A baby bonus isn't what we need

American families need help that paying people to have babies won't provide

Is paying cash for every newborn a good policy? It hasn’t worked anywhere else. (Unsplash photo by Christian Bowen)

---

There’s just too much news. Like, here I was, worrying about famine in Gaza and government attacks on press freedom, health protection and independent education in America, and paying so much attention to the economic consequences likely to flow from a tantrum-induced trade war and billionaire-benefiting tax breaks, that I nearly missed the effort to put half our population back where they damn well belong, which is clearly in the kitchen and the bedroom.

Oh, sorry — that was not written in the neutral tone of journalism that I was long ago trained to use, and which I insisted upon during my decades as a newspaper editor. Let me try to explain more precisely, then, and without offensive sarcasm, the Trump administration policy initiatives that I had largely ignored until my wife — a part of that misplaced half of the population, you know — insisted that I take a closer look. So:

Eager to promote so-called conservative family values and stimulate the declining birthrate among American citizens, the Trump administration is moving toward embracing policies that would reward people for having babies and encourage larger families. People familiar with the thinking of White House advisers, however, say the benefits would likely flow only to families that conform to traditional gender roles and family structures.

In other nations where the policies have been tried, they have been ineffective. Critics say they wouldn’t address the crisis in child care and elder care that has put enormous pressure on women in the workplace, leading millions to leave their jobs or temper their ambitions.

There. I think that says it.

But if you, too, have missed most of the talk about this topic while you were worrying about something else — about, say, America abandoning its democratic principles and its global allies, or about the millions of children who will surely die after losing food and health aid that the United States had provided, or about the global chaos that looms ever more likely as this nation surrenders in the fight to slow the devastation of climate change — well, here’s a chance to pay a bit of attention to this issue.

So if you’re part of that half of the American population who might be most affected by these policy changes, or if you love someone who is, I invite you to turn away from those other issues for just a bit here, and check out this chapter of Donald Trump’s Devastation Tour. (If you’re happy with the way Donald Trump has handled his interactions with that half of us, you should feel free to move on to something that you’ll surely find less unsettling.)

My mother dropped out of college after two years to get married, and so did her daughter, my older sister. My mother was 19 and my sister was 20, both just about at the median age for women to marry for the first time in their days — my mom in 1941, my sister in 1964. Both of them said they wanted nothing so much as to be good moms and wives, roles they had been raised to believe would fully satisfy their innate human desires for safety, belonging and mattering. When I was in elementary school, I learned that rather than referring to my mother as a “housewife,” as I had at first been taught, I should use the term “homemaker,” which was more respectful of her many duties.

While not much had changed in the expectations of women in that nearly quarter century between the marriages of mother and daughter, a lot soon did. My sister’s wedding came just a year after the publication of Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique, a book credited with launching so-called second-wave feminism. It set in motion new demands for social equality regardless of sex, along with resistance to the norms of a male-dominated society that idealized certain notions of female beauty and pushed women to settle for lower-paid jobs, or to stay at home.

Not every such effort succeeded — notably, the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution wasn’t ratified — but as more families acknowledged that Mom might want to get out of the kitchen and the laundry room, women emerged into previously off-limits roles in many workplaces. It’s one of the many factors that contributed to a changing demographic that now finds people getting married later in life and having fewer children, and an increasing share choosing to never marry.

So while the stereotypical American family in the early 1960s and before featured a husband as the sole breadwinner, two-thirds of families today have two earners, and almost half of all workers nationally are women. Yet a pay gap remains: For every dollar that men earn, women earn about 82 cents. And while women have moved into roles in society that my mother wouldn’t have imagined, the notion of gender equality is far from realized: In the current Congress, just 28 percent of the lawmakers are women; among the Fortune 500 companies, only 10 percent have women as CEOs.

Part of what makes it hard to be a woman in the workforce is the reality of home life: Moms still shoulder a disproportionate load of the work, surveys show. And, significantly, there’s a nationwide shortage of direct care workers for both children and the elderly, leading millions of women to decide that they need to stay home to provide care.

That problem is on the verge of ballooning into a crisis as a result of two Trump administration initiatives: proposed cuts to Medicaid, which will reduce the dollars available to hire caregivers, and the crackdown on immigrants, who comprise 28 percent of the long-term care workforce. Even if families can find caregivers, they’re likely to discover that persistent inflation, which will be exacerbated by the Trump administration’s tariff policies, will push many of those options out of reach.

Common sense, then, suggests that families would benefit from federal initiatives to expand care options and make them more affordable, so that women could remain in the workforce and succeed there. You might think that the U.S. would finally join every other industrialized country in requiring employers to provide some paid family leave; we’re one of only five countries that requires no paid leave. For example: Canada requires employers to cover 50 weeks of leave at 55 percent pay, and the U.K. requires a full year at 90 percent pay.

The Trump team takes a different approach: It is trying to encourage women to have more babies and to stay home and care for them. If this strikes you as counter-intuitive, you’ve been paying attention to the wrong things. Common sense is not a prerequisite for policy development in Washington these days.

Maybe if we give moms money for having a baby, some Trump advisers are saying, they’ll decide to reproduce. Just a moment — we will get to why that is perceived as a good idea when it’s already hard for parents to keep up with childcare costs.

