Stay-at-home parents often go unnoticed, but the work that they do is invaluable. There are many challenges that come with at-home parenting, not the least of which is the lost income, so what can be done to support families who are making a substantial sacrifice to invest in their children?

This week on Family Policy Matters, host Traci DeVette Griggs welcomes Ivana Greco and Elliot Haspel, co-authors of the report “Invisible Labor, Visible Needs: Making Family Policy Work for Stay-At-Home (And All) Parents,” to discuss their report and how public policy can support stay-at-home parents.

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

TRACI DEVETTE 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 and supportive of 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,

IVANA GRECO: Thank you so much for having us on. Hello!

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: And Elliot Haspel.

ELLIOT HASPEL: Hi. It’s wonderful to be here.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: All right. Well, 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?

IVANA GRECO: 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 child care 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.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay, so what do stay-at-home parents and their families look like today then, and how does that compare historically?

IVANA GRECO: 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.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: 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?

IVANA GRECO: 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. But we’ve found it’s really wonderful.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: So, let’s talk about what American families say they need or want from policy makers, especially those who prefer having one parent stay-at-home with the kids.

ELLIOT HASPEL: 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 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 child care, and they actually would prefer to be out, working outside of the home. But whatever the reason, we found that a lot of the stay-at-home parents are not feeling respected by policy makers 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 healthcare and housing to actually the need for external childcare themselves.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay, well, let’s do talk a little bit more about those family policy issues in what you see as some of the key ones.

ELLIOT HASPEL: So, I can talk about the child care finding, and then Ivana, if you want to jump and talk about some of the other things that we found. So, what’s really interesting is that we found that around 60% of our respondents needed some form of external child care, 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 have this need for external childcare. But the US 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, you know, 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.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: 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 traded 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 child here?

ELLIOT HASPEL: Yeah, I think it’s a combination of things. For one thing we know that many of the you know, Ivana could talk about this, as we’ve seen this shift in the demographic. So now in the US, 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 also the cost of living has gone up, right, there are all these burdens. And so, the idea here, or we’ve sort of found, and kind of my perspective on it personally, is it 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 need, have what they need to be able to support. 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. And right, Oklahoma’s 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, you know, a job to make the bills, or being 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.

IVANA GRECO: One thing I’d like to mention is that Elliot 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 have 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.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay, are there some solutions that you think are floating around out there, that you think would be a good place to start?

IVANA GRECO: 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 asked 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 talk 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.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay, what about the idea of a baby bonus? What does that look like?

ELLIOT HASPEL: Yeah. So, the baby bonus is sort of tied into this idea of a child tax credits, the idea of you would get kind of a larger lump sum, you know, 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 I’m 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, while 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.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Right. So, what about the child and care dependent tax credit? What is that and how does that factor into this conversation?

ELLIOT HASPEL: This is a lovely government alphabet soup of tax credit. So, the child’s 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, stay-at-home parents, families with stay-at-home parents, are currently ineligible for that tax credit. However, an idea that has floated around, actually in both parties since the late 90s, is to say that families with a stay-at-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 that’s when we 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 with a stay-at-home parent can access the CDCTC as well as a bigger CTC and Child Tax Credit.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: What are some good places as far as programs or policies that you think would be the place to start? And it does that change from state to state?

IVANA GRECO: So yes, 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 policy makers right now surrounding that particular one.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Right. And do you think that’s because of the elections? I mean, do you think that was a wake-up call for politicians to take some action on this?

ELLIOT HASPEL: It’s a hard question to answer, and I’ll say here’s why. There was actually a bipartisan style 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 what, 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 you know, a powerful person in the country. So, I think there’s no question that the election results have put family policy, you know, front and center in these conversations. I just think we should be clear that, some of these conversations have been happening in previous years and really with some almost unexpected politics.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Right, okay. 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?

ELLIOT HASPEL: Yes. So, Ivana and I are both senior fellows at a family policy think tank named Capita. So, you can just go to Capita.org, the report is there, our bio and contact information is there, and that’s a great place to start.

TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: 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.

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