Happy African American mother using laptop and working on paperwork while her daughter is embracing her at home.

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This past weekend, millions of mothers across the United States were celebrated with cards, flowers and well wishes. But Mother’s Day in America has become an act of appreciation without accountability. We applaud mothers for their strength and sacrifice, while perpetuating policies that require both constantly.

In a country with vast resources, raising a child too often means navigating unaffordable child care, unstable income and a safety net that rarely offers adequate support in hard times. As another holiday marking a failed promise to honor moms has passed, we should now be demanding policies that support mothers as relentlessly as mothers support everyone else.

I spend my days working to improve the lives of mothers living in extreme poverty in Jackson, Mississippi. My state is often cited for what’s going wrong in a variety of metrics. We have one of the highest infant mortality rates in the nation. We rank worst in the country for healthcare outcomes and racial disparities. Child care is scarce and prohibitively expensive. Wages lag while costs rise. These are not abstract policy failures — they show up for the mothers I work with as daily obstacles that shape how they feed their children, get to work and plan for the future. But the truth is, Mississippi is not an outlier. It is a mirror.

Across the country, mothers are being asked to do more with less. The cost of child care rivals rent or mortgage payments in most states. Paid leave remains out of reach for millions of workers, with under 15 states having codified its access. And while extensive research shows that early investments in children pay dividends over a lifetime, our policies continue to treat family stability as optional rather than foundational.

We have evidence of what works. We just haven’t chosen to scale it. During the pandemic-era expansion of the Child Tax Credit in 2021, child poverty in the United States dropped to a historic low. Parents used that money for exactly what it was intended for: food, rent, utilities and child care. It was one of the most effective anti-poverty measures in recent history — and then Congressional leaders let it expire.

But even if federal relief has been inconsistent, smaller programs have sustained — guaranteed income programs like the one I run, the Magnolia Mother’s Trust, have been quietly demonstrating what happens when we trust mothers with resources instead of restricting them with conditions. After participating in the program, 78 percent of mothers report feeling more confident in their ability to achieve their goals, and 80 percent feel more hopeful about their children’s futures. Our latest cohort starts receiving their first payments of $1,000 monthly for a year this week. And while that will make a huge difference for about 100 families by almost doubling their incomes, we must scale back up to the unparalleled positive results we saw with the national experiment of the expanded CTC.

There are tangible concrete economic gains for us all, with research estimating the expanded CTC would provide the public a staggering 16x return on investment. In addition to the societal benefit, child cash policies give mom invaluable benefits. They represent a mother being able to fix her car so she can get to work reliably. They represent fewer sleepless nights spent deciding which bill to pay. They represent the mental space to plan, to dream, to parent with intention instead of constant crisis management.

Cash does not solve everything, but it is a powerful tool to create the conditions for everything else to become possible. If we are serious about supporting mothers rather than just celebrating them, we have to be willing to follow through with concrete ways to improve the experience of mothering. That starts with restoring and making permanent an expanded Child Tax Credit that reaches families monthly, not once a year. It means investing in guaranteed income programs as a complement to existing safety net programs, not a replacement. It means enacting national paid family leave so no parent has to choose between a paycheck and caring for a newborn. And it means treating child care as essential infrastructure, with subsidies and systems that reflect the true cost of care.

We are already seeing glimpses of what this can look like. New Mexico just passed the nation’s first universal child care law. Cities like New York are investing in more robust child care support systems. These are steps in the right direction — but they are fragmented, uneven and too often dependent on geography. A mother’s resources to care for her child should not depend on her ZIP code.

What we need now is the political will to connect these efforts into a cohesive national strategy — one that recognizes that supporting mothers is not a niche issue, but an economic imperative. When we invest early and consistently, we spend less money as a society trying to fix preventable crises later.

As we mark the passing of another Mother’s Day, we have a choice. We can continue to offer symbolic gestures that ask mothers to endure more with grace. Or we can build systems that make that endurance less necessary in the first place.