One proposal gaining currency in the Trump White House would give a $5,000 cash “baby bonus” to every American mother after delivery — which might sound like a boon, unless you consider the cost of everything from diapers to new shoes. A 2023 study put the average cost of raising a child to age 18 at $389,000. A $5,000 baby bonus, then, would cover about three months of the child’s life.

But the baby bonus proposal isn’t really about helping families get by. Nor is it really aimed at hiking the U.S. birthrate, which has been declining since 2007. That’s a valid concern, since if there aren’t enough new workers to support an aging population as it leaves the workforce, the nation’s economy could collapse.

There’s an easier solution to that issue than trying to grow more workers from little seeds. We might turn, as America historically has, to immigrants, who comprised one-fifth of the U.S. workforce in 2023. Federal Reserve Board chair Jerome Powell noted recently that immigration is “a big part of the story of the labor market coming back into better balance.” But that’s not the kind of workforce that the Trump administration wants to encourage, of course. It is working to deport, not support, the immigrant workers.

Nor are non-traditional families part of the Trump vision of America. Ever since his first campaign for president, Trump has stressed that any family leave plan that might come to him from Congress ought to apply only to biological mothers who are legally married. Families created through adoption, fostering or any other means would be denied support, as his daughter Ivanka declared early in his first term as she articulated his views on the issue.

Which is where the Trump family policy and the emerging push for baby bonuses finds its sweet spot: among the Christian conservatives who have always formed the core of Trump’s support. To evangelical and fundamental Christians, marriage should exist only between a man and a woman, and the purpose of marriage is to build Christian families. Women belong in the home, and a baby bonus would seem to support the command in Genesis to “be fruitful and multiply,” a command that deeply religious Christians and Jews alike take literally.

It's a notion that is popular among people close to Trump, including Elon Musk, who has acknowledged that he is the father of 14 children, and Vice President JD Vance, who has said that parents should have more political clout than childless people, and that Americans without children should pay higher taxes.

Critics might note that the idea conflicts with the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that declared that the right to marriage cannot be restricted to only heterosexual couples. Based upon that Constitutional view, other benefits also can’t be denied non-traditional couples — not a family leave benefit, for example, nor a baby bonus.

Interestingly, a baby bonus has been tried elsewhere — in one form or another, in Russia, Italy, Greece and Hungary — and nowhere has it convinced parents to have more babies. You would think that their experience would be instructive. But when has the Trump administration been discouraged by clear signs that its direction is futile, or even harmful?

As the product of a so-called traditional family, you might think that I would be in the camp of Vance and Musk. But I’m not lucky by virtue of being the biological child of a married dad and mom; it was, rather, the love in my home that provided a foundation for the dreams that my family encouraged me to pursue. No cash bonus can generate that.

And I was lucky to grow up at a time when our government wasn’t run by a morally compromised ideologue driven primarily by personal ambition rather than by society’s needs, and whose vision for America never grew beyond what he could see as a teenager — a time I well recall as an excited 12-year-old usher at my sister’s wedding. I’m sorry for the children in today’s America.

It’s odd, of course, to imagine anyone viewing Donald Trump as a champion of the family — he who has been convicted of sexual assault, who has violated the vows of his three marriages, and who bragged on tape, with vulgar language (the most memorable line of which we won’t quote here), that “when you’re a star… you can do anything.”

And he will do anything, it seems, except what really might benefit American families, and women in particular. So, yes, it’s hard to keep track of everything emerging from the White House these days that might rightly worry us. Probably the notion of paying people to have babies is pretty far down the list of the ways this presidency can hurt us.

But it’s unwise and unfair. In another time, that would mark it as intolerable. How sad it is, then, that we hardly notice it now.

---

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

This essay suggests that the Trump administration’s policies are aimed at returning America to a time when only traditional family forms were tolerated, and that the result would limit the options for today’s women. Do you agree?

---

TRAINING

DO YOU WANT TO LEARN TO WRITE OP-EDS?

If you’d like some training in writing opinion essays — for newspapers, audio or digital platforms — check out the live 90-minute class Rex co-teaches that is offered by Marion Roach Smith’s global platform for writing instruction, The Memoir Project. Click below for information on our upcoming schedule of classes.

Our next class is Tuesday, June 24, at Noon Eastern

Lots of our students have been well published — and you can be, too!

---

BONUS CONTENT

GET MORE FROM THE UPSTATE AMERICAN

IF YOU’D LIKE TO HEAR MORE from Rex Smith, check www.wamc.org for his weekly on-air commentary aired by Northeast Public Radio. Here’s a link to the latest essay.

AND IF YOUR INTEREST IS SPECIFIC TO AMERICAN MEDIA, you can download the podcast of The Media Project, the 30-minute nationally-syndicated discussion that Rex leads each week on current issues in journalism. In the seven states where Northeast Public Radio is heard, the program airs at 3 p.m. each Friday and is rebroadcast at 6 p.m. Sunday. You can tune in live, too, at www.wamc.org, or get the podcast there. It has been called “a half-hour of talk about finding and telling the truth.”

---

ENDNOTE

THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about our common ground, this great country. As we together navigate these challenging times, I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send me a message with ideas you’d like to see us address.

- Rex Smith