Invisible Infrastructure, Pronatalism vs Pro-Family, & The Homemaking Blindspot in Economic Metrics with The Home Front's Ivana Greco

How Social Security, healthcare systems, and tax policies create perverse disincentives for essential care work

Photo by Israel Delgado on Unsplash

Just before the transcript, I would like to give some notes and introduce our guest.

Ivana Greco

writes "The Home Front," a Substack focused on advocating for homemakers' contributions to society; work that rarely registers in traditional economic measurements.

A former litigator who left her legal career during COVID, Greco now homeschools her four children while writing about family policy. Her professional background and personal experience give her unique insight into both the practical and policy challenges facing caregivers.

"Homemakers are like an invisible infrastructure," Greco explains. They're often the ones delivering meals to new mothers, taking elderly neighbors to appointments, and volunteering for community improvement—work that goes unmeasured in economic indicators.

Greco prefers "homemaker" to "stay-at-home parent,"(something I very much agree with!) noting the difference between passive location and active creation. "It indicates that person is doing something—making a home," she says.

She points to specific gaps affecting homemakers: Social Security disability coverage that vanishes after five years outside the workforce, retirement benefit structures that disadvantage caregivers, and health insurance systems that penalize single-income families.

Greco distinguishes her "pro-family, pro-baby" stance from what she calls "technocratic pro-natalism" championed by figures like Elon Musk. "I don't want people having children because it helps the Social Security trust fund," she says. "I want them to have children because they're looking to add more love to the world."

Ivana’s message is straightforward: caring for others creates value that GDP can't measure. In our productivity-obsessed culture, that perspective feels both refreshingly old-fashioned and radically necessary. In the conversation that follows, Greco expands on these ideas, offering practical policy solutions and a vision for how society might better recognize the vital work happening in homes across America

Introduction and Background

Dave Deek: All right, recording has started. I thank you for accepting this interview. I can't wait to get this started. How's your week been overall?

Ivana Greco: It's been a good week. Thanks, Dave. How about you?

Dave Deek: So, before we start talking about some of the more fun stuff, let's start with some background information. I believe that you have a Substack called The Home Front. Is that correct?

Ivana Greco: Yes, it's really a place to talk about issues affecting families, especially families that have either mom or dad at home taking care of their kids fully. I really focus on home parents and their needs and their interests.

Dave Deek: And what was the idea behind The Home Front?

Dave Deek: And from your background, I believe that you were a lawyer in a past life.

Ivana Greco: Yes. I worked as an attorney for about 10 years and then during COVID, I left the practice of law to be home full-time with my kids.

Dave Deek: And what law did you specialize in?

Ivana Greco: So, I was primarily a litigator and I specialized in ERISA, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act.

Child Development and Personal Experience

Dave Deek: Now that we have that background out of the way, I'm more interested now about the personal angle. You're very much interested in child development and I'm just curious about the influence it takes on your work, both on your blog and in general.

Ivana Greco: I have four children. Their ages range from 9 to 6 months, and I homeschool my children. The younger two are not school-aged yet. So I'm very personally interested in child development, and then a lot of my work focuses on families and children. So I take a professional interest as well. Those two sides of my life are kind of mutually reinforcing—my work and my family—in terms of focusing on children.

The Value of Homemaking

Ivana Greco: I think that homemakers are very undervalued by society. The moms and dads at home provide really important societal functions, not only in terms of taking care of their own children, although of course that is very important, but also in terms of the fact that it's often moms at home who do things like drop off a meal to another postpartum mother, who have the time to take an older neighbor to a hospital appointment, who join the garden club to beautify the neighborhood, who serve on the PTA. So they're kind of like an invisible infrastructure for the rest of society that we don't really recognize.

Dave Deek: I more than agree with that. Taking an older neighbor to appointments, is that really a thing in America? I know it's a thing in the Middle East and Asia and stuff like that, but that's the first time I heard about this in America, frankly.

Ivana Greco: No, it's very common. In a lot of communities, it is stay-at-home parents who do that kind of work. Certainly there are fewer stay-at-home moms than there were in the 1950s, for example, but there still are a number of families where it works best for them if either mom or dad is at home. And it's often those people who have the time, who have the slack to do these kind of important community tie-building and community support work.

