Democratic policies do the real pigeonholing

He explained the policy solutions to which he alluded in a conversation with Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, including kinship care and child care certification. Vance was articulate and objective — qualities Vice President Kamala Harris has proved to lack, in part because of her countless policy flip-flops.

Vance, however, has been particularly consistent on parental choice, around which his whole child care platform turns. Policies that subsidize “one particular family model,” wrote Vance, place heavy pressure on the favored child care system while making it hard to seek any other mode. Seeking a solution through the help of grandparents, for example, could provide significant relief both for those who will continue using child care programs and those who want to rely primarily on family. In order to obtain this twofold benefit, there has to be room for parental choice in the matter. That intention has to be in the policy.

When the government only supports one child care model, existing problems of supply and cost amplify. The same good becomes more expensive and less available, and the low-income families Harris tries to target are then in an even more difficult situation. Vance specifies two factors in the supply problem: One is the exclusion of faith-based child care written into policies, and the second is education requirements that inhibit employment. 

Democratic child care policies, when these problems are reinforced, run contrary to parental choice. Whether it is by design or a coincidence-spiraled-out-of-control is a tangential question. But the irony of the singular child care model is unavoidable.

The lack of choice, or forced pathway, is what constitutes liberal fears of “neopatriarchy.” Critics of this movement, if it can be called a movement, push back on Republican messaging and policies that seem to funnel women toward one role, that of homemaker: centering concerns on the family, suggesting men and women lean into traditional husband and wife roles, showing how this model is one that works — all things that would prove horribly regressive, in the critic’s view, if women actually implemented them. 

It certainly could appear regressive if these conditions were made compulsory. Yet it is not right-wing policymakers who do the pigeonholing. The Left’s is the model of full-time work and outsourced child care, and it is this model that current policies reflect. The dominant culture follows along, and everyone else has little choice otherwise.

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Vance might see the Right’s model as optimal, and he might encourage it by his own example. Still, what he promotes with his policies is merely the opportunity for a better choice, not the enforcement of it. 

It is a slow process to move toward the ideal, but making it easier for parents to care for their own children is one step in the right direction. Those on the Left are fair to be concerned that women not be made into “babymaking machines,” but it is by its doing that the meaning of family has taken on such a practical tone. True support for family formation comes when parents can choose freely to do what is best.