Punishing Single Parents and At-Risk Children
Kids At Risk Action (KARA) – 09/09/2026
There is a draft rule sitting at Health and Human Services right now that would pay a married stay-at-home parent about $9,000 a year per child to stay home with their own kids. The money does not come from a new appropriation. It comes out of the Child Care and Development Fund, the roughly $12 billion program built in the 1990s so that low-income parents could hold a job or finish school while somebody watched their children.
About 870,000 families use that fund today. According to HHS figures reported by the New York Times, roughly 80 percent of them are headed by single working parents, and most of those are mothers.
So read the rule again. The same pot of money. More people drawing from it. And the new category is limited to married couples where one spouse works at least 35 hours a week. Unmarried couples do not qualify. Single parents who are not working do not qualify. Joshua McCabe of the Niskanen Center told the Times what any budget person would tell you: open the eligibility without adding a dollar and you get more parents competing for the same money, with single working parents ending up worse off.
Some of the department’s own attorneys have reportedly asked whether tying a federal benefit to marriage can survive a court challenge. That is a fair question. Here is a better one. Why is a government that says it cares about children taking money from the single mothers who are raising them?
I have been a guardian ad litem in Hennepin County since 1996. I have never met a single mother in juvenile court who was there because she was single. She was there because she was poor, or sick, or using, or beaten, or alone with three kids and no daycare and a job that fired her the day she missed a shift. Marriage was not the missing piece. Help was.
This rule is not an accident and it is not a one-off. It is one item on a list.
The list
Each bullet is a real policy or action. The sentence after it is what it does to children.
Money and basic needs
- The 07/04/2025 budget law cut more than $1 trillion from Medicaid, CHIP, and SNAP, the largest cuts to those programs in American history, and nearly half of all American children get their health coverage from Medicaid or CHIP.
- Over $186 billion of that came out of food assistance according to the Senate Finance Committee’s accounting, hitting all 42 million SNAP participants including 16 million children.
- The Congressional Budget Office projects SNAP spending down $211 billion through 2035 and 7.5 million more Americans uninsured by 2034, which means hungrier kids in classrooms and sicker kids who never see a doctor until the emergency room.
- The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates roughly 1.5 million children have already been cut off food assistance since July 2025, and that is the conservative number.
- Medicaid work requirements do not apply to children, but children lose coverage when their parents lose theirs, which is how a paperwork rule aimed at adults ends up in a pediatric chart.
- The expanded Child Tax Credit was never restored, and child poverty measured by the Supplemental Poverty Measure went from 5.2 percent in 2021 to 13.4 percent in 2024, more than double, for the third year running.
Child care and early learning
- The draft “parent-based child care” rule would divert Child Care and Development Fund dollars to married stay-at-home parents, taking from a fund whose recipients are overwhelmingly single working mothers and requiring no vote in Congress to do it.
- On 04/01/2025 HHS closed five Head Start regional offices in Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle, which had provided grant support and technical assistance to programs across 22 states and five territories.
- Staffing at the Office of Head Start and the Office of Child Care was cut 40 to 50 percent, removing the people who process the grants that keep classroom doors open and payrolls met.
- Nearly $1 billion in Head Start grant funding was withheld in early 2025, a 37 percent drop from the same period the year before, according to a letter from Senators Duckworth and Durbin and colleagues.
- In early 2026 HHS froze roughly $10 billion in child care and social services funding while states were made to prove their spending was legitimate, which is a long time to hold your breath if you run a center with two weeks of cash.
- On 08/06/2026 the administration proposed eliminating or loosening more than 1,400 Head Start regulatory provisions, including the class size limits and staff-to-child ratios that made Head Start a gold standard program for sixty years.
- The same proposed rule defers quality standards to state and local law, which means a four-year-old’s odds now depend on their ZIP code.
- It adds a citizenship or qualifying immigrant test that applies to every child regardless of the child’s own status, so American citizen children can be turned away from a preschool their parents’ status disqualifies them from.
- It also requires more documentation from parents who are homeless or unemployed, asking the families with the least paperwork in their lives to produce the most.
Child protection itself
- The presidential child welfare order leans hard on the language of “unnecessary removals” and government “overreach,” which is already being used by parental rights and religious groups to argue that neglect rarely justifies a CPS response.
- Neglect is the primary allegation in a clear majority of CPS cases, so diminishing neglect as an entry criterion would end investigation for something like 60 to 75 percent of the children currently investigated.
- Most maltreatment deaths happen to children two years old and younger, and neglect is involved in most of them, which is the entire reason neglect is in the statute in the first place.
- ProPublica documented cuts to the federal funds and staff that support child abuse investigations and child support enforcement, programs that until recently had support in both parties.
