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    Zohran Mamdani’s campaign proposes free childcare. Is it finally a winning policy?

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    Maggie Stockdale hadn’t given much thought to childcare before welcoming her first child last year. But once she learned the high price of full-time daycare tuition in Brooklyn, New York, she knew she had to find another solution.Now, her care duties are split between Stockdale’s parents, who relocated from Wisconsin to help out, and her husband, who cut his hours down to part time and arranged with his employer to let him bring their 10-month-old to work several days a week.“You feel fragile,” said Stockdale, lamenting that so many families have to choose between financial stability and their child’s wellbeing.So when Zohran Mamdani campaigned on a platform of affordability, proposing free childcare for children aged six weeks and older, it made her feel that the pain she and other parents had experienced had not gone unnoticed.Mamdani, the 33-year-old state assemblymember who won the Democratic primary for New York City mayor last month, has put forth a variety of kid- and family-focused ideas, including distributing baby baskets containing formula and postpartum supplies to new parents, building up mental health infrastructure in schools and closing off high-traffic streets adjacent to school zones. But what’s garnered the most attention is his promise of free childcare, a system he plans to fund by raising taxes on corporations and the city’s richest residents.As he told supporters in his victory speech: “We have won because New Yorkers have stood up for a city they can afford. A city where they can do more than just struggle … where childcare doesn’t cost more than [college].”For Stockdale, seeing these policies at the center of a major political campaign has underscored how childcare affordability is not only a core concern for voters – but also a winning issue.“It’s got so much support,” said Stockdale, also an organizer with the advocacy group New Yorkers United for Childcare. “People have started to realize that this should be a key component of any candidate’s platform.”In many ways, Mamdani’s platform responds to the surge of activism that New York has seen in favor of making childcare a public good – activism that first emerged at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the importance and fragility of the country’s childcare system was laid bare. Since then, elected officials have begun to take the issue seriously, explained Allison Lew, senior organizer with New Yorkers United for Child Care.A report released from the New York City comptroller’s office this year shows the average cost of center-based care across the five boroughs was $26,000 a year, and that to afford the cost of care for a two-year-old in New York City, a family would need to earn $334,000 annually. “People are draining their savings, going into debt, borrowing on their 401ks [retirement funds],” said Lew. “You have to be wealthy in order for childcare to not be an issue.”For many would-be parents, the inaccessibility is affecting their family-planning decisions, causing them to delay having kids or to only have one child, despite wanting more. “We would love to have another, but financially, we don’t know if we can afford it,” said Nancy Keith, who is raising a 15-month-old in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn. Keith says that she and her husband waited until they were in their late 30s, and more settled in their career, to have a child. Even still, they need financial assistance from their parents to afford the $26,000 a year they pay for childcare.Should Mamdani win the mayoral election in November and make his childcare vision a reality, these challenges could become things of the past, experts say.Most immediately, parents and childcare workers alike would experience improved financial security. Families would see thousands more dollars in their bank accounts every month, while childcare workers would be paid salaries and receive benefits at parity with New York public school employees.Gregory Brender, chief policy and innovation officer at the Day Care Council of New York, explains that pay parity has been a priority for the provider network for decades, making it a relief to finally see it be a legislative priority. “Early childhood education depends on a talented and educated workforce, and they need to be compensated appropriately,” he said.These family-focused policies would also improve equity in the city, as more parents – especially women – would be able to remain in the workforce. And in making the city more affordable for everyone, families from diverse backgrounds with a range of incomes would be able to remain in their communities.Down the line, such policies would also bolster the city’s economy. Collectively, New Yorkers spend as much as $15bn on childcare every year. And in 2022, families not being able to afford childcare cost the city $23bn between lost tax revenues and workplace departures as parents were forced to drop out of the workforce.