[ The thing that makes the Biden child credit so revolutionary,
its universality, is also what makes it controversial. Policymakers
disagree on whether all families merit direct financial assistance
from the government...] [[link removed]]

CHILD CARE NEW BENEFIT RAISES OLD QUESTION: WHICH MOTHERS SHOULD
WORK?  
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Emily Badger and Claire Cain Miller
April 26, 2021
New York Times
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_ The thing that makes the Biden child credit so revolutionary, its
universality, is also what makes it controversial. Policymakers
disagree on whether all families merit direct financial assistance
from the government... _

Social conservatives have become more open to government spending to
support families. “The right has dropped the ball on family
policy,” said Brad Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of
Virginia., Credit: Desiree Rios for The New York Times

 

American mothers have always been sorted and divided — deemed worthy
of aid or not — by race, by class, by marital status, by what their
husbands do, by whether they’ve had too many children or not enough.

All these fault lines, though, will be ignored by the federal
government this summer when it begins delivering a monthly check of
$250 to $300 per child to all but the richest families in the United
States. It will go to families whether they have one parent or two,
and whether their mothers have an income or not.

The benefit, an expansion of the child tax credit
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is in place through the end of the year. It would be locked in through
2025 as part of the American Families Plan
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President Biden is expected to unveil this week
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the next step in what proponents hope will be a permanent expansion of
the American safety net for families
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The simplicity of the plan cuts through old ideas of who’s
deserving, “narratives that we know are grounded in stereotypes and
moral measuring sticks,” said Celeste Watkins-Hayes, a sociologist
at the University of Michigan. Instead, the proposal “just makes
sure parents have the resources they need to raise their families.”

Yet the thing that makes the Biden
[[link removed]] child
credit
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revolutionary, its universality, is also what makes it controversial.
Policymakers disagree on whether all families merit direct financial
assistance from the government, or whether it should be reserved for
parents — including single mothers — who work for pay.

The debate over time has not been about _whether_ mothers should
work or stay home with their children, but _which_ mothers should
work or stay home.

The answer, in American policies, has long depended on characteristics
like their income, family structure and, especially, race, researchers
said.

“What it means essentially is that when white women stay home and
work without pay for the family, that’s a great thing,” said
Jacqueline Jones, a historian at the University of Texas at Austin.
“When Black women attempt to stay home and care for their children,
if they don’t have the means or the husband to do so, they’re
vilified.”

The question of work could be the largest obstacle to reimagining
federal support for families. It adds to a growing tension on the
right between promoting work and promoting traditional families: While
some Republican policymakers, including Senator Mitt Romney of Utah
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support a near-universal child credit, others, like Senators Marco
Rubio and Mike Lee, believe it should have a work requirement.

A divide on the right

More Republicans have recently joined Democrats in agreeing that
families with children need government support, as the problems
families face have shifted. Teen parenthood has sharply declined. But
the opioid crisis has ravaged rural families. Wages have stagnated for
many families even when they have two working parents.

“That’s definitely created a degree of working-class consciousness
on the right,” said Samuel Hammond, the director of poverty and
welfare policy at the Niskanen Center. “Maybe in the ’90s, when
you talked about single moms, that was disproportionately a dog
whistle for Black single moms. Now, if you’re a Republican, you have
plenty of single moms in your constituency.”

The pandemic has further made clear how much parents rely on outside
support when raising children, and how quickly any family can fall
into an economic or health crisis.

A deeper divide has also emerged on the right between social
conservatives, who want to preserve traditional families, and economic
conservatives, who want to limit government spending.

“There’s always been a lot of overlap between social and economic
conservatives: Two-parent families are better off economically,”
said Angela Rachidi, who studies poverty and safety net policies at
the American Enterprise Institute. “But the last few years, social
conservatives have become more open to using government spending in
ways that make economic conservatives uncomfortable.”

She aligns with the economic conservatives, who cite evidence that
work requirements can decrease child poverty and model a strong work
ethic for children. She does not want government aid to encourage
people to forgo work. (The previous child tax credit was not
available in full
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families with no or low income; the earnings threshold to start
benefiting from that credit was $2,500 when the tax law passed in
2017.)

“By lessening the importance of work,” she said, “we’re
harming the most vulnerable families.”