Dave Deek: So that's actually a very good reason that homemaking needs to get more recognized, because even I was surprised at how much in the American context homemakers do because we live in a more atomized society. So it's hard to hear stories like that.

Ivana Greco: I think of course there were a lot of very important things that were gained when women went into the workforce in large numbers, but I think it's also important to recognize that there were some things that were lost. And I think one of the things that was lost was that it was often moms at home who were doing volunteering, who were hosting coffee hours, who were throwing the church barbecues that tied communities together. So I think part of the reason why we have such an atomized society today is there are fewer people around to do the work of building community.

Undervaluing Care Work

Dave Deek: On that note, why do you think our society often seems to undervalue this care work compared to other jobs?

Ivana Greco: It's not paid. I think in 2025 America, a lot of what we value is work that contributes to the GDP or work that contributes to the family income. And this kind of work is obviously unpaid. And it's also kind of invisible—people feel the absence of it when it's not happening, but they don't put two and two together that the reason why this work isn't happening isn't because of cell phones or the internet. It's because people just don't have the time, because in most families now mom and dad are both in the workforce. And so there's no one with the time to do these important community building jobs.

Dave Deek: Could you talk more about the ripple effect of this invisible work?

Ivana Greco: I think you see it everywhere, in terms of elderly people who no longer have a neighbor with the time to come and visit, in terms of the fact that most nonprofit work is now done by paid people whose job it is to do nonprofit work rather than volunteer work done by people in the community.

So, the professionalization of a lot of volunteer work, and I'm not implying that that's necessarily bad, but it certainly is different where a lot of charitable work rather than being done by someone who is not being paid for it and who has a stake in the community now instead is done by someone working for an NGO or some other nonprofit.

So I think it's been very transformative for our society to no longer have a critical mass of homemakers.

Terminology and Recognition

Dave Deek: What about making "Homemaker" more of a formal job title? What are your thoughts about the pros and cons of that?

Ivana Greco: I think language matters. So a lot of times when we're talking about homemakers these days, we talk about stay-at-home parents. I think words really matter. In the US when we talk about homemakers, we're usually talking about stay-at-home parents, but the term stay-at-home parent does not indicate that that person is doing anything very useful. It just suggests that that person is staying home in their house. So I prefer the term homemaker even though it is sort of an archaic term, because it indicates that that person is doing something. They're making a home as opposed to the more passive "stay-at-home parent."

Dave Deek: All right, but archaic might be the more appropriate way of phrasing it. I mean, it's the best way to describe what homemakers actually do versus the idea of the stay-at-home parent, especially mother, which has gotten a bad rap today.

Ivana Greco: But I do think unfortunately sometimes when you introduce yourself as a homemaker they assume a political implication to what you're saying, which I think is unfortunate. But yes, I agree. I think homemaker is a much better term for what moms and dads at home are doing.

Models for Recognizing Homemaking

Dave Deek: And I know in foreign contexts, especially before in the Czech Republic and I know currently a few cities of Japan where they kind of formalize a role for older members of the community with a lot of this unpaid work like looking after grandchildren and not just their grandkids but also helping around and doing these tasks. Do you think that this idea or model might be a start to professionalizing homemaking?

Ivana Greco: I should say, I'm not suggesting that we need to professionalize the occupation of homemaker. I do think there are a lot of worthy programs in the United States where, for example, Medicaid now in some states will pay for an elderly person to use a family member to take care of them rather than having to go into a nursing home. So, I think that those programs are great, but I'm not arguing that homemaker needs to be thought of in exactly the same category as lawyer or business person.

But just that it's important to recognize how important that work is and to think about ways that we can support those people. Whether it is making sure they have a secure retirement through modifying how we do social security payments, whether it is thinking about how we do taxation to make sure we're not penalizing families with homemakers. These are all measures that I think the United States could productively adopt.

Policy Supports for Homemakers

Dave Deek: Can you elaborate on those measures? What's there in existence and what more do you think needs to be done?

Ivana Greco: So this is somewhat technical, but the way the Social Security system works in the United States, it's not very conducive to modern homemakers who often move in and out of the workforce depending on what their family needs are. So I think that that system needs to be modified to better support the way homemakers often operate in the United States in 2025, which is they work more or less or not at all depending on what's going on with their family.