“We just cannot afford to not have universal childcare,” Lew said.Universal childcare isn’t cheap. But the city has the money, said Justin Brannan, a New York City councilmember representing parts of Brooklyn and chair of the city’s committee on finance. “We have been stuck in this cycle of false austerity where we are supposed to believe that we have to choose between little and even less, and it’s just not true,” Brannan said, noting that the city’s budget totals almost $116bn (universal childcare would cost $12bn per year). “We just need to do a better job of spending our money,” he said.Implementing such a system may not be as simple as carving out room in the budget, however. Some facets of the plan – like raising taxes – need to be approved by the state legislature and the governor. Kathy Hochul, the New York governor, has already said she will not raise income taxes. Mamdani has acknowledged these challenges, saying in an interview with Morning Edition, “Any mayor that has an ambition that meets the scale of the crisis of the people that they’re seeking to represent will have to work with [the state].”Still, the ideas have momentum.New York has been a pioneer in accessible childcare infrastructure for several years, including universal preschool for three- and four-year-olds (known as pre-K and 3-K). And although many doubted Bill de Blasio’s ability to pull off his promise of universal preschool when he ran for mayor more than a decade ago, the program is now a national model. Before that, the city instituted a voucher program that enabled low-income families to access childcare for children aged six weeks to 15 years – although seats are limited. As a result of those developments, advocates like Lew say some degree of publicly funded childcare is now a “non-negotiable” for many New Yorkers.Mamdani says his campaign promises to build on those past successes. “These platform planks are rooted in very recent New York City history,” he said in an interview with the Nation. “Universal childcare is something that many candidates are in support of because of the success of universal pre-K.”New York isn’t alone in its quest for solutions to the nationwide childcare crisis. In 2022, New Mexico made childcare free for most families. That same year, Washington DC raised childcare workers’ wages through a tax on the district’s wealthiest residents. And in 2023, Vermont guaranteed financial support for childcare for all families with incomes below 575% of the federal poverty level – amounting to 90% of families in the state.Hailey Gibbs, associate director of early childhood policy at the Center for American Progress, said it’s an issue that crosses the political aisle. “Folks, regardless of what state they represent or how far they sit in the political extremes, understand that the lack is meaningful,” she said.“It’s a unifying issue,” echoed Karen Schulman, senior director of state childcare policy at the National Women’s Law Center, pointing out that even staunchly Republican states like Alabama, Georgia and Montana have created early childhood education funds.But Mamdani’s campaign is the first in the country to put children and childcare front and center – and win, at least at the primary level. “That’s pretty bold for the US,” Gibbs said. More

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      Childcare is a hellscape for most US families. Why isn’t there a bigger push for change?

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      In 2021, Bri Adams was pregnant with her first child and began signing up for waitlists for childcare – eight, to be exact. She was thrilled when she found a spot, but was quickly horrified when the childcare shut down abruptly.It “kind of broke my brain a bit”, said Adams, a 34-year-old tech director from Falls Church, Virginia. Scrambling again, she found a new location close to the family’s home.Like Adams’s household, two-thirds of US families with young children – including middle- and upper-middle-class families who frequently command politicians’ attention – have had all available parents in the workforce since the late 1990s. Yet parents still struggle mightily to access quality childcare; large majorities say it is hard to find and afford care, and the cost of care continues to rise at a faster rate than inflation.As near-universal as these challenges are, there is a persistent and surprising lack of a mass movement demanding major childcare reforms. US parents are basically on their own to figure out solutions for their families. Adams “considers herself lucky” that she and her husband, who take home $11,000 each month after taxes, can spend more than $50,000 a year on their two kids’ childcare. Childcare remains their biggest expense, costing a whopping $4,300 a month – $800 more than their mortgage. As Adams asked: “If I am feeling such intense financial stress when we make $300,000 a year, how on earth are people managing who make so much less and have zero safety net?”View image in fullscreenOther countries like Canada, Germany and Ireland have made transformative changes to their previously inadequate systems, partly spurred on by parents like Adams. In February 2020, for instance, more than 30,000 parents and childcare providers flooded the streets of Dublin, an event credited with elevating childcare to a top-tier political issue and securing more public funding. Despite the long-broken American childcare system, there has never been a successful and sustained mass mobilization demanding the government do something to fix the problem.So what has held the US back from achieving such a program, even though polling suggests it would be widely popular for families, and a boon to our communities and economy?The historical divide in childcareThe US has long had a fraught and contradictory relationship with childcare, one wrapped up in clashes over the role of the family versus the state and tainted by sexism and racism. These tensions culminated with an epic failure in the 1970s, the consequences of which still reverberate today.For most of the 