The Trump administration is drafting a rule that would let qualifying married couples draw from the existing Child Care and Development Fund when one parent stays home with the children and the other works at least 35 hours a week. The typical benefit runs about $9,000 per child each year.

The change would not invent a new entitlement or demand a new appropriation from Congress. It would simply allow some families already eligible under the program’s income rules to use the money for parent-based care instead of sending it to a commercial daycare.

Yet some conservatives want to kill the idea. They say any use of federal child-care money is socialism, and the only clean solution is to abolish the subsidy altogether.

That instinct is understandable. The Child Care and Development Fund was built in the 1990s to push low- and moderate-income parents into the paid workforce and park their kids with paid caregivers. A government program that treats parental care as a second-class option deserves skepticism. Abolishing it outright would be cleaner than rewriting it.

But the votes to abolish it do not exist. Pretending otherwise is a luxury politics that leaves families stuck with the status quo: a subsidy that pays only when mom and dad hand their children to strangers.

The government is dangling a carrot and putting its thumb on the scale. Families that keep a parent at home get nothing from the program. Families that ship the kids out get the check. The daycare industry collects the money. Parents lose the hours, and children lose the bond.

Children do best when they are raised by their own parents. A society that wants intact families should stop pretending that every arrangement is equal. Marriage is the institution that most reliably binds two adults to the same children over time. If existing dollars can favor that arrangement, they should.

The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind. Two parents under one roof – accountable to each other and to their kids – outperform bureaucracies, nonprofits, and rotating caregivers on attachment, discipline, language, and moral formation.

The fight inside conservative circles looks familiar. For years, some on the right have treated school choice the same way. They call it socialism to let families direct the upbringing of their children by escaping government-run monopoly schools. Many of those critics would prefer zero taxpayer funding of government schools.

Fair enough. If the country were starting from scratch, that might be the better design. But taxpayers are already funding K-12 education. The factory-model district system already exists, and it isn’t going away any time soon.

School choice takes the money already being spent and lets parents pick the school. Education savings accounts and scholarships are wildly popular across party lines because they do something simple: they fund students instead of systems. They introduce competition into a one-size-fits-all arrangement that has failed too many kids.

The incremental win is a transfer of power from administrators to parents. Conservatives who sat out those fights because the funding source was impure left families trapped in schools they could not exit.

The same logic applies here. The child-care subsidy is already on the books. The question is whether those dollars can follow a parent who wants to raise her own child, or whether they must keep flowing to commercial providers.

Gallup has already told us what a large share of mothers want. Among working mothers, 54% said they would prefer to stay home with their children. A mother who wants more time with her toddler should not have to watch the government pay someone else to do the job she would rather do herself.

The appropriation is already there. The choice is whether it stays a subsidy for centers or can follow a married parent who provides the care at home.

Daycare operators will fight the change – much like the teachers unions fight school choice – because they profit when the government separates parents from children during the workday. Their business model depends on the subsidy remaining a voucher for out-of-home care. Conservatives should not take their side out of a misplaced fear that any parental use of existing funds contaminates the cause. The contamination already happened when Washington decided that paid strangers were the default and parents were an afterthought.

Take the incremental win. Let married parents use the money already appropriated to spend more hours with their own children. Keep arguing for a smaller state. Do not hand the status quo another decade because the alternative is imperfect. Parents, not systems, should raise the next generation.

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Corey DeAngelis is a research fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a senior fellow at Americans for Fair Treatment.

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