MAGA's plan for moms comes at a cost

Vox

5 hours ago

is a senior correspondent for Vox, where she covers American family life, work, and education. Previously, she was an editor and writer at the New York Times. She is also the author of four novels, including the forthcoming Bog Queen, which you can preorder here
The MAGA movement has a particular vision of the ideal American family.
For starters, there are lots of kids. There's a dad who works a manufacturing job to provide for them financially. And, according to many influential figures on the right, there's a stay-at-home mom who holds it all together.
Prominent Republicans from Vice President JD Vance to Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri have floated policies aimed not just at boosting birth rates, a key conservative goal in recent years, but also encouraging parents to stay home with kids, as Caroline Kitchener reported at the New York Times earlier this year.
Those advocating these policies typically don't specify which parent should stay home. But Hawley, Vance, and other Republicans have been vocal about the importance of male breadwinners and women's childbearing and childrearing responsibilities, and within the larger MAGA project of pronatalism and manufacturing resurgence, it's fairly clear who the stay-at-home spouse is supposed to be.
These realities raise a basic question about social conservatives' goals: Would it even be possible to reverse decades-long global trends in women's employment and convince mothers to stay at home? Pronatalist policies generally have not worked well to increase birth rates. Manufacturing jobs probably aren't coming back. But can President Donald Trump's allies find a way to make their goals for moms a reality?
After several weeks of speaking with experts, I have good news for Vance et al: There is an answer. You just have to give moms a million dollars.
The history of moms at work
Stay-at-home motherhood is sometimes portrayed as a natural or original state of humanity, something women began to deviate from around, say, the second wave of feminism in the 1960s. In fact, mothers have moved in and out of various kinds of work over the course of American history.
'People treat the 1950s as the conventional ideal,' said Matt Darling, a senior research associate at the policy research firm MEF Associates who has written on mothers in the labor force. But if you go back to the 1800s, most white women and their husbands worked together on farms. 'The household was an economic unit,' Darling said.
As the American economy transitioned from agricultural to industrial, Darling has written, more men went to work in factories and more women focused on child care and other work in the home. Stay-at-home motherhood was never universal — Black women in the US, for example, have always worked in high numbers, with the highest labor force participation rate since record-keeping began in the 1970s, and likely before, Michelle Holder, an economics professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told me.
But in the mid-20th century, families with a male breadwinner and stay-at-home wife were more common than they are today. In 1950, 29 percent of women — 46.4 percent of single women and 21.6 percent of married women — participated in the labor force. Rather than representing a historical norm, the 1950s were one particular point in time during which a subset of American families found it most efficient for one parent to work outside the home and one to work inside it.
That point in time was also fleeting — women's labor force participation climbed steadily from the late 1940s, peaking at 60 percent in 1999 before dropping slightly. In 2024, 57.5 percent of women were in the labor force. During the same time period, men's labor force participation dropped steadily, from 86.4 percent in 1950 to 68 percent today.
What would make moms stay home?
To reverse these trends and get moms back in the home, Republicans have proposed a few ideas. One is to open up public lands for housing development, with the goal of reducing housing costs. Lower housing prices, some believe, could make it easier for families to live on one income. (It is not clear if opening up public lands would actually reduce housing costs, or how much lowering housing costs would really affect people's decisions around kids and family.)
Another plan is to change the tax code. Right now, parents get a tax credit of about $2,000 for each child they have, and an additional credit of up to $6,000 to help defray the expenses of child care. Some Republicans want to reduce the child care credit and add that money to the lump sum parents get per kid, possibly bumping it up to $5,000.
Research on increases to the child tax credit has shown a small effect on moms' labor force participation, Darling told me. For example, the temporary expansion of the child tax credit in 2021 led to a reduction in employment among mothers with low levels of education, according to one 2024 study.
But for most mothers — even those who might like to stay home — an extra $3,000 per kid isn't enough to counteract the powerful forces that have transformed the American workforce over the last half-century.
'Our expectations about what a middle-class life is like have changed'
Some of the most pressing forces are economic. 'Our expectations about what a middle-class life is like have changed to some degree' since the 1950s, Tara Watson, the director of the Center for Economic Security and Opportunity at the Brookings Institution, told me. Houses have gotten larger and more expensive. There's a greater expectation that kids will go to college, which also costs a lot of money. Extracurriculars like youth sports are pricier and more regimented than they once were.
If you wanted to make it easier for families to get by on one income, you'd have to make that income bigger by raising wages, some experts say.
'The federal minimum wage hasn't been raised since 2009,' Holder told me. Raising that would exert upward pressure on low-wage jobs in general, putting more money in parents' pockets. While Republicans have not generally supported minimum wage increases, one advocate of stay-at-home parenthood, Sen. Hawley, is sponsoring a bill that would boost the federal minimum to $15 an hour.
But there's a catch. Some believe that the transition to dual-earner families happened not because of rising costs, but because of rising incomes. It sounds counterintuitive, but Darling has laid out the case, citing the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin. Essentially, wages began to rise in the years after WWII, especially in fields like office work that were more open to women than factory labor had been.
Rising wages gave moms an increasing incentive to work — if they stayed home, they'd be leaving more and more money on the table. (Some research also posits that women are more likely to work outside the home when their potential earnings outstrip the cost of child care.) As Darling put it to me, 'it might not be worth it for me to take a job when it's $10 an hour, but it might be worth it to me when it's $15.'
