Earlier in January, the Republican Study Committee—a large bloc of conservatives comprising more than half of the Republican House membership—released a framework for a potential second party-line budget reconciliation package. Among the recommendations was something that we called for in the past: making families with a stay-at-home parent eligible for the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC). This proposal drew a critique from the American Enterprise Institute’s Kevin Corinth. While we make no comments about the broader Republican Study Committee framework or the wisdom of pursuing another reconciliation bill, Corinth’s criticism is based on a common but erroneous trope about stay-at-home parent households: that they have no child care needs or costs. We think it is important to correct the record.

First, a bit of background: the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, as Capita’s Elise Anderson wrote last year,

Is the only provision of the tax code explicitly dedicated to defraying the cost of child and dependent care. The CDCTC allows parents to pay less federal income tax by claiming a percentage of qualifying child care expenses they incurred while they worked or sought employment.

Notably, because the tax code is confusing, the CDCTC is distinct from the Child Tax Credit (CTC), which is available to all qualifying families simply to compensate for the costs of child-rearing.

Corinth’s problem with the proposal to include stay-at-home parents in the CDCTC rests on the idea that these families do not have child care expenses to defray. He writes,

When both parents in a married couple work, they need someone to care for their young children, and they often need to pay for that care. As with work-related expenses more broadly, families should not be taxed on the money they earn that is used to pay for childcare. Otherwise, they face a higher tax burden than families who do not require childcare to work, despite having the same level of resources.

In his comparison model, Corinth assigns “$0” in child care costs to a family with a stay-at-home parent.

Yet our research shows that most families with a stay-at-home parent do need some amount of paid child care. Why? Because they need to attend medical appointments for themselves, take an older child to physical or occupational therapy, or take time away from children to care for themselves or elderly relatives. In our 2024 survey, 58% of stay-at-home parents reported needing external child care at least several times a month, with a third needing it weekly or daily. In a worst-case scenario, stay-at-home parents who are unable to find the child care they need to care for themselves, their households, or the elderly may suffer from “caregiver burnout” and become unable to care for others at all.

As one focus group participant told us,

As full-time moms, even though we don’t go to work, and I talk from experience, it is hard to be home with three or four children from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. or whenever they finally get to sleep. It’s difficult not to have a moment for yourself, take a bath, eat a hot meal, without being interrupted. Nobody cares for the mental health of those mothers that live 24/7 at home with their children.

Indeed, 41% of respondents said they “rarely” or “never” had access to the care they need. Cost is a significant factor: we have interviewed one stay-at-home mother whose family budget is so tight she and her husband apportion their car gas usage so they can determine which appointments or social functions they can attend. A few hundred dollars can make a meaningful difference for these types of families.

And while one might argue that occasional child care needs do not carry the same imperative as requiring child care to work, this again misunderstands how real families’ decision-making operates around budgets, work, and care. As Ivana Greco has written about the “other greedy jobs”, consider the wife of an electrical lineman. Her ability to provide primary child care enables her husband to perform the irregular, economically critical work of fixing electrical lines after storms. If she is unable to provide that care because she cannot access the necessary medical or other services, her husband will necessarily have to adjust his work. 

Nor have actual proposals to include stay-at-home parents in the CDCTC treated them exactly the same as families in which both parents are working full-time paid jobs. As we have noted, stay-at-home parents came close in the past to being incorporated into the CDCTC in a bipartisan fashion, but all of the proposals come in below the maximum claimable amount:

• A provision was added to a vetoed tax bill in 1999 that would have made stay-at-home parents eligible for the CDCTC during the first year of their child’s life and assigned a minimum claim of $200 per month. Integrating stay-at-home parents into the CDCTC was also elevated in President Clinton’s 1999 State of the Union address. 
• Former Sen. John H. Chafee (R-RI) introduced a bill in 1999 that included a maximum CDCTC benefit of $900 for parents who stay home for one year to care for children aged 3 or younger.
• A provision in the Democratic-led Right Start Act of 2001 set a minimum claimable CDCTC amount of $90 per month for stay-at-home parents with children under 1. 
• Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) introduced the Stay At Home Parents Tax Credit Act in 2003. This stand-alone bill assigned a minimum CDCTC claimable amount of $200 per month for stay-at-home parents with children under age 6. Former Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) later added this provision to versions of the Parents’ Tax Relief Act until 2007. 

It’s fair to argue over the cost of incorporating stay-at-home parents into the CDCTC or the optimal policy design for doing so. What we should not do, however, is legislate on the basis of misunderstandings. Families with stay-at-home parents have child care needs and accrue child care costs, and we are a weaker nation for ignoring them.

Ivana Greco and Elliot Haspel are Senior Fellows at Capita.