19th century, working- and middle-class families lived on self-contained farms or ran small family businesses. Young children worked on those farms or in those businesses, and childcare responsibilities were shared among family members. For families of means, beginning with slavery and continuing well into the present day, women of color have provided unpaid or undercompensated care for upper-class families, even while frequently being unable to care for their own families.During the second world war, with men at war and women taking on the manufacturing jobs at home, the US briefly created a successful, publicly supported childcare system. However, many workplaces restricted mothers from the workplace when the men returned.But by the late 1960s, mothers were entering the paid labor force in droves, representing one of the largest labor market shifts in modern American history. Organizing efforts came together in 1971 to help Congress pass the Comprehensive Child Development Act, a bipartisan bill that would have begun creating a nationally funded, locally run network of childcare centers.View image in fullscreenBy this time, however, the progressive New Deal coalition of the 1930s – riven both by the disaster in Vietnam and cultural conflicts at home – was giving way to a free-market order marked by a distrust of government intervention. The act was subsequently vetoed by Richard Nixon on the grounds that it would assert the government’s authority “against the family-centered approach”.In a span of only 30 years, while the US’s European counterparts began investing in broad-based childcare systems as they needed women to work and rebuild countries devastated by war, the United States went from considering the idea of a federally funded childcare system to entrenched opposition.Childcare as a ‘private family issue’Access to childcare has deep economic implications, and it’s also a social issue mired in cultural policies that ask: who gets to work and who should be at home watching kids? Through the 1950s, many companies explicitly discriminated against married women or mothers in hiring or retention. Popular TV shows of the era, from Father Knows Best to The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, reinforced a traditionalist view of gender dynamics around care. Even today, many parents continue to say that it is primarily parents’ responsibility to figure out how to make childcare work.Sandra Levitsky, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who has studied US care movements, explained that deep-seated ideologies were “hard to shift” and believes the leap from being seen as a private issue to a public one is “at the heart” of what needs to change for the movement to expand. “If it couldn’t happen [during Covid] – when women were literally quitting their jobs to care for their kids – what is going to happen now?” she said.On a national level, childcare has what political science calls a “salience” problem. Today’s voters say they support childcare measures, even regularly approving measures on state and local ballots. Yet very few politicians are elected or defeated due to their childcare stance.When parents get politicalHistory has shown that parents can, however, be a remarkably effective and galvanized voting bloc: parents led organizing efforts following the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre by launching Moms Demand Action, and conservative parents concerned about Covid school restrictions responded by forming Moms for Liberty. It was a bereaved parent who started Mothers Against Drunk Driving, while in an earlier era, mothers’ groups were instrumental in the fight against child labor through pamphleteering, hosting public lectures and pressuring legislators.Since the pandemic, multiple major parent organizing efforts with childcare as a main pillar have launched or scaled up, and more philanthropic dollars have flowed to the movement. The increase in childcare advocacy funding is consequential: for decades, childcare organizers have scraped by with limited resources, the equivalent of bringing a horse-and-buggy to the political racetrack.Chamber of Mothers, of which Bri Adams is a part, was formed in 2021 by a group of social media-savvy mothers incensed after $400bn in childcare funding was dropped from the Build Back Better legislation. The chamber now has dozens of chapters across the nation where mothers come together to build community, learn about public policy issues and organize politically. Another group, Moms First, developed out of an effort to create a “Marshall plan for moms” in the midst of the pandemic, and founder Reshma Saujani was the one who asked then candidate Donald Trump a childcare question during the presidential campaign; Trump’s rambling response about how “the childcare is childcare” went viral. Additionally, several philanthropic entities in 2018 created the Raising Child Care Fund, which provides funding to 20 social justice-focused childcare organizing groups. Collectively, these initiatives point to the type of energy and infrastructure that can help issues leap from private matter to public concern.The final piece that is missing is a shared vision.View image in fullscreen“We don’t have a clear definition of what the what is,” said Natalie Renew, executive director of Home Grown, a philanthropic collaborative focused on strengthening home-based childcare options. “We don’t have a shared consensus to define what childcare is and who benefits from it, and what those benefits and outcomes look like.” Renew points to the divide between groups that organize