And then I also think that in general politicians are often very focused on GDP growth or workplace equality or the gender wage gap, and those things are important, but they really do not take into account the unpaid work that moms at home do. And so I think that's a serious flaw.

Dave Deek: I believe in one of your posts you talked about a GI Bill for homemakers. Could you talk more about that?

Ivana Greco: So one thing that I would love to see is—like I said, many homemakers go back to work once their children are older, once their children are out of the house, but they often find it very difficult to do so because we don't recognize that the work that they did at home is skilled work, that it's important work and that it translates into equivalent workplace skills that can be used in the formal workforce.

So something that I proposed is that the government could take steps to make it easier for homemakers to rejoin the workforce once they're done with their time at home. This could look like, for example, providing scholarships for stay-at-home moms and dads to go back and increase their educational attainment.

It could also look like, on the non-governmental side, employers actively seeking out such people and trying to reintegrate them into the workforce. And in general, as I said, what's really missing here is a society-wide acknowledgement that if you're at home with kids or if you're at home taking care of an elderly relative, that work is important. It's skilled and it provides a good basis to then reenter the workforce.

Dave Deek: What pushback or challenges do you think you might come up with for the GI Bill for homemakers and other programs?

Ivana Greco: As always, when it comes to government programming, the big challenge is the United States does not have infinite amounts of money. So it is convincing policy makers to prioritize this over other programs that are also worthwhile. And then when it comes to employers, I think changing the stigma that surrounds homemakers is going to be an uphill battle. It's going to require cultural change. I don't think it's going to be something that will come easy.

Common Themes from Interviews

Dave Deek: I know that you do a large amount of interviews on The Home Front. What common threads do you see that pop up again and again in those interviews?

Ivana Greco: I think the biggest thing that pops up is that for many homemakers their time at home is one of the most important periods of their lives and it's really valuable. So it's one of those key life experiences for many people to be at home with their children when they're young or to be caring for an elderly relative who's declining. And so when I talk about cultural change, one of the things that I would love to see is greater recognition of the importance of those moments for the whole family.

That for a lot of people being home before a child goes off to kindergarten is one of the most important things they'll ever do. And so again, with the focus in our country on GDP growth and workforce participation, I think we're losing our sense of the importance of those moments.

Dave Deek: Any specific stories or moments from those interviews that really stood out?

Ivana Greco: I think one of my favorite interviews I've ever done is with a couple where dad was at home and mom was in the workforce and how they creatively made that work and showed real thoughtfulness about their roles, so that mom still was important in terms of nursing the baby and obviously through pregnancy and childbirth, but also how important dad's role was even when his children were little. I really appreciated that interview for kind of breaking down some of the stereotypes we might have about who can provide thoughtful and nurturing care for an infant at home.

Family and Child Care Policy

Dave Deek: Let's talk more about policy. In terms of the whole family and child care policy, what are the main sticking points in that field like help for everyone versus targeted help, government versus private solutions, etc.?

Ivana Greco: I think the big thing is when we talk about child care in the US, we're usually talking about external child care. So child care in a daycare, but there's not enough recognition that child care in the United States encompasses a lot of people. It encompasses grandparents who take care of grandkids. It encompasses parents who take care of their own kids. And so child care policy in the United States is mainly focused on daycare and preschools, but it only addresses an incomplete portion of who actually takes care of children in the United States.

And so again, I think that that's kind of myopic on the part of policy makers not to look at the whole universe of who's actually providing childcare in the United States.

Dave Deek: Do you think that this also goes back to the original problem—people are just too individualized to recognize things outside more formal systems?

Ivana Greco: I think that's part of it. And again, like I said, I think there's a lot of focus on how do we get women into the workforce without a corresponding recognition that the unpaid work of taking care of other people is also very valuable even if it's not reflected in our formal economic measures.

Dave Deek: Where do you think we can realistically find some agreement across the political aisle?

Ivana Greco: I think caring for other people is a very human problem that it's something that everybody has to address at one point or another in their life, so I have hope for the future that this is something that we can tackle because it is a problem that almost everybody faces.

