Washington Post Monica Hesse April 30th 2025

Until I reached a kid-having age, I might have guessed that the priciest child-related expense was diapers. This was based on a blissful ignorance of parenting math that can be found only in the childfree — and in high school conversations with some girls who volunteered at a crisis pregnancy center. “We make it easy for the moms to choose life,” one told me. “Because the moms don’t have to pay for diapers.”M

Did diapers cost a dollar apiece? Five bucks? Seventeen? Less or more than Harvard? Who could say!

I can. I can say now. Huggies cost $45 for a big pack of 148. You’ll go through a few of those every month until your kid is 2½ or 3. Add on another $1,500 for wipes, rash creams, bum butters, diaper pails, etc. It all totals up to $4,500-ish to keep your baby and your furniture dry until they’re potty-trained, which makes the Trump administration’s theoretical $5,000 baby incentive — one of several ideas the administration is apparently considering to boost flagging birth rates — seem like a great deal.

For several years, conservatives have been fretting about the declining American birth rate. Elon Musk is trying to solve the problem exclusively with his own DNA. But now, here comes the White House with a vague list of solutions: $5,000 provided to every American mother after delivery. Classes educating women on their menstrual cycles. One prominent “pronatalist” couple apparently sent the White House a few of their own ideas, including a “National Medal of Motherhood” for women who birth six or more children. “Sounds like a good idea to me,” President Donald Trump said of the baby bonus, while White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the president was “proudly implementing policies to uplift American families.”

So the only question left to ask is: Jesus, have any of these policy wonks ever had to actually budget for a baby?

Five thousand dollars is a large sum of money. Five thousand dollars, in the grand financial scheme of child-rearing, is nothing. It’s a fart-in-the-wind number; it disappears before you even registered it was coming. Formula. Clothes. Strollers. Amoxicillin. My family has good health insurance, and while waiting for the deductible to kick in, I still spent $835 at the pediatrician last year.

We’re not even to the expensive stuff yet. Where I live, day care costs an average of $24,000 a year. Advocacy group Child Care Aware estimated in 2023 that “center-based infant care costs more per year than in-state tuition at a public university in 34 states and the District of Columbia.” There’s a reason that study after study, from both conservative and liberal think tanks, estimates that raising a child from birth to adulthood costs at least a quarter of a million dollars.

So let’s not get confused. A proposed $5,000 is not enough to uplift an American family. And it’s downright perverse when the money is being floated by the same administration that seems hell-bent on making parenthood harder in almost every conceivable way.

Five thousand dollars — from the same administration that provided $1 billion less in funding this year to Head Start, a program that provides free preschool for low-income families. Five thousand dollars — from the same administration trying to close the federal day-care centers that make it possible for thousands of parents to work.

Five thousand dollars from the same administration that recently slashed maternal health programs at the Department of Health and Human Services. That fired the entire staff of a program designed to help struggling families keep their utilities running. That cut $660 million in funding that allowed schools to purchase food from local farms to feed kids. That wants to dismantle the Department of Education. In a March news release titled “President Trump is protecting America’s children,” the White House promised that the president would “never stop fighting for [children’s] right to a healthy, productive upbringing and childhood,” but then four of the five touted bullet points had to do with transgender issues, such as “President Trump made it the official policy of the U.S. government that there are only two sexes.”

I feel like a crank and an ingrate belaboring these numbers. “Something is better than nothing” is the credo by which I live my life. If you don’t have time to go to the gym, walking for 10 minutes is better than sitting on the couch. If you forgot to send someone’s birthday gift, a phone call is better than silence. If American families are drowning in a sea of child-related expenses, then sending them home with $5,000 is better than sending them home with no-thousand dollars. Nobody expects the government to pay for all of their child care — after all, this isn’t Canada, South Korea, Japan or basically anywhere in Europe where people do, in fact, expect the government to heavily subsidize child care and the government happily obliges.

The real issue here isn’t that this administration doesn’t seem to understand math. The real issue is that this administration, which purports to love families, does not seem to understand children.

It does not seem to understand them as whole people who need not only $5,000 worth of supplies upon birth, but also two decades worth of care and attention to follow. In terms of education. In terms of nutritious food. In terms of swimming lessons, birthday parties, and the ability to travel to a farm or a city or the Atlantic Ocean and think, Wow, this is my country, and it is big, and it is beautiful.

What is a mother supposed to do when her electricity is about to be shut off, and the program that could have helped her pay it is gone, and she can’t go to work to get electricity-bill money because there’s nobody to watch her kids because the good day cares are shuttered and even the bad ones cost more than her hourly wage? Hawk her National Medal of Motherhood on eBay?

And we’re to believe that a main factor in the declining birth rate is that women … don’t know how their periods work?

I learned about the $5,000 proposal from one of my favorite regular readers. He and I agree on almost nothing, but I respect him a lot, and he regularly challenges me to find “something positive” to say about the Trump administration. Surely, he said, I could find something positive to say about an idea that would put $5,000 in the pockets of new moms. Surely the White House and I have this in common.

So yes. I would love for new moms to have $5,000 in their pockets. But I would love even more for the White House to be smarter than I was as a high-school-age girl. Because what we should want is not an uptick in babies that we can promise to keep in Huggies but a generation of kids whom we want to invest in way past birth.

Having a child is an act of hope and faith, as the Trump administration well knows. We do have that belief in common. Having a child requires the hope that from the moment you see the second line of the pregnancy test, you are bringing them into the world because it is good to be brought into this world. And that at the moment you drive away from their freshman dorm or their first apartment, you will know that they made the world better and that the world made them better, too. It’s hard to put a price tag on that. It’s hard to do it by yourself.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/04/30/trump-5k-incentive/