Story highlights Stephanie Coontz: Ivanka Trump's letter is a rebuke of the administration's own policies

Entitlement programs should allow for the security and prosperity of all Americans, she writes

Stephanie Coontz is director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families, which is hosted by the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author, most recently, of The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. The views expressed in this commentary are her own.

(CNN) In a letter to The Wall Street Journal this week, Ivanka Trump gave a robust defense of the Trump administration's proposed paid family leave program. The Journal's editorial board had denounced it as a government "entitlement" that "could create another disincentive for work and advancement."

Ms. Trump indignantly denied that paid leave was an "entitlement," a word that has become an epithet in American politics. Rather, she said, it's "an investment in America's working families."

Stephanie Coontz

But whether consciously or not, Ms. Trump's defense represents a stinging rebuke to the combination of lofty rhetoric and callous policies emanating from the new administration and Congress. She frankly admits that the unregulated market, hailed by so many politicians as the ultimate creator of jobs and prosperity for all, has failed "those who need these benefits the most." She added, "The poorest, most vulnerable workers in our society get left behind" by business-provided work-family policies.

Fewer than 10% of individuals in the lowest 25% of earners have access to paid family leave. As a result, they often lose or are forced to quit their jobs after having a child. And this, Ms. Trump notes, results in far greater damage to their prospects for future work and advancement, and "a far greater cost to society over the long term," than the government funding required to support "healthier children and parents in more tightly bonded families" with a "stronger attachment to the labor force" in the long run.

Of course, however Ms. Trump frames it, paid leave would indeed be an entitlement -- and an investment. A new mother or father is entitled to paid leave; the child is entitled to bond with its parents. And government makes an investment in parents' ability to put food on the table while they are at home and to return to work without having sacrificed their prospects for advancement.