My wife is a stay-at-home mom. We are lucky that we can afford to do this. Most of our kid's friends have both parents working and they pay for child care. If suddenly they were able to have that childcare paid for, that would be wonderful! It doesn't affect our situation at all. Why would we oppose it? I don't need to have my own "waiver" payment in order for me to be in favor of my neighbor's burden being lifted.
It's like free school lunch. We pack our kid a lunch every day, but some families rely on the school-provided free lunch. It's never even occurred to me that we should get a $3/day payment because we don't take advantage of free lunch. Having free lunch available is unequivocally a good thing, regardless of whether we personally partake.
It affects you like if your neighbor got a $5000 tax credit and you didn’t.
It’s community money paying for it so it impacts you because it is your tax dollars being spent.
What is it that is being incentivized here? Leaving your children and working all day.
Are men "leaving their children and working all day"? Should we not pay them to stay home?
This view is either fully gendered or assumes that all families are made up of two people and one person's wages should support a family. Neither are the conversation on this table.
The conversation on this table is: Our current economy, in nearly every state and for every metro requires more than minimum wage to rent not own, an apt and live, not save for the future. Childcare has gone up 30% in the last few years alone and wages, as you have likely experienced, have not.
We cannot continue to expect people with choices to have children given this economic situation.
Trust me. You want people to continue having children, and you'd prefer them to be positive additions to society, for your own well-being in old age.
The emphasis on jobs over children as where we want women’s energy, time, and attention to go is what is being demonstrated by this policy. We will pay you to leave your children with others. We will not pay you to take care of your children.
Why anybody thinks this will result in more children being born is beyond me. Sure, it might make it “easier” in some sense to have children, but what it teaches is job > children, and that is going to result in people learning to deprioritize children. As intended.