Should Mothers Be Paid By The Government To Raise Their Own Children?

As early as 2012, research indicated that 84% of working women desired to be at home. However, the pandemic in 2020 not only resulted in high numbers of women leaving the workforce and staying home with their children, but it also opened up more conversations about whether women who do stay home should be compensated for their time. 

Prominent figures, including Reshma Saujani, CEO of Girls Who Code, and various female celebrities, addressed this trend by placing an ad in the New York Times. They urged the Biden administration to implement a "Marshall Plan for Moms" to combat the inequities faced by women returning home to care for their children. Saujani argued that women's labor in the workforce was replaced by unpaid labor at home, which should be compensated. Managing school-age children who are now constantly at home is a significant challenge, and seeking ways to alleviate this burden is natural. Why oppose a proposal to compensate women for staying at home? Interestingly, for many on the left, the objection lies in the potential incentive for women to remain at home.

In a conversation with The Aspen Institute, Saujani addressed this criticism. She clarified that the plan aims to facilitate women's return to the workforce, not to encourage them to become stay-at-home moms. The payment is intended to be temporary and, when combined with expanded childcare aid and job training, would help women transition back to their careers. Saujani writes, “It’s time to put a dollar figure on our labor. Motherhood isn’t a favor and it’s not a luxury. It’s a job.” She argued in early 2021 that the first 100 days of the Biden administration were an opportunity to redefine societal values by starting to value moms.

A favor is done gratuitously, while a job is performed contractually. Which is a nobler and more fitting understanding of motherhood? Is motherhood a generous outpouring of love expressed through daily care and nurturing of those who cannot care for themselves? Or have we decided that mothering without payment is exploitative and demeaning, only valued when it is elevated to a paid job?

Should the Government Pay Mothers To Raise Their Own Children? 

It seems as though we are in the midst of a battle between career moms and stay-at-home moms. Even when women don’t intend to sound offensive or judgmental, the discussion gets pretty heated. Many mothers believe that there is no greater purpose than raising your own children, while others believe it’s perfectly acceptable (and many times, completely necessary) to manage both a career and a family. 

In reality, most mothers' decisions are influenced more by their circumstances than by simplistic narratives. At-home mothers often long for the skills and opportunities they miss, while working mothers of young children yearn to spend more time with them and seek ways to achieve this. 

In her pivotal 1975 text Wages against Housework, scholar Silvia Federici argues that compensating housework would challenge the notion that it is inherently part of women’s nature rather than legitimate labor. "Demanding payment for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it, because seeking a wage makes our work visible," Federici wrote. Many people who are in agreement with Federici believe that families have long faced the challenge of America’s insufficient safety net and the invisibility of housework. 

Without supports like paid leave or universal childcare, parents are left to manage on their own. For many, assigning monetary value to their efforts would highlight how a role subsidized by some governments remains unpaid in the U.S. Despite discussions around universal paid leave, affordable childcare, and monthly checks for parents, such proposals have not gained traction in the U.S. The left claims that it’s only logical to pay mothers to stay home and raise their children if we really want to bolster the family unit and see more couples have children. In fact, they think it’s outdated that our country doesn’t even have federally mandated maternity leave. 

You can certainly understand how frustrating it is for many families to struggle when living on just one income, and it can be heartbreaking to see mothers going back to work just several weeks postpartum because their work doesn’t offer any paid leave and they have no other choice in order to properly help provide for their family. 

It’s nearly impossible to federally mandate maternity leave due to the vastly differing economies that happen across the 50 states in our country. 

Although it sounds fantastic for mothers to stay home, raise their children, and get paid by the government to do so, we have to be realistic about what this would mean. When the Great Society Act was passed in 1965, it resulted in single mothers receiving government assistance – but only if they weren’t married to the father of their children. It wasn’t long before the rates of single motherhood skyrocketed in our country. Because why marry the father of your children when you can get more money from the government for remaining single? Human beings run on incentives, regardless of how much we want to deny it. If the government begins to fund mothers to raise their own children, that quickly takes out the urgency for a husband and father to provide for his family. This wouldn’t end well for many families.

Then there’s the question of whether companies should be paying mothers to stay home with their children, at least for a longer period of time, such as a whole year. As utopian as that sounds, it’s nearly impossible to federally mandate this due to the vastly differing economies that happen across the 50 states in our country. A small business in Arkansas wouldn’t be able to offer that to their female employees the same way that Google would in California. In fact, forcing all businesses to provide this kind of maternity leave would result in fewer women getting hired and many people getting laid off because the businesses can’t afford to offer such a leave to all their female employees. However, that doesn’t mean that our country can’t do more to help families raise their children. 

There Are Ways To Support Mothers Raising Their Children

We should be asking how we can better support the family unit in our country, as it’s the backbone of our society. For example, in Poland, couples who have four or more children under a certain age don’t pay income tax. Our federal government has become so greedy with our tax money and so accustomed to sending our hard-earned tax dollars overseas to fund foreign wars that they have completely forgotten how they can better support mothers. Tax breaks would certainly be a start.

Our government has also made a series of terrible decisions over the last decade that have resulted in high inflation, insane housing prices, and extreme difficulty for families to survive on a single income compared to generations of the past. Mass immigration, outsourcing jobs overseas, allowing corporations like Blackrock to purchase immense amounts of property, etc. have all resulted in wages going down, housing becoming unaffordable, and jobs being lost.

Rather than thinking about the government redirecting our tax dollars to pay mothers to stay home with their kids, we should be demanding that our government make smarter decisions with our money in order to strengthen the economy, keep jobs in the hands of middle-class Americans, and give us better tax breaks. 

Closing Thoughts

Being a mother is certainly the most important job in our society – it is the foundation of everything. But just because it’s a job doesn’t mean it should be treated as the kind of job that we see in the corporate workforce. Motherhood is in a completely different league than being an accountant or a marketing consultant. It’s inherently part of a family unit, a role that is rooted in love and compassion rather than profit and money, and it should be treated that way. This also requires a cultural shift that sees mothers and families as valuable, rather than a nuisance or a burden. We will never make changes at the political level unless our culture returns to the idea that the family unit is the strongest foundation our country will ever know. 

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