for childcare using economic arguments to support parents doing wage labor, and groups that organize for childcare using kindergarten readiness as a means to support pre-kindergarten. “But pre-K is not childcare,” Renew said. “It can be part of a childcare solution, but it’s not childcare.”For all of the challenges, we know change is possible – even on long-held social beliefs – in a relatively compressed period of time. In the past two decades, the US has normalized and enshrined into law the rights of gay people to marry and participate fully in society. We’ve also changed paternity leave from a rare fringe benefit to an increasingly expected workplace leave policy. We may have deeply held beliefs about who takes care of children, but as more generations with different expectations about who can care for their children become parents – and after the wake-up call of the Covid pandemic – we can see a shift potentially beginning to take hold.Renew, too, is heartened by the changes she has seen in childcare policies and structures at the local and state levels, advances that arguably provide a proof of concept. Buoyed by Covid relief funds, localities had a chance to invest in childcare. “We saw cities and towns putting their flexible dollars to childcare, and they became stakeholders in the conversation,” she said. And as states begin to invest more in childcare systems locally notably in Vermont and New Mexico – more localities are beginning to take notice and have seen how such efforts boost their local economies and families’ wellbeing.America’s history, prevailing cultural attitudes and an underpowered advocacy ecosystem have all contributed to the current childcare hellscape. But it’s possible that enough parents have begun to look around and ask: why is the United States making this harder than it needs to be? Real change will come when it’s no longer just parents asking that question. More

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      Trump’s ‘big, beautiful’ bill is built on falsehoods about low-income families | Brigid Schulte and Haley Swenson

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      As they race to deliver Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax bill, Republicans in Congress are using familiar tropes to justify massive cuts to the safety net that will leave millions of low-income children and families without healthcare or sufficient food. The programs, they argue, are rife with waste, fraud and abuse, and the people who use them just aren’t working hard enough. So work requirements are necessary to force the obviously lazy “able-bodied” people to get to work.Here’s the reality check: a majority of those receiving this aid who can work are already working. More than 70% of working-age people who receive nutrition benefits or Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income children and adults that covers one in five Americans, are already working, according to the Government Accountability Office. Those who aren’t working, research shows, are mostly ill, disabled, caring for a family member, or in school.Take the story of Ruaa Sabek. When the Covid pandemic hit in 2020, she and her husband worked at a fast-food restaurant in Philadelphia. Both their hours were cut, but they didn’t qualify for unemployment benefits because they remained employed. With two young children at home, their carefully managed budget began to crumble under rising prices and reduced incomes.What saved them wasn’t extraordinary luck or family wealth. It was the streamlined and expanded government support programs that turned what economists predicted would be a financial apocalypse into a springboard toward financial stability for some families.One analysis of Medicaid work requirements by KKF, a health policy research organization, found that most working people with low enough incomes to qualify for Medicaid typically work for small companies or in sectors, like agriculture, that don’t offer employer-sponsored health insurance, or the rates are unaffordable. In other words, their jobs don’t pay them enough to afford basics, don’t offer benefits, and they have no other choice but Medicaid.There’s no doubt that safety net programs like Medicaid could be improved. They’re rife not so much with waste, fraud and abuse, as conservative lawmakers say – though there is some – but confusing red tape; disincentives to upward mobility, because benefits cut off sharply as soon as incomes start to rise; and cumbersome, punitive rules designed to dissuade people from applying for benefits in the first place.Fueling the Republican drive to slash public benefits is a long-held belief among many conservatives that the reason most people live in poverty is because they don’t work, or don’t work hard enough, and are instead lazing about, dependent on government largesse, and robbing Americans of their hard-earned tax dollars.That view features prominently in Project 2025, the playbook for the Trump administration authored by the conservative Heritage Foundation. The foreword reads: “Low-income communities are drowning in addiction and government dependence.”And it was clearly on display in recent House congressional hearings on how to slash $1.5 trillion from the federal budget in order to pay for extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. “That little gravy train is getting ready to run out,” one Republican lawmaker said of federal safety net programs like Medicaid and food and nutrition aid for people living in poverty. “The spigot is getting ready to be turned off.” The billionaire Elon