Public Policy Information:  Groundbreaking Minnesota Law Provides Eligible Parents Stipends for At-Home Infant Care as an Alternative to Subsidies for Paid Child Care Copyright 1999 Mothers At Home.  Reproduction or dissemination of this work -- or any part of it -- is expressly forbidden without the written consent of the author.

The October 1999 issue of Welcome Home reported on a new law in Minnesota that offers certain lower-income parents of infants a choice between returning to work and using a state child-care subsidy or staying home and receiving a monthly stipend.  We spoke with officials at the Minnesota State Department of Children, Families and Learning to find out more about this groundbreaking new law.  The Minnesota program takes an important step towards recognizing the value of at-home parenting by providing comparable help both to parents who want to care for their children at home and to parents who want to work outside the home.

Under the Minnesota At-Home Infant Care Program (Minnesota Statues 1998, Section 119B.061), since July 1, 1998 lower-income families meeting certain requirements have been "eligible for assistance for a parent to provide short-term child care for the family's infant child."  To be eligible a family must have been receiving child care assistance before the baby was born or, for a first child, the parents must have been working or participating in another authorized activity before the baby was born.  In addition, the family must meet the same income guidelines established for receiving child care assistance, as well as meeting certain other criteria.  The At-Home Infant Care Program is administered at the county level in Minnesota.

Eligible families that elect to have a parent stay home with an infant may receive a stipend totaling no more than 75 percent of the dollar amount that would be available to an eligible family using licensed family day care.  A state spokesperson described the at-home stipend as helping to "take the edge off" the financial burden resulting from having a parent leave paid employment to stay home.  The stipend is available until the baby's first birthday, and is limited to a lifetime amount of 12 months per family.  As explained recently in the Los Angeles Times, "[a] family of four earning as much as $45,438 a year before one parent left the work force would be able to qualify for stipends that would hover around $250 a month . . . ."  "Mothers Do It All for Love -- but Money Helps," Los Angeles Times (by Melissa Healy, Aug. 22, 1999).

The passage of the At-Home Infant Care Program by the Minnesota legislature was not without controversy.  Richard "Doc" Mulder, the state representative and family physician who wrote the law, argued that "in the interests of children's health and emotional development, mothers should stay home with their babies as long as possible," according to the Los Angeles Times article.  While Dr. Mulder won bi-partisan support for his law, some lawmakers feared that the At-Home Program would draw funds away from the existing program to provide child care subsidies for parents who felt they had no choice but to work, for which there was already a waiting list.  In the end, the new law prevailed in part because at-home care was viewed as cost-effective when compared with paid child care, provided the parent staying home with the infant cared for any other children in the family at the same time (as the parent must do under the eligibility conditions for the at-home stipend).

To date (at the time of publication of this article), Minnesota families have made only limited use of the At-Home Care Program.  The Los Angeles Times article noted that 57 families are participating, receiving an average stipend of $3,000 annually.  Fewer families have used the At-Home Program than state legislators anticipated, and one state official speculated that at the income levels required for eligibility most families feel the need to have both parents working.  The state will issue a report in the year 2000 evaluating the effects of the new law.  Dr. Mulder hopes to extend the program to cover children older than 12 months and to extend it to more middle-income families. He has had inquiries from lawmakers in dozens of other states, and in particular we are told that Arizona, Florida, and Utah are looking into starting similar programs.