Healthcare for Homemakers

Dave Deek: On the topic of health care for homemakers, I remember you were talking about Medicaid paying people to take care of more elderly family members, right? Could you expand more?

Ivana Greco: Medicaid, which is the safety net program for the elderly poor in the United States, will provide in some states payments for family members to take care of elderly persons who need help with the activities of daily living. I think that those are great programs because they keep people who don't want to be in nursing homes out of them, and also provide them caregivers that they're familiar with, who love them. And so it's a very good way of dealing with the very difficult problem of caring for those who can't care for themselves.

Dave Deek: I remember you writing an article more in depth about healthcare for homemakers. Could you talk more about that article?

Ivana Greco: Many homemakers face challenges with getting adequate health care. One of the most serious ways is, if you are out of the workforce for more than 5 years, you're going to have trouble accessing Social Security disability payments, which is the main safety net for someone who becomes disabled in the United States.

So if you are a homemaker and you become disabled, you basically fall into a donut hole of coverage, because probably you're not going to be able to access Social Security disability payments. But if you're married to someone, you're probably not asset-poor enough to qualify for the different safety nets that cover the very poor in the United States who are disabled. And you also don't have any workplace disability coverage.

So there's very little out there that is available to cover homemakers who become disabled. And then there are also a lot of difficulties in the United States with families with a breadwinner-homemaker structure to afford health care for the whole family.

Dave Deek: What potential fix do you have in mind?

Ivana Greco: One fix for the Social Security problem that I mentioned is to issue what are called caregiver credits. So to say, look, if you've been working for a long time and you step out of the workforce for 5 years to care for children, the federal government will create credits that basically fill the gap while you're out of the workforce doing this other socially valuable work. That is a fix that the government could do.

I don't know that it's particularly likely because the Social Security trust fund, as you probably know, is under significant financial pressure right now and I'm not sure that there's a critical mass of policy makers who would be interested in that, but that is a potential fix.

And then in terms of healthcare coverage, it would require both employers and governments essentially changing the rules to make family health insurance more affordable for families that have a homemaker-breadwinner division of labor.

So, basically the way family health insurance in the United States works is that employers in general subsidize individual health insurance plans to a greater degree than they subsidize family health insurance plans, which is part of what makes family health insurance in the United States so expensive. The employer—of course with a family it's going to cost you more in premiums—but it also costs you more because the employer subsidizes less as a percentage of the premium cost for family health insurance.

So these are things that will require technical fixes either to ERISA or to state rules governing how healthcare insurance is provided to make it less expensive for families to afford health insurance through their employers.

Dave Deek: Can you talk more about the technical fixes?

Ivana Greco: There's something called non-discrimination testing which says that employers can't provide different health insurance to their employees based on the employees' classification as a worker. One fix would be if we change the non-discrimination testing rules to say that family health insurance has to be subsidized to the same amount that individual health insurance is. It's quite a technical fix, but that would be the fix for that problem—the federal government issuing either through law or through rulemaking a requirement that employers provide good family health insurance.

Dave Deek: Any other ideas like fixes to HSAs or direct primary care?

Ivana Greco: Nothing is particularly occurring to me in terms of a specific breadwinner-homemaker division. Certainly there are a number of fixes out there that would make potentially like childbirth costs less. Some conservatives, for example, have proposed through the "make birth free" movement that employers be required to cover all the costs of childbirth in the same way that they're required to cover all the costs of contraception. That wouldn't only affect families with a homemaker, but certainly many of those families have a number of kids and so they would benefit if a rule like that was adopted.

Another possibility is to encourage employers to cover things like home births or births in free-standing birth centers. Those are often cheaper than hospital births. And so that is another thing that could make just the healthcare cost of having children lower for these families. Although again it's not unique to families with a homemaker-breadwinner structure.

Retirement Benefits for Homemakers

Dave Deek: And talking about other policies like employee benefits, legal shifts, taxes, what are your thoughts on those?

Ivana Greco: So one of the things that I would like to see in addition to the caregiver credits for disability payments is caregiver credits as it comes towards retirement. So for homemakers who've worked often they receive no benefit when it comes to retirement. The way Social Security retirement benefits are structured in the United States, you are as a homemaker entitled to half the Social Security retirement benefit of your spouse.

