By Abby McCloskey The White House is considering a plan to allow married, stay-at-home parents to be paid through the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), a child-care fund for impoverished working parents. But there are more generous ways to support at-home parents that are fiscally responsible and that don’t compromise resources for other families.

In the words of Vice President JD Vance, “Normal Americans care more about their families than their jobs, and want a family policy that doesn’t shunt their kids into crap daycare.” I couldn’t agree more.

Ironically, that is the very spirit behind CCDBG. A bit of history: The program was created as part of welfare reform in the 1990s. Prior to reform, single mothers were collecting government benefits, and often not working. This was perpetuating a cycle of poverty and dependence that concerned Republicans in particular, who’ve long prided themselves on agency and upward mobility.

But in the mid-1990s, a GOP-controlled Congress and Democratic President Bill Clinton passed a law that tightened work requirements, which in turn necessitated better child-care options than most low-income single mothers could afford.

Hence the creation of CCDBG, a block grant to states that provided support for child-care providers as well as vouchers to low-income working parents. To this day, upwards of 80% of recipients are single mothers, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. Half are below the poverty line.

Much of the outrage over Vance’s proposal is related to taking money from a program that has never had enough funding in the first place. Only one in seven federally eligible children receive CCDBG support. Vance’s approach could result in children below the poverty line competing for resources with married families near the state median income. This alone makes it a nonstarter. And most married families with stay-at-home mothers earn enough that they’d be ineligible for support under Vance’s plan. Hardly a cultural unlock.

But the broader question — how can more families be better supported? — deserves more examination.

First, let’s say plainly that it’s not knuckle dragging or anti-feminist to support stay-at-home parents. The majority of Americans (55%) still believe it is best for children in two-parent households if one parent stays home, according to Pew Research. One in four mothers are stay-at-home parents, as are 7% of fathers.

Second, low-income mothers aren’t doing particularly well under the current system. While welfare reform dramatically increased single mothers’ workforce participation and income, an NBER paper by Chris M. Herbst and Erdal Tekin found a decrease in the quality of interaction between parents and children and worse maternal health, given the stress of juggling their kids and their jobs. This suggests that pushing single mothers into full-time work had a cost that was not offset simply by adding in child-care subsidies. That cost is one policy makers should address.

Which brings us to an alternative way forward. CCDBG is not the biggest fish to fry when it comes to supporting working parents feeling the financial squeeze in today’s economy. Far from it. It is a small fraction of the cost of the child tax credit, which at its maximum delivers $2,200 a year from birth through age 17, or a total of nearly $40,000 over a child’s life should current levels persist.

What if, instead of being dribbled out year by year, the tax credit were front-loaded in the first four years of a child’s life? That could amount to approximately $10,000 per year per child, available to the majority of families.

It wouldn’t compromise CCDBG. It wouldn’t cost the federal government another dime. It wouldn’t fall prey to the big government trap of favoring certain kinds of families — a trap that can be reversed to favor other types of families in the future, such as childless ones. And it would help families bridge the gap from birth to age 5, when most children start attending public school.

Of course, it could introduce some of the same challenges that pre-dated welfare reform. Some would surely argue that in a tight economy, some families would have children in order to gain the front-loaded tax credit. But, as was the case when welfare reform was being debated, these concerns are likely overblown. Others might argue that additional income tends to discourage work, although perhaps for Vance that’s a benefit.

Vance is right that American family policy could be improved, but he’s focused on too small a target. Reworking the child tax credit would help to bridge the early-childhood gap for many American families in a fiscally responsible way.

To contact the author of this story: at amccloskey7@bloomberg.net