Musk, charged with cutting federal spending, has even posted a meme calling people who rely on federal spending the “Parasite Class”.Here’s another reality check: Three in 10 Americans, more than 99 million people, rely on some form of federal aid to live. That includes nearly half of all children in the United States. Another 52 million households, 41% of all US households, make too much to qualify for public safety net benefits but still not enough to survive. Nearly 40% of Americans would struggle to cover a $400 emergency expense.There is a problem with making policy decisions based on the unfounded belief that poverty is about people with bad moral character making bad choices, or on debunked racial tropes of undeserving “welfare queens.” (In fact, white people make up the largest group receiving public food and healthcare aid.) Shaping policy around false stereotypes, rather than the complex reality, prevents policymakers from working together on real solutions.In fact, if you talk to people living in poverty, what they say they want tracks nearly exactly with what Project 2025 aims to foster: “empowering individuals to achieve economic independence.”“If I earn good money, I’m not going to be looking for benefits. I’ll take care of my bills,” said Blessing Aghayedo, a licensed practical nurse in Minnesota. Instead, she earns barely more than the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009.Breathing roomIn the Sabeks’ case during the pandemic, expanded Medicaid and enhanced nutrition benefits helped weather health emergencies and soaring grocery prices. Rental assistance prevented them from losing their housing when they fell behind on payments. Stimulus checks and the expanded monthly child tax credit provided crucial cash that covered essential expenses like milk, diapers, children’s clothing, utility bills, and car repairs when they needed a new transmission.Perhaps most significantly, public subsidies for childcare and the Head Start program reduced their childcare expenses from an overwhelming $1,300 per month to $120, enabling Ruaa Sabek to continue working part time and enroll in a banking training program. “I feel like, ‘Oh my God, peace of mind,’” she said of the breathing room the public benefits gave her and her family. As a result, she landed a full-time position in 2023 as a personal banker that pays $45,000 annually with benefits – a dramatic improvement from her previous part-time $12-an-hour cashier job with irregular hours and no benefits.The family is now thriving without public assistance, aligning with decades of research. “You can’t actually figure out how to get to flourishing until you’re in a stable and secure situation,” said Megan Curran, director of policy at the Center on Poverty and Society Policy at Columbia.Research shows that when families have a stable foundation, they are healthier and live longer. Adults are more likely to keep working, and children are more likely to stay in school, graduate, get better jobs, and pay taxes as adults. Even babies’ brain development is improved.And the stability pays for itself: the Child Tax Credit, for instance, returns $10 for every $1 spent every year. The United States remains the only wealthy country with no national paid maternity leave, yet the return on investment for paid family leave is 20:1. For childcare, it’s 8:1.Meanwhile, rather than saving taxpayers a ton of money, as Musk promised, slashing safety-net support ignores the real problem that keeps families from economic independence: 44% of the workforce in the United States, the wealthiest country on earth as measured by GDP, is low-wage, a share far higher than in many economic peer countries.Squeezing families already struggling financially could increase the share of those already waking up hungry, homeless, or worried they soon might be. The United States already has one of the highest rates of child poverty among wealthy countries. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine estimates that high poverty rate costs as much as $1tn a year in lost adult productivity, increased crime and poor health.Childcare is keyIf lawmakers are serious about adding work requirements for safety net programs, then ensuring families have access to affordable childcare is critical. Compared with other advanced economies, the United States invests the least in childcare. That means childcare costs are second only to mortgage or rent for most families who have to pay out of pocket. And federal childcare subsidies for low-income parents come nowhere close to covering those eligible.The lack of affordable childcare sent Kiarica Schields, a college-educated hospice nurse and single parent in Georgia, spiraling into a cycle of joblessness, eviction, instability, and poverty. “Childcare. That’s my issue,” she said.Trump has said he wants families to have more children. Yet surveys show that young people aren’t having children, or having as many as they’d like, because they can’t afford childcare.Kel, a divorced parent of four, wants lawmakers to think of public benefits for families like hers as a short-term investment with long-term benefits. Kel, who asked not to use her last name, fled an abusive marriage, struggles to pay bills, though she works as much as she can, and relies on Medicaid for life-saving physical and mental health treatments for her and her children. “Lifting me and people like me up will have a cascading effect on so many lives in a positive way,” she said. “We will give back to our communities tenfold, a hundredfold. It’s worth that investment in us. We’re a really good investment.”

