all for pay.

Among moms with just some college education or only a high school diploma, their preferences were dramatically different: 38 percent wanted to be working full-time. Another 30 percent wanted to be working part-time and nearly as many, 28 percent, wanted to be at home with their kids.

Too often, in D.C. circles, “family policy” ends up being written by just one highly educated group with its own narrow set of preferences. This was typified by the Biden administration’s proposal to standardize and subsidize child care for families. Child care costs can indeed be eye-bleedingly expensive for parents looking for full-time care in New York City or Washington, D.C. But while the average cost across the U.S. varies, it is often far less than the $40,000-a-year tuition charges that garner headlines. Many parents affirmatively choose part-time day care, or mornings-only preschool, because they want to be able build a work schedule that allows for afternoons at the zoo or story time at the library. (I speak here of what I know.)

The only downside in focusing on increasing the top-line value of the child tax credit is that families with moderate to low incomes — particularly those with one parent making the median income and the other staying home raising children — will largely be unable to benefit. For them, tweaks to how the Additional Child Tax Credit is calculated — the rebate families receive if their allowable child tax credit is greater than their federal income tax liability — would be necessary, something Republicans should keep in mind.

But in principle, the Ways and Means focus on the child tax credit is a welcome sign that will hopefully remain in the final bill no matter what shape it takes. After all, the tax code’s main provision that supports working families however they choose to arrange their work-life balance should be a priority for the coalition that wants to be widely seen as the pro-parent party.

Patrick T. Brown is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.