A Trump proposal would punish single parents. Other wealthy countries have a different approach

When news broke that the Trump administration planned to pay married couples to have one parent stay home with their kids, everyone from policy wonks to Redditors bemoaned what they saw as a new front in the mommy wars.

The proposal would shift funds that subsidize childcare for low-income working parents – the majority of them single parents who rely on childcare providers – to low-income married couples with one earner. Given that most single parents and stay-at-home parents are women, and both groups would be applying for the same limited funds, it seemed almost designed to pit moms against each other.

Details on the policy, initially reported by the New York Times, are scant. However, like many of other nominally pronatalist policy proposals the administration has entertained so far, it appears this one is less focused on addressing the deeper challenges that face parents and aspiring parents as celebrating a throwback family structure.

The policy’s exceptionally narrow criteria for eligibility – married, with one person in the workforce and one at home with the kids – is highly unusual, according to family policy experts. Only about 20% of American families with children fit this specific household type, said Daniel L Carlson, a family studies professor at the University of Utah and the executive director of the Council on Contemporary Families, a research network. Other countries that offer a home-care allowance, or funding for parents to stay home with children, do not restrict it to specific family forms. Jennifer Glass, a professor emerita at the Population Research Center at University of Texas, Austin, said she could not think of a single European country that conditioned childcare support or other family benefits on parents being married and one of them staying home full-time.

“It’s this weaving between wanting to give money to married mothers who are stay-at-home mothers, but not wanting to give money to single mothers,” said Shawn Fremstad, director of law and political economy and a senior adviser at the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research. “Other countries have figured out that you can do something for everybody, but we’ve never really figured that out.”

In one comparison of 15 developed countries, single parents with one child under six received an average of $3,000 and $5,000 annually, although the amounts ranged between $1,500 to more than $20,000. In Canada, for example, the province of Ontario provides an additional benefit of $147 a month per child to low- and moderate-income households, on top of the national child benefit. Many countries also heavily subsidize childcare for all families, with high-earning families paying a capped amount and low-income families often paying nothing. In Sweden the most a family can pay for childcare for their first child is $180 a month, less than an American family’s weekly grocery bill.

Sweden has long promoted gender equality through its family policies: parental leave structured to all but require men to take several months off, plus highly subsidized childcare to make working parenthood a norm. Sweden did for eight years experiment with paying parents to stay home in a manner similar to the one proposed by the Trump administration, although theirs was not linked to marital status. Critics called it a “housewife trap”, and the benefit was scrapped in 2016; conservatives are seeking to revive it.

Hungary, which under former prime minister Viktor Orbán’s conservative Fidesz party launched some of the most generous family benefits in the world in an attempt to boost fertility, is an outlier in conditioning some of them on marriage. For example, in 2019 it announced an interest-free loan of about $31,000 to young first-time wives that is partly forgiven if they have two kids and fully forgiven if they have three, as well as home-buying grants and mortgage deductions for couples that also increase in value with additional children.

While these policies have not resulted in the baby boom that pronatalists were hoping for, they did increase the share of kids born to married couples, halting within Hungary’s borders an otherwise continent-wide trend of rising single motherhood, observed Patrick Brown, a family policy expert at the conservative Washington DC thinktank Ethics and Public Policy Center. “If you really lean hard on making benefits much more generous to married couples as opposed to single moms, you see that trend reverse,” he said.

But even Hungary does not condition eligibility on one parent leaving the workforce, and in fact many of the most generous benefits, such as the elimination of income tax for mothers with two or more children, are only available to moms who work. “The general attempt to raise births by providing more benefits to stay-at-home mothers has clearly failed historically in EU countries,” Glass said, adding that countries with policies that supported women to continue working throughout their childbearing years have on balance maintained higher fertility.

When European countries do single out specific family types, it’s typically to extend extra help to solo-parent households. In the Netherlands and Sweden, single parents receive additional monthly payments on top of the universal child benefits. Some countries even assume the responsibility of paying child support to single parents, rather than forcing them to chase ex-partners in court. Germany is one such country: on top of a universal monthly payment of 259 euros to all parents, single parents can receive an additional sum if their child’s other parent doesn’t pitch in enough. Denmark’s support for single parents is so robust – everything from additional child allowances to 22 extra weeks of paid leave – that it has a large cadre of “solomor”, or single mothers by choice.

Caretakers go through vocabulary words with children at Robindell private school, a 24/7 childcare center, in Houston, Texas. Photograph: Houston Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers/Getty Images

The US displays no such generosity. While it has a higher-than-average rate of single motherhood among wealthy countries, it stands out for attaching the highest penalty to having a single mom. In the US, the probability of poverty increases by nearly 10 percentage points if a child resides with a single mother, compared with a coupled household, according to a 2024 study; in 24 out of 30 rich countries, there is no penalty at all, and for the six that do leave children of single mothers worse-off, the US is by far the most egregious offender – no other country makes children pay so dearly for their parents’ failure to marry.

The divergent outcomes suggest that family structure, per se, does not cause poverty, observes David Brady, a policy scholar at the University of Southern California and one of the study’s co-authors. “If it’s just the case that single mothers fundamentally are disadvantaged, and there’s nothing we can do about it, then you would expect in other countries single mothers would be poor too, right?” he said. “We make a choice in America to punish children in single-mother families. Other countries say, ‘We’re going to take care of all children.’”

In the Netherlands and in Denmark, children in single-mother households are actually significantly less likely to be poor than in coupled households, despite single mothers facing significant barriers in the labor market. “The difference is the government steps in and helps,” Brady said.

The new proposal from the Trump administration looks more like the government stepping in to hurt. Since the majority of these funds go to childcare centers to subsidize the cost, with parents paying a small additional amount out of pocket, the reallocation of resources to stay-at-home parents could force childcare centers to either raise prices or close. Transferring money from the poorest dual-earner and single-parent families towards their married peers will also likely amount to upwards redistribution: families and children in the new target group for the limited childcare funds at stake are already relatively better off than those in single-parent families, according to a recent analysis of household incomes by the Cuny policy scholar Sophie Collyer.

To be sure, many laws and policies already favor the family form celebrated by Vice-president JD Vance, who has been a key champion of this particular proposal and has claimed that young children are “harmed” by spending long hours in daycare. For example, the US tax code is structured such that high-earning married couples with one working parent enjoy a tax break averaging $8,000 per child – about 2.5 times the tax benefits received by low-income families of any type, and four times the roughly $2,000 per child that high-income families with two equal-earning spouses receive, Collyer has found. More than 1,000 US statutory provisions confer different benefits depending on marital status.

Many family policy experts, including some conservatives, were skeptical that the proposed policy shift would actually spur more marriages or additional births. But it is “meant to encourage a particular family model”, said sociologist Caitlyn Collins, whose book Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving examined work-family policy in four western countries. Specifically, she continued, “the 1950s Leave-It-to-Beaver family model, with a father who works outside the home and arrives back every evening to find a perfectly coiffed wife wearing pearls and heels setting a hot meal down on the table alongside two blonde, blue-eyed children waiting to greet him.”

Otherwise, Collins said, benefits would be conditioned on the number of children and family income, as they are in so many other places. “​​Why should marriage have anything to do with it?