Social conservatives have become more open to government spending if
it encourages more women to have children
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enables them to stay home with them. They cite research that children
benefit from strong attachment to their parents.

“The right has dropped the ball on family policy,” said Brad
Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, in a recent
panel at A.E.I
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where the divisions on the right were on full display. “I’m not
looking for more measures that will put parents into the labor force
than spend time with their kids. We need less workism and more
familyism.”

This is also why social conservatives generally do not support
government funding for child care, while some economic conservatives
do — child care makes it easier for mothers to work.

The history of who’s deserving

Debates over American motherhood, amplified by the pandemic, have deep
roots. “It really does go back to this idea that there’s this
assumption that certain women should work, and that Black women in
particular should work,” said Elisa Minoff, a senior policy analyst
with the Center for the Study of Social Policy who has researched the
history of work requirements
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Slavery laid the groundwork for the stereotype that Black people
don’t want to work, Ms. Minoff said, and helped establish a narrow
conception of work: as servants, domestics and field hands. Throughout
this history, Black women have been viewed more as laborers than as
mothers, said the Cornell historian Louis Hyman (any virtue attached
to the title of “mother,” he adds, invariably vanishes when a
Black woman is a “single mother”).

Black mothers were largely excluded from the earliest experiments in
welfare after the Civil War, with widow’s pensions specifically
designed to keep women at home with their children. (If they were
found to be working, they lost the benefit.)

In the 1930s, a federal program, Aid to Dependent Children, extended
help to more mothers and replaced those pensions. But Southern
Democrats demanded that states run the program, allowing them to set
rules effectively barring Black mothers from benefits. State
caseworkers would spot-check whether women were keeping their homes
clean enough, or keeping a man around. Some states automatically
kicked women and children off benefit rolls during picking seasons
when they were needed in the fields.

Such standards, many enduring until the 1960s, weren’t applied to
white women. And it was only after they were struck down, and more
Black mothers began to rely on the aid, that political momentum grew
to attach work requirements.

“It’s a response to the program doing more to actually serve
families of color that people start to say, ‘These women should be
working,’” said H. Luke Shaefer, a professor at the University of
Michigan who studies poverty and social welfare policy.

The typical mother getting government help became, in politicians’
telling, a “welfare queen,
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with too many children and not enough personal responsibility. That
stereotype led to the 1996 welfare reform law that attached time
limits and stricter work requirements to cash assistance.

Employment of single mothers increased, and child poverty decreased
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the following years. But both effects were helped by a booming economy
in the late 1990s. And many mothers were left without jobs or
government benefits
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or in jobs that were precarious and poorly paid, while their children
were often in low-quality child care
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In the debate over the Biden
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allowance, policymakers have focused on its potential to decrease
child poverty, a goal with support on both the right and the left. A
variety of research shows that growing up in poverty has long-term
consequences
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children’s physical and mental health, family stability,
and educational and career outcomes
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“If this expanded child tax credit becomes a permanent policy, it
would really serve as a pillar of a reimagined social safety net, and
one that actually is focused on promoting the well-being of children
and families, not just increasing the number of hours parents
worked,” Ms. Minoff said.

Much of the debate, though, still reflects these old divides. Senators
Rubio and Lee, who have supported expanding the child tax credit, want
a work requirement because, as they said in a statement
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“an essential part of being pro-family is being pro-work.”

Many progressives, in addition to supporting a universal child
benefit, say they also support work — but that the way to encourage
work and decrease poverty is to improve jobs, such as by increasing
the minimum wage and providing predictable hours.

“I would say to those who want to see work requirements as part of
this benefit, move that impulse into building a stronger labor
market,” Professor Watkins-Hayes said. “The universal child credit
was a way to acknowledge the reality that the labor market isn’t
able to support families to make sure their kids are happy and
progressing well.”

_[Emily Badger writes about cities and urban policy for The Upshot
from the Washington bureau. She's particularly interested in housing,
transportation and inequality — and how they’re all connected. She
joined The Times in 2016 from The Washington Post. @emilymbadger
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_Claire Cain Miller writes about gender, families and the future of
work for The Upshot. She joined The Times in 2008 and was part of a
team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for
reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. @clairecm
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