JD Vance is right about one thing: Caring for children has value. His plan gets the rest wrong.

This week, the Trump administration floated an idea that has managed to irritate almost everyone: Allow some parents who stay home with their children to receive federal childcare subsidies.

The proposal, championed by Vice President JD Vance, would allow some low-income married couples to use money from the federal Child Care and Development Fund to support a parent caring for a child at home. The fund currently helps families pay for childcare so parents can work, study, or get job training.

Vance is right about the premise. Caring for your own child is work; our economy depends on enormous amounts of it, and public policy does remarkably little to recognize its value.

But the administration’s proposed solution would draw from a childcare fund already nowhere close to meeting demand. The federal government’s latest estimate found that only about one in six eligible children receive subsidies, and eligible families across the country are already sitting on waiting lists.

» READ MORE: I live in a constant battle between wanting to work and not being able to afford child care | Opinion

The proposal has become yet another argument about whether or not mothers should work. Conservatives praise it as overdue support for stay-at-home parents; critics see it as another attempt to push women out of the labor force. Both framings make family life sound much tidier than it is.

I have spent my career working with childcare providers and parents, and the arrangements they cobble together rarely fit clean categories. A mother may stay home with an infant, return to work later, rely on a grandmother some days and use a childcare center on others. A parent who considers herself “stay-at-home” may still want childcare for part of the week. No single work or care arrangement comes close to satisfying everyone, and preferences shift as children grow.

Using the same federal pot for both obscures an important difference.

Money paid directly to a parent may make staying home possible when it otherwise would not be. A childcare subsidy, however, does more than help one family purchase care. It also helps sustain the supply of care itself: the teacher’s salary, the home-based provider’s income, the classroom that needs enough children enrolled to remain open.

If these dollars move elsewhere, the effect does not stop with the family receiving them. A provider may need to close its doors, leaving fewer options for everyone else.

The debate usually stops with two mothers: the one who wants to stay at home and the one who needs childcare in order to work. It overlooks a third woman whose livelihood depends on those same dollars: the childcare worker.

About 98% of center-based early childhood teaching staff are female, earning a median of less than $17 an hour. For self-employed childcare workers — including those running care from their own homes — the latest estimate is even lower, at $9 an hour, or about $18,500 a year, barely above the U.S. federal poverty level. Many of these childcare providers are mothers themselves.

Seen this way, the proposal exposes a much bigger problem than a fight over who should receive a childcare subsidy. A woman caring for her own child often cannot afford to stay home, while a woman caring for someone else’s child often cannot afford to live on what she earns. Now we are considering asking those women to compete for the same scarce public dollars. Taking money from one underfunded form of care and giving it to another is a peculiar way to show that America values caregiving.

The proposal exposes a much bigger problem than a fight over who should receive a childcare subsidy.

There are better ways to give parents more room to stay home when that is what they want, such as through paid family leave or a more generous child tax credit. If Washington wants to recognize the economic value of parental care, it should fund that goal directly rather than weakening the childcare system other parents need in order to work.

While the proposal may have been intended to signal that the administration values caregiving, instead it reveals how little public money America is willing to put behind care in any form.

Parents at home are undersupported. Childcare workers are underpaid. Families who need care and qualify are stuck on waiting lists. And rather than fixing any of those shortages, the administration is proposing to make them compete against one another.

America can do better than deciding which woman’s care counts.

Sabrina Habib is the cofounder of Kidogo, Kenya’s largest childcare network, and leads the Zera Fund, spurring new investments into childcare globally as part of Melinda French Gates’ Global Leaders Initiative. She is also a Public Voices fellow tackling poverty, a partnership between the Op-Ed Project and Acumen.