So if you have worked and paid into the Social Security trust fund, if your spousal benefit is greater than your personal benefit, you're going to take the spousal benefit, but get no extra benefit for all the money you've paid into the Social Security trust fund. And so I would like to see some way to address that, whether that's through caregiver credits or some sort of top-off that would recognize the extra work that most modern homemakers do where they're doing both economically productive labor in the workforce, but also caregiving work.

Children and Technology

Dave Deek: Let's talk about the next topic. Considering the background, let's talk about kids and technology and the big worries about that.

Ivana Greco: I'm certainly not someone who would say that kids should not be exposed to technology. My kids play video games, they use the internet, they watch TV. Some people have basically an abstinence policy when it comes to technology with their kids where they really try to limit technology as much as possible for their children. And that's not where I fall. I want to kind of gradually ramp up my kids' use of technology so that when they are adults they feel familiar with and comfortable with the technological world around us.

But that said, I do think that there are lots of concerns about technology, including unfortunately that there's a lot of child predators on the internet that reach out to children through technology, that there are a lot of mental health concerns for overuse of technology, especially by teens, and that in general many parents have poor visibility into what their children are doing with technology because they're accessing it at school or they're accessing it on cell phones that the parents aren't able to keep track of. So I have a lot of concerns about those issues.

Dave Deek: I remember Apple and Android devices—parents are able to set up parental accounts and maintain strong control over kids' phones.

Ivana Greco: My understanding is that there are parental controls available, but for every possible parental control, children frequently find workarounds. One of the most common ways actually is that grandma gives a 14-year-old $300 for Christmas or a birthday and then the child goes out and buys basically a burner phone, or they use a friend's phone or they use a friend's computer.

So I don't unfortunately think that parental controls are a complete fix, and I think we do need more aggressive movement by the federal government to seek out and punish websites that are enabling really harmful stuff to get to teens.

Dave Deek: In my past life I was into IT auditing and cybersecurity. How valuable do you see regular classes teaching parents just about parental controls and ways to find workarounds?

Ivana Greco: I think all of that stuff is very valuable. This is kind of out of the realm of my expertise. The only thing that I feel very confident of is that we do need much more robust enforcement measures and that I feel like tech platforms have essentially been shielded from liability for the harmful content that's available on their platforms, and that I would like that to end.

Pro-Family vs. Pro-Natalist Views

Dave Deek: Let's move on to the next topic, basically the whole natalist movement. As we were talking on Substack, I remember you calling yourself someone who's pro-family and pro-baby. What's the difference between that and the pro-natalist movement as you see it?

Ivana Greco: I understand the concerns of natalists about decreasing birth rates in the United States and worldwide. But I'm very uncomfortable with the government deliberately aiming to increase the birth rate to some specified number. I think that is very at odds with how the system of government in the United States has traditionally worked, especially for the federal government.

And it also just makes me uncomfortable because when I think of countries like China that deliberately decrease the birth rate, this seems to me to just sort of be like a mirror image of that—if we're going to pick a targeted birth rate we like and aim for that one. So, I'm very in favor of support for families having the children that they want to have. I start getting uncomfortable when we start talking about just how do we create more kids.

Dave Deek: So you would say that natalism in your mind means basically this technocratic, not very human idea of boosting rates to a specific number based on whatever the government needs. Is that a fair definition of how you view pro-natalism?

Ivana Greco: I don't think pro-natalism has to be defined that way and I know that there are people who advocate for a different definition, but I think many of the most prominent pro-natalists swing in that direction even if they're not there. And that is a path that I find very worrisome.

Dave Deek: Who would you call prominent pro-natalists?

Ivana Greco: So like Elon Musk, the Collinsons are people who I think swing more in this more technocratic dimension in which they're really concerned with increasing the number of kids, and so they're going down a path of more like "by any means necessary we need to up the birth rate numbers." And I'm very concerned by the means that we use to get to that end goal.

