The Trump administration looks to be planning to pay stay-at-home parents. What a fantastic idea.

According to a recent report in , the White House has drafted a proposal to pay stay-at-home parents if the other spouse is working outside the home for 35 hours a week. Donald Trump’s team has yet to confirm the plans, but it appears to be in line with an earlier pledge to “deliver meaningful support for mothers across America”. According to the report, the couple must be married and fit in an as yet unknown income bracket. Single parents would not receive the benefit, and neither would unmarried couples.

Now, I’ve never agreed with any of the Trump administration’s policies before but this is something I can get behind. The early years are crucial for development – and there should be an opportunity for parents to stay with their children at home. Of course, not everyone has a choice in the matter. The cost of living crisis in the UK is forcing more parents back to work, even if they think their children would be better off spending time with them at home.

I am also cautious about the intentions behind the policy. If it was truly about supporting families, or helping children, it would be available to unmarried parents too – and single ones. But that doesn’t mean the idea is a bad one just because the motivation is suspect. It’s a policy that should be available to more people, and one we should adopt in Britain.

The birth rate is plummeting in the UK, falling to a record low of 1.39 children per woman in 2025, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics. That’s meant that, over the past decade, more than 100 schools in England have closed due to a lack of students. Meanwhile deaths are set to outnumber births every year from 2026. Nothing we have done so far has increased the birth rate, or made it possible for more people to have more children.

The only things we’ve tried are thrusting our mothers back to work as quickly as possible, by offering them subsidised childcare, some of the time. They can only get this, though, if they don’t make too much money, or if their partner doesn’t earn too much either.

Critics of the stay-at-home policy say that it’s regressive, and that it forces women back into the home. I think the same is true of what we are offering now. Is it really a choice to go back to work as quickly as you’re physically able when maternity pay is pittance, and paternity pay is basically non-existent? That’s not an authentic choice. It’s necessary for survival.

Why can’t we offer both? Why can’t we keep the childcare funding for mothers who want to return to work, and also offer funding for mothers who wish to focus on raising their children? That would offer real choice. It’s not progressive to pretend stay-at-home mothers don’t exist. There’s no one thinking of us. There’s no one advocating for us. I think it just became more convenient to pretend all mothers want the same thing.

So, it’s refreshing to hear a politician say, actually, what you’re doing does matter, here’s some money to make it possible. I even prefer the US term “homemaker” to “stay-at-home mum” because it’s a verb. It’s an action. It reflects that we’re doing something, not just “staying at home”.

The policy does not stipulate that the mother must be the one to stay at home to provide care for a child, so it could be the father. If our government is happy to pay strangers to watch our children, why not pay the mother (or father) who wants to raise the children themselves? I don’t understand why we have to pick one version of motherhood. There’s room to support everyone.