If more women started working in part because of rising wages, then boosting wages even more might incentivize even more women to work. Instead, the only way to get more women to stay home, some say, would be to pay them to do just that.
What's the going rate for giving up your career?
It's not unheard of: According to the Times, Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) has introduced a bill that would pay stay-at-home parents for providing child care, an approach that's been proposed by some liberals as well. The bill would allow subsidies that currently go to child care providers through the federal Child Care & Development Block Grant to go to family members instead.
The idea of compensating family members for providing care isn't new, or unique to Republicans — a number of states, including New Jersey, offer payment for what's known as family, friend, and neighbor care. But subsidy rates tend to be very low, and some family members who receive them say they're not even enough to cover the cost of what children need (like diapers and food), let alone enough to provide someone with a living wage.
If you really wanted lots and lots of American moms to leave paid work for stay-at-home care, you'd have to pay them more — a lot more.
That's because you're not just replacing their income (which, in 45 percent of cases, pays the majority of bills in the household); you're also working against 75 years of American culture.
A hundred years ago, many American women would have been very happy to take money to stay home, said Alice Evans, a senior lecturer at King's College London who writes about gender roles across societies. Their society already idealized (white) stay-at-home motherhood and they gained prestige and status from their role as moms. Today, however, 'women see success and status in having a career.'
That success has been very real, and goes beyond pure economics. When American women entered the workplace, they achieved greater independence and the ability to leave bad marriages. Many found new social relationships and new sources of meaning and fulfillment. Women gained more power in society, more seats in Congress and on corporate boards, and more rights (though none of this came without struggle or backlash).
In a 2023 McKinsey report on women in the workplace, 80 percent of women said they wanted to be promoted, the same share as men. A full 96 percent said their career was important to them.
To get women to drop out of the workforce, then, the government would need to give them enough money to overcome the powerful incentives, both financial and social, that drive them to work. 'Maybe if someone offered me a million, I'd stop doing my Substack,' Evans joked.
When I asked Goldin, who won the Nobel in 2023 for her work on women's employment, whether policies like baby bonuses or larger child tax credits would convince moms to stay home, she replied, 'Are we giving them a million dollars?'
What if even $1 million isn't enough?
Obviously neither Evans nor Goldin has studied whether giving moms a check for $1 million would convince them to stay home with their kids. Even in today's inflationary times, that number is basically a shorthand for a lot of money.
The point is, if you want mothers to give up all the benefits they get from working, you're going to have to make it really financially attractive. And that's expensive.
If there are about 25 million working moms in the US, giving each one a million dollars would cost the US about $25 trillion, an amount that dwarfs even the $2.8 trillion Trump's 'big, beautiful bill' is projected to cost the country over the next 10 years. Costs grow even more if the $1 million is an annual payout rather than a one-time sum. Paying only moms in the labor force without offering the same sum to moms already caring for kids at home also seems unfair — including the around 9 million stay-at-home moms in the US would boost the total even further.
'There's really no way to consider having even a fraction of those women withdraw from the labor force without it affecting the American economy'
And that's all before we factor men into the equation. A two-parent home with a stay-at-home mom requires another person to be the sole breadwinner — according to a lot of socially conservative thinkers, that person should be a man, ideally a husband.
But that puts a lot of pressure on young men, many of whom aren't even sure they want to get married, let alone bear the sole financial responsibility for a family, Evans pointed out. 'It's not just about giving women a million,' she said. How much would you have to pay men to go back to a 1950s nuclear family model, in which the entire burden of providing for a family rested on their shoulders?
Getting a large number of moms to quit their jobs would also have indirect costs. The 25 million mothers working today are treating patients, teaching kids, selling products, and contributing to the country's GDP in innumerable ways. 'There's really no way to consider having even a fraction of those women withdraw from the labor force without it affecting the American economy,' Holder said.
Trump and members of his administration have at times hinted that shrinking the American economy is acceptable if it allows the country to return to its manufacturing past. But tariffs purportedly designed to bring manufacturing jobs back home (and, some hope, bring men back to their former position of dominance in families and society) have been so unpopular that the administration has had to walk many of them back. It's hard to imagine that tanking the economy to get moms back in the home would fare much better.
There are also surprisingly popular cultural forces — think tradwife influencers — encouraging women to prioritize stay-at-home motherhood, but it's a campaign that's unlikely to succeed at scale, due to cultural fragmentation and the hyperpersonalization of social media. 'It's much, much harder for, say, government to change people's values' than it might have been in the past, Evans said, 'because we're not all watching the same shows.'
There are, of course, other options for supporting American families. If policymakers wanted to help moms with the costs and challenges of raising kids, they could institute national paid leave programs, Holder said. They could also make child care more accessible and affordable.
In surveys, a significant minority of moms say the best setup for them would actually be to work part-time. If we wanted to make part-time work easier for parents, we could tackle unpredictable part-time schedules that make it hard for workers, especially at the lower end of the wage spectrum, to balance work and child care, Darling said.
All this would probably cost less than $25 trillion. But if what Republicans want is to get moms back in the home, they're going to have to pay up. I will take my million in cash.