Dave Deek: That seems to be the opposite of a lot of more successful international cases of boosting birth rates. There was an academic study that recently came out where basically the South Korean cities and towns that do a better job with being pro-family and pro-baby as you define it tend to have higher birth rates. There's famous examples in Japan—if I'm rambling, you could just tell me to stop. But I just love talking about this stuff—like Nagi, Nagama, and Akashi, and a whole bunch of Japanese cities that said, "Hey, if we want more kids we have to be better." And there's even an Italian province, I believe it's called South Tyrol, that has that same mentality. Why do you think that Elon Musk's and the Collinsons' viewpoint seems to be the louder viewpoint versus the more pro-family, pro-baby voices that are more international?

Ivana Greco: Certainly when pro-natalism is discussed in the United States, usually the more Elon Musk view is what is published in the newspapers, possibly because it's more exciting and draws the reader in. Internationally, I know that there's a number of countries trying to increase birth rates that have had some localized success, but not general success. In general, when I think about what would successfully result in people having more kids, I'm skeptical that government measures can do more than move the needle a little bit. And I suspect that it is cultural change that would significantly increase birth rates. And I do not know how to create cultural change.

Dave Deek: I believe that Lyman Stone would argue that moving the needle is what you need to do to move cultural changes. What do you think about that point of view?

Ivana Greco: I don't know if you're familiar with the book Hannah's Children by Catharine Pakaluk in which she interviewed mothers of five or more children to learn why they had decided to have such large families, and for most of them their religious or spiritual beliefs were the foundational reason. And I think that is true for many people when they're deciding whether or not to create a larger family. They rely very much on the culture around them rather than specific government incentives.

So I think to create a world in which people affirmatively want to have large families again, it's not enough for the government to want it. The culture has to value and support it. And I do not know how you get there or if you can even socially engineer that.

Dave Deek: And then I do want to make a comment on national governments. And again feel free to shut me down if I tend to ramble. Because I remember writing summaries after summaries of basically studies looking at what governments did during the Great Recession and during COVID, and how the first thing that was cut, especially in Western European countries, is family benefits. And I remember in both the Czech Republic and Hungary there's been a lot of pushback in recent years because Orbán had to perform direct austerity measures which affect family policy benefits to some extent, and in the Czech Republic the new government basically went after family benefits and birth rates fell.

Ivana Greco: I mean, I think in many ways it's shortsighted to cut family benefits when you're thinking about austerity, although of course if you're in a situation where your government is running out of money, you don't have a lot of choices. But it is families that underpin the workings of the rest of society. So when you target family benefits because you're having economic problems, you may get short-term relief, but longer-term problems.

On the other hand, of course, I'm extremely sympathetic that a government that's running out of money is caught between a rock and a hard place.

Dave Deek: Then looking back to the pro-natalist movement, looking at how people advocate, what specific tactics from the Collinses and the Musks seem especially unhelpful?

Ivana Greco: I think the idea that children are essentially a consumer good is one that I really dislike—I don’t like the idea that we want to have more children in sort of an instrumental way. I reject seeing children in that way. I think children are valuable for themselves as individuals, and to the extent that a family decides to have a child, I don't want them to have a child because it's going to be good for the Social Security trust fund one day. I want them to have a child because they feel ready for it, they are looking to add more love into the world. And so I really do worry about this kind of more technocratic pro-natalism that I see being advocated for in the United States.

Dave Deek: So, it sounds like it's a poison pill that can stall progress in other ideas. Is that fair to say?

Ivana Greco: I think to some extent, yes. I mean, I don't want to overstate it, but I think that many people are very turned off by that form of pro-natalism. And so, I think it can be self-defeating because it makes people uncomfortable with the idea, and that can lead to things like liberal media right now rejecting the baby bonuses proposed by the Trump administration because they see it as in line with this more technocratic natalism. Whereas if the same policy had been proposed under Biden, I think it would have been hailed as an important measure to support families.

Conclusion

Dave Deek: I wonder if there's any key takeaways that you got from writing The Home Front.

Ivana Greco: Just that family is important, that the work of taking care of other people is also very important, and so that is what I try to highlight and advocate for on the Substack.

Dave Deek: Any last closing thoughts or call to actions?

Ivana Greco: Again, just all of my work really is about valuing people who take care of other people, and that work is so often invisible. And so that is really what I'm hoping to do through the paid work that I do right now.