How Public Policy Can Support Stay at Home Parents (with Ivana Greco and Elliot Haspel)

Welcome to Family Policy Matters, a weekly podcast and radio show produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. Hi, I'm John Rustin, President of NC Family. And each week on Family Policy Matters, we welcome experts and policy leaders to discuss topics that impact faith and family here in North Carolina. Our prayer is that this program will help encourage and equip you to be a voice of persuasion for family policy matters.

Your family values in your community, state and nation. And now here's the host of Family Policy Matters, Tracy Devitt Griggs. Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters. A challenging financial landscape for many families played a large role in the 2024 elections. Republican and Democrat politicians alike campaigned on promises to cut taxes for families and brainstormed a host of policy proposals intended to make life more affordable for families. While many in the headlines focused on solutions such as universal daycare or childcare subsidies, surveys have consistently found that families prefer the financial flexibility to have one parent stay home, especially when children are young. Well, two family policy researchers have now published a thorough report looking at these important issues.

It's entitled Invisible Labor, Visible Needs, Making Family Policy Work for Stay-at-Home and All Parents. We're grateful to have the authors of that report with us today. Welcome, Ivana Greco. Thank you so much for having us on. Hello.

And Elliot Haspel. Hi, it's wonderful to be here. All right, welcome to Family Policy Matters. So first of all, why did you write this report? For whom did you write it?

And why do you consider it a valuable resource for us? We really wrote this report for both stay-at-home parents and for policy analysts. I am a stay-at-home mother myself.

I have four children. Elliot is an expert in childcare policy. And we designed the report to really make the invisible, which are stay-at-home parents, they're very invisible to the rest of society, more visible to them. Okay, so what do stay-at-home parents and their families look like today then?

And how does that compare historically? I would say that there are two major differences between stay-at-home parents historically and stay-at-home parents today. The first big one is that there are a number of stay-at-home dads today. When we did a survey of stay-at-home parents, many of the parents who responded were men.

Around 30% of our respondents were male. And then there also are a lot of stay-at-home parents who are home with their children during the day but do some amount of paid work. So it used to be that the typical trajectory was that mom was home for the entirety of her working life, you know, until she reached retirement age and dad was in the workforce. And we see much more flexibility now with mom going in and out of the workforce as family needs require or with dad stepping out of the workforce to stay home with the kids.

So it really is a very different landscape than it used to look like 40 or 50 years ago. Well, Ivana, obviously you're not a typical stay-at-home mom either. You somehow fit in this humongous report and you work from home. So how does that work for you individually? Well, it is complicated. So I have four children, one of whom is a newborn. I also homeschool my children. And then I also work.

So there are just a lot of moving pieces. My older children know how to occupy themselves when I'm doing something like this interview. My husband and I try to make it work together in terms of sort of tag-teaming our different work.

And it requires a lot of flexibility. We found it's really worth it. So let's talk about what American families say they need or want from policymakers, especially those who prefer having one parent stay at home with the kids.

So it's really interesting. One of the things that we found doing our research and it was a combination of the survey that Ivana mentioned, we also did a series of focus groups with stay-at-home parents. And one of the things is there's a wide variety of opinions and either stay-at-home parents are not a monolith and the reasons for staying home really vary, right? Some of them deeply they want to be home with their children when they're younger.

Some of them it's a religious belief. Some of them their child has a special medical need. Some of them it's because they can't find and afford paid childcare and they actually would prefer to be working outside of the home. But whatever the reason, we found that a lot of stay-at-home parents are not feeling respected by policymakers or by society. They were not able to access the kind of supports that they and their families need to thrive.

And we can get into those. Those range from things around health care and housing to actually the need for external childcare themselves. OK, well, let's do talk a little bit more about those family policy issues and what you see as some of the key ones.

So I can talk about the childcare finding and then Yvonne, if you want to jump in, talk about some of the other things that we found. So what's really interesting is that we found that around 60 percent of our respondents needed some form of external childcare at least monthly and some of them more frequently than that. And that was, again, for everything from they need to go to the doctor, they need to take a child to the doctor.

They want to be able to have a break, have some time with their spouse or their partner. So they had this need for external childcare, but the U.S. childcare system is very much in what the government calls a market failure. There's not enough of it.

It's very expensive. There's very little public money going into the system. And so there's very little childcare available. When these stay-at-home parents need someone to watch the children, even though they are themselves providing primary childcare during the day, they still need a childcare system around them. And the current one in the United States really doesn't work for them. Yeah. Let me just jump in here, because, you know, it seems like you're asking the government to take the place of what at least what we used to be just like friends.

I mean, we trade it off. I would have their kids one day. Why is it important, I guess, for the government to be involved in helping these stay-at-home moms find sporadic childcare?

Yeah, I think it's a combination of things. For one thing, we know that many of the, you know, I could talk about this as we've seen this shift in the demographics. So now in the U.S., two thirds of all young children of all their available parents are in the workforce. So there are fewer stay-at-home parents, there are fewer folks around in the neighborhood to do that kind of informal. And then the cost of living has gone up.

There are all these burdens. So the idea here or we've found in my perspective on it personally is not in any way about the government taking over the child care, child rearing. It's about the government coming alongside parents in a supportive role and helping parents have the work care situation.