Staffing and data, the quiet part
- Federal child welfare staff at the Administration for Children and Families was nearly cut in half through DOGE-driven terminations and regional office closures, cutting the line between Washington and state and tribal child welfare systems.
- Naomi Goldstein, ACF’s research chief from 2004 to 2022, called these stealth policy decisions, and that is exactly right. Nothing was voted on. The people who did the work were simply gone.
- The Administration for Community Living lost about 40 percent of its staff and the Social Security Administration lost at least 7,000, which is where disabled children and foster youth with SSI end up waiting.
- Federal researchers found no systematic method for tracking what happens to children after a parent is detained, and a system that does not count children cannot claim to be protecting them.
- Every data cut is a future accountability cut, because you cannot prove a child died of a policy if nobody is required to write the policy down next to the death.
Immigration and children
- The sensitive locations policy protecting schools, hospitals, child care centers, and churches was revoked in January 2025, ending more than thirty years of keeping enforcement away from the places children have to go.
- Brookings researchers reviewing roughly 400,000 interior-arrest detentions between 01/20/2025 and 04/09/2026 estimated more than 145,000 US citizen children were affected by a parent’s detention.
- Analysis of Deportation Data Project figures found nearly 4,000 detentions of minors in the first ten months of the administration, children in institutional settings not built for long stays.
- The Urban Institute found 10 percent of adults in immigrant families kept their children home from school out of fear, and one California district recorded daily absences up 22 percent after raids.
- Greater Good Magazine reported that more than 50 students did not return to one West St. Paul elementary school after winter break, which is what this policy looks like about fifteen minutes from my house. [Mike – worth a second look before publishing, single source.]
- Children of detained or deported parents show higher rates of PTSD symptoms, anxiety, and self-harm, and those children are almost all American citizens who will still be here in twenty years.
What it adds up to
Take the list apart and every item has a talking point attached to it. Flexibility. Local control. Red tape. Family. Efficiency.
Put the list back together and you get something else. Health care gone, food gone, preschool standards gone, child care money moved to families that are already doing better, the federal staff who run those programs fired, the offices closed, the data collection thinned out, and the definition of neglect being argued down at the same moment.
More than 9 million American children are living in poverty. The Supplemental Poverty Measure for children has been more than double its 2021 level for three years straight, and we know why, because we did the thing that fixed it in 2021 and then stopped doing it.
Roughly 7.8 million children are reported abused or neglected in this country every year. Because child abuse is invisible, it is likely at least that many are never reported at all. These are the children who are about to lose the doctor, the food, the preschool teacher, and the caseworker in the same eighteen months.
I have been asked more than once lately whether this is really about children at all. I do not think it is. I think children are being used to settle an argument about what a family is supposed to look like, and the ones who lose that argument are two years old.
KARA has been tracking this
If you want the longer record, these are our pieces on the same trend:
- What the Future Holds for At-Risk Children in America – 08/01/2026
- Project 2025 and Children: How Federal Cuts Are Dismantling Supports Kids Need to Survive and Thrive – 07/26/2026
- Leadership and Child Protection – 06/28/2026
- KARA’s Plea for Children (a call to action) – 05/22/2026
- Family First & Child Neglect Studies and Reporting – 05/13/2026
- Children Are Under Attack: How Federal Funding Cuts Are Dismantling Kids’ Lifelines – 05/06/2026
- A New Kind of Child Neglect – 04/28/2026
- From Classrooms to Homeless Shelters: How Our Choices Hurt Children – 03/24/2026
- What Happens if “Child Neglect” in Child Protective Services Is Removed or Diminished – 12/16/2025
- Weaponizing of Trump’s Presidential Order – 12/14/2025
- Trump’s Child Protection Order & “NEGLECT” – 11/25/2025
What you can do Now:
The Head Start rule is a notice of proposed rulemaking, which means there is a public comment period. Comment on it
https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/ACF-2026-0595-0001
Details
- Rule name: “Reducing Federal Burden for Head Start Programs”
- Docket ACF-2026-0595, RIN 0970-AD30
- Published in the Federal Register 08/07/2026
- Comments close at midnight 10/06/2026. That is 27 days from today.
- Email alternative: Deregulation@acf.hhs.gov, docket number in the subject line
.So is the child care subsidy rule, if and when it publishes. A rule that never needed a vote in Congress can still be slowed by a record of public objection, and that record has to be built by people who are not paid to build it.
Call your senators and your representative and ask them one question: what are you doing about the Head Start rule and the child care subsidy rule. Not how do you feel about children. What are you doing.
And send this to somebody who does not already agree with you. Most people have no idea any of this is happening. That is the whole strategy.
All adults are the protectors of all children.
