The Parenting Choice America Made Nearly Impossible

Can a parent be a child care provider? Framed one way, the question is trivial: All parents provide care for their children. But the conservative movement has been divided in the last week by the question of whether a parent can be an official child care provider, one who is eligible to receive the value of a childcare subsidy that might otherwise go to a childcare center. 

The rumored proposal, which would allow families with a stay-at-home parent to receive funds through the Child Care and Development Fund block grant, seems directly inspired by the move to include homeschoolers in some school voucher programs. The possible rule prioritizes parental choice and flexibility.  The idea is responsive to parents’ real frustration, though the existing problems with the CCDF block grant make it an awkward vehicle to help these parents. 

The CCDF is a welfare-to-work program that has always been focused on helping poor families rise by subsidizing childcare expenses, so parents can afford to work or go to school. The new idea is controversial for two reasons: First, because it would allow some parents to be exempted from the requirement to work, and second, because it would add more eligible parents to a program that already doesn’t have enough funds to cover the families ostensibly eligible for aid. 

The CCDF is a block grant, and Congress has not expanded the funding for this program as the cost of child care has risen. As a result, in 2023, only about one in seven families who should receive subsidies actually receive them. Instead of reliable help for working families, the CCDF offers a lottery ticket. Adding more eligible families to a system that’s already falling short further worsens the odds, but the new rule isn’t breaking a functional program. The CCDF desperately needs added funds to function at all, regardless of whether it undergoes further expansion. Funding can’t be done via executive order and ought to receive bipartisan support in Congress. Lawmakers can’t give themselves credit for creating a program and refusing to fund it. 

Like almost everyone else writing on this proposal, I haven’t seen a draft of the rule under consideration, just secondary coverage responding to the leak of the idea to the New York Times. That makes it hard to know exactly how the proposed plan would work. Would it be a binding rule for all states, or would it allow states to opt in to including families with a stay-at-home parent if they chose?

In 2022, Governor Spencer Cox of Utah petitioned the Biden administration for exactly this kind of flexibility. Cox cited surveys of Utah residents that found 81% of them preferred to have a child too young for school watched by a parent or guardian. Cox was frustrated that a program intended to help poor families rise made that help contingent on overriding their better judgment about their children’s needs. 

Cox proposed a waiver that would allow the state to support families with a stay-at-home parent while raising the work requirement for the working parent. As Cox pointed out, Utah’s rules already allowed married parents to qualify with two part-time workers (one averaging 15 hours a week, the other 30 hours a week). Cox hoped to allow families to qualify under an alternate standard, where the working parent needed to hit 40 hours a week, but the other parent could stay home. The Biden administration rejected the waiver request.

Utah filed for an exemption because it has particularly high rates of families with a stay-at-home parent, but a significant share of parents share these preferences nationwide. In a 2026 survey of parents with kids younger than six, New America (no hotbed of social conservatism!) found that parents caring for their young children at home was by far the most wished-for childcare option (49%). Only 15% of parents said center-based care was their ideal, and 11% preferred a relative or friend as their child’s caregiver. 

CCDF subsidies do a poor job of allowing parents to make the choices they think are best for their children. The childcare subsidy ostensibly allows families to opt for some version of kin care. Parents are currently barred from caring for their own children under CCDF, but grandparents and other family members are technically eligible to receive the subsidy, just like a professional center provider would. In practice, take-up is almost nonexistent, with only about 5% of children who get subsidies receiving care from a relative in their home or their relative’s home. 

It’s not clear what shape this rule will take in its final form, but since we appear to be having the public comment period early, the administration is right to ask how this program can help parents opt for the care they think is best. States have relied too much on licensing and credentialism as the bar for quality, rather than parents’ judgment and personal knowledge of caregivers in their community. A final rule might focus on steering states to prioritize the accessibility of kin care, so that relatives who are already eligible in theory to receive the childcare subsidy have more success claiming it in practice.

Another potential form the rule could take would be to expand eligibility for parent care, but to tailor the support to the years when it matters most. CCDF covers care for children up to age 13, but a final version of this rule could allow payments to parents for the first year after a child’s birth. This is the window where the presence of a parent matters most, and when it is the most challenging and expensive to buy care from a professional provider.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, some states experimented with an alternative to the CCDF funds called At Home Infant Care (AHIC) that, like this proposed rule, let subsidy payments go to parents, not professionals. AHIC was funded by states, since CCDF funds explicitly couldn’t be used to support parents directly. The programs were promising but ultimately lapsed. Instead of having states cover the cost, the federal government could exempt one parent in a household from CCDF’s work requirement for the first six months to a year of their baby’s life. Caring for an infant would be treated the way being enrolled in school is — an investment in the family’s future.

Encouraging states to resume pilots of AHIC-like programs with federal dollars would allow enthusiastic governors such as Spencer Cox to experiment while other states wait to see how the programs play out. Allowing parents of babies to care for them directly, as they most frequently desire, would mean the government was supporting the natural family, not forcing parents to contract out the care that matters most.

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Leah Sargeant is the author of “The Dignity of Dependence” and works on public policy in Washington, D.C.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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