One of the biggest complaints I hear from young families,” JD Vance said on the vice-presidential debate stage, “is people who feel like they don’t have options, like they’re choosing between going to work or taking care of their kids. That is an incredible burden to put on American families.”
With that statement, Vance, a Millennial father with three young children, deftly summarized the cri de coeur of the modern American family—particularly working mothers. Speaking of his own wife, Usha, a Yale-trained corporate litigator who had access to paid family leave, Vance noted that “being a working mom, even for somebody with all of the advantages of my wife, is extraordinarily difficult.”
Millions of women no doubt agree—myself included. Even after completing graduate school and training as a sommelier while working full-time in multiple senior staff roles in Congress, balancing the beautifully consuming calls of motherhood while meeting the demands of a fulfilling career that helps support my family is far and away the most challenging thing I have ever done.
But does it have to be? The answer is likely as multifaceted, complex, and personal as the question itself. As a policy matter, however, the conversation tends to be reductive and, for Democrats in particular, reflect the inherent biases and preferences of the Acela corridor policy makers and lobbyists who set the terms of the debate.
This is why the left’s answer to the challenge facing working women is simply more daycare. Specifically, universal daycare and state-run preschool, with an income cap on how much families should have to spend on childcare. This is one answer, but it’s wildly insufficient for the obvious reason that it narrows and flattens unique family needs, preferences, and ecosystems into one model: two parents full-time in the workplace, handing off their children to the state.
It also reveals a lot about how the modern left views women—as one-dimensional careerist GDP drones who aspire to nothing more than a singular life path that ends in the corner office. While conservatives and Republicans discuss policy options to make it more affordable for moms to spend more time with their kids, “Democrats,” noted the New York Times approvingly, “tend to talk about child-care benefits as gender-neutral and as a crucial way to get more parents into the work force.”
But as poll after poll demonstrates, women's preferences vary across race, income, education, and their child’s age. Particularly when caring for children under five, most families would prefer that one parent stay at home. In the modern economy, however, many families simply cannot afford this option—and the existing thicket of childcare tax credits only benefits families who outsource childcare, and not families where one parent stays at home.
Moreover, the issue of “to work or not to work” is not the binary choice policy makers assume it to be. Women often want to work, but at a reduced schedule, and will choose jobs that give them maximum flexibility (often choosing a lower salary in exchange, which is why the so-called gender pay gap is an illusion). To that end, Vance’s proposal to have the government subsidize various family care models—including those provided in the home, or by family—strikes closer to the target.
Addressing the childcare affordability crisis, however, is just one element of easing the burden on working moms. Making it easier for states and businesses to grant leave time, for employers to provide childcare, changing the federal law to improve employer flexibility for hourly workers, and simply making it financially attainable for families to have one parent full-time in the home should all be on the table.
For some on the right, using government policy to benefit the family in any way is a betrayal of small government principles. “The IRS shouldn’t favor Child Moms over Dog Moms,” blared the Wall Street Journal, attempting to argue that the tax code should be entirely neutral toward children and families. But just the opposite is true.
For one thing, the tax code isn’t neutral toward childrearing—it already benefits it, to some extent, while simultaneously penalizing marriage. Moreover, the party that has no problem modifying the tax code for pro-growth corporate policies should be equally as enthusiastic toward a tax code that privileges the most important pro-growth work of all: raising a future generation of human beings.
Insisting that government policy be entirely neutral toward families ignores the reality that the system is in fact heavily weighted against parental rights, family autonomy, and agency. The social contract has been broken by a government that uses our tax dollars to fund abortion on demand, libraries with sexually explicit books and programming, and public schools that are little more than incubation spheres for progressive dogma.
Working-class families that used to be able to rely on publicly funded institutions for a solid education must now step in with their own limited resources and time to fund private education and enrichment, or forgo extra income so one parent can homeschool—and this is just part of the economic burden that modern families now face. Why shouldn’t they get a little help? Empowering the individual family unit, the most foundational of all the permanent things, is one of the few policy areas the right has to effectively defend against the progressive ideology that has saturated every public institution and nearly every cultural and corporate institution as well.
The left’s answer to the challenge of working motherhood is always “the village,” and by that they mean the state. The right must answer by making the family unit sturdy enough to stand against the tidal wave of progressive government and culture that seeks its undoing.
Rachel Bovard is vice president of programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute.
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Image by Lyncconf Games, provided by Flickr, via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