They have what they need to be able to. So we've seen states like Oklahoma during the height of the pandemic set up a system where grandparents and aunts and uncles of essential workers could actually get paid by the state of Oklahoma. Oklahoma was a pretty conservative state to help watch those children because there needed to be some support. And so we have a situation where a grandparent is kind of choosing between having to work a job to make the bills or be able to watch their grandchildren. Then it's actually maybe to the good to have a way for society to support these family, friend, neighbor caregivers, to say nothing of the more sort of licensed types of care. One thing I'd like to mention is that Ellie and I come from very different sides of the political spectrum, but we're united by our belief that there are very important supports that government can offer to make families have the choices that they're comfortable with and caring for their children. So we are united around the idea that it is very important for families to either be comfortable having their kids at home and be able to make that work or be comfortable with the child care situation that's available to them if both parents want to work. So I do see a very serious role for policy here, and in addition to helping to provide ad hoc child care, making that available, the parents we talked to had many of the same concerns that parents where both of them are working have, which are they're worried about retirement, they're worried about health care, and they're worried about housing. And in all of those areas, families that have a stay at home parent are really encountering serious struggles because often they just make less money than families where both parents work. And so they're very worried about what the future looks like for them in terms of retirement.

They struggle to find good, affordable health care, and they often struggle to find housing that's cheap enough for them. So those are some of the things that we heard from the parents we interviewed where one parent is staying at home. Okay. Are there some solutions that you think are floating around out there that you think would be a good place to start?

Sure. So it's interesting, when we talk to the parents, we ask them what solutions they would be interested in, like rather than imposing our ideas of what would be a good solution, we ask them what would be most helpful to them. And by and large, what they wanted was cash. They wanted tax credits. They wanted something that would be flexible so that they could make the right decision for their family. We had one mom being like, I don't really want the government to decide for me what to do with the funds. I really want our family to be deciding what it is that we need. So the child tax credit came up a number of times when we talked to families because that is the sort of solution where, okay, they get the money back and then they can decide how best to help themselves prepare for the future or tackle their problems in the present.

Okay. What about the idea of a baby bonus? What does that look like? Yeah, so the baby bonus is sort of tied into this idea of a child tax credit. It's the idea that you would get kind of a larger lump sum when the child is born.

And it's sort of similar to what Ivana was just describing. It's a version of that idea of direct cash support for families. Because obviously, you know, the needs increase acutely when you have a newborn.

I have two children myself, so if you're familiar with this. It also sort of has an interesting interplay with this question of paid leave policy and what that looks like. Because, again, if you're not working beforehand, you know, under current paid leave law, you don't have any access to support there. So there are some really the baby bonus is an interesting idea, I think, which is another way of making sure that we're providing material support to families during those really essential and also pretty vulnerable first months and years of having a child. So what about the child and care dependent tax credit?

What is that and how does that factor into this conversation? This is a lovely government alphabet soup of tax credit. So the child tax credit is generally like you get that right now just because you have a kid and because it's good for society to have healthy families and kids.

And so you get some support. The child and dependent care tax credit was conceived as a way to sort of defray child care costs. So right now, you know, you're sending your child to a licensed child care center.

You can claim some of those expenses with that tax credit because of how it was put together. So for state home parents, families of state home parents are currently ineligible for that tax rate. However, an idea that is floated around actually in both parties since the late 90s is to say that families of the state home parent and a young child.

You can actually sort of claim a minimum amount, regardless of whether you have someone working out or both parents working outside the home. So if you talk about the reform of that bill, which may come up in this upcoming Republican reconciliation tax package that they're talking about, that's one of our recommendations in the report is to make sure that resurrect that old idea and make sure the families of the state home parent can access the CDC as well as a bigger CTC and child tax credit. What are some good places as far as programs or policies that you think would be the place to start?

And does that change from state to state? I think the child tax credit is the serious one right now that seems to be considered most seriously by government officials and the one that is the most likely to pass in the new administration. There is a lot of appetite among policymakers right now surrounding that particular one. Right. And do you think that's because of the elections? I mean, do you think that was a wake up call for for politicians to take some action on this? It's a hard question to answer.

And I'll say here's why. There was actually a bipartisan tax credit expansion bill that passed the House of Representatives in the last Congress that was then failed in a vote in the Senate, actually, because the Republican caucus blocked it. So it's been around kind of in the world. Right.

Like there was an expanded tax credit that came in during the pandemic. And so I think, though, it is very clear that this question of family policy and how we support families is this is a strong interest. Right. Vice president elect Vance has spoken about this extensively and clearly he now is going to be the second most powerful person in the in the country. So I think there's no question that the election results have put family policy front and center in these conversations. I think we should be clear. So these some of these conversations have been happening in previous years and really with some almost unexpected politics. Right.

OK, well, we're just about out of time for this week before we go. Ivana Greco and Elliot Haspel, where can our listeners go to read your report, which, of course, is called Invisible Labor, Visible Needs, Making Family Policy Work for Stay-at-Home and All Parents? And also just to learn more about your good work.

So Ivana and I are both senior fellows at a family policy think tank named CAPITA so that you can just go to CAPITA.org, C-A-P-I-T-A dot org. The report is there. Our bio and contact information is there. And that's a great place to start. All right.

Very interesting. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us, Ivana Greco and Elliot Haspel. Thank you so much for being with us today on Family Policy Matters. Thank you for listening to Family Policy Matters.

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show and leave us a review. To learn more about NC Family and the work we do to promote and preserve faith and family in North Carolina. Visit our website at NC family dot org. That's NC family dot o r g. And check us out on social media at NC Family Policy. Thanks and may God bless you and your family.