      Brigid Schulte is the director of New America’s work-family justice program, Better Life Lab, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, and the author of Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life and the New York Times bestselling Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play when No One has the Time. Haley Swenson is a research and writing fellow for the Better Life Lab More

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      She compared motherhood in four countries. The US isn’t looking good

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      When Abigail Leonard saw the news that the Trump administration was considering handing out $5,000 “baby bonuses” to new mothers, she realized that she had already received one.A longtime international reporter, Leonard gave birth to three children while living in Japan, which offers a year of parental leave, publicly run daycare, and lump-sum grants to new parents that amount to thousands of US dollars. But it was not until moving back to the US in 2023 that Leonard grasped just how robust Japan’s social safety net for families is – and, in comparison, just how paltry the US net feels.Not only is the US the only rich country on the planet without any form of national paid leave, but an uncomplicated birth covered by private insurance tends to cost families about $3,000, which, Leonard discovered, is far more than in most other countries. The federal government also spends a fraction of what most other wealthy countries spend on early education and childcare, as federally subsidized childcare is primarily available only to the lowest earners. Middle-class families are iced out.View image in fullscreenLeonard traces the effects of policies and disparities like these in her new book, Four Mothers, which follows the pregnancy and early childrearing experiences of four urban, middle-class women living in Japan, Kenya, Finland and the US. Published earlier this month, Four Mothers provides a deeply personal window into how policy shapes parents’ lives. And it has emerged as an increasingly rightwing US seems poised to embrace the ideology of pronatalism and policies aimed at convincing people to have more kids.Pronatalism is deeply controversial, in no small part because its critics say pronatalists are more concerned with pushing women to have kids than with ensuring women have the support required to raise them.“Being ‘pronatal’ – designing policy to increase the birthrate – is not the same thing as being pro-woman,” Leonard notes in Four Mothers’ introduction. A $5,000 check would not have been enough to help any of the moms profiled in the book. Instead, the women relied on – or longed for, in the case of the US – extensive external support, such as affordable maternity care, parental leave and access to childcare.“The book is an implicit comparison of the rest of the world to the US, and parenthood is so much harder here in many ways,” Leonard said in a phone interview with the Guardian. “People are so accepting that things can be privatized and that government can be torn down and that there won’t be any repercussions to that. We don’t think about how integral government policy is to our lives, and for that reason can’t imagine how much more beneficial it could be.”View image in fullscreenIn the US, resistance to increasing government aid in childrearing has long gone hand in hand with a commitment to upholding a white, traditional view of the American family. At virtually every juncture, rightwing groups have been galvanized to stop sporadic efforts at expanding support. During the second world war, Congress allocated $20m to a universal childcare program that could help women work while men fought in the war effort. The program was so popular that people protested in the streets to keep it even after the war ended, according to Leonard. But the program was dismantled after political disputes over how to run the program, as southern states demanded that the daycares be segregated.In 1971, Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have created a national system of federally subsidized daycare centers. Inflamed by the idea that the bill would encourage women to work outside the home, church groups organized letter-writing campaigns against the bill. Rightwing pundits, meanwhile, claimed the bill was “a plan to Sovietize our youth”. Richard Nixon ultimately vetoed the bill, calling it “the most radical piece of legislation” to ever cross his desk.Today, Leonard writes, corporations have an entrenched interest in keeping childcare from becoming a public good in the US. Private equity is heavily invested in childcare companies. Wealthy corporations, especially big tech companies, can also use their generous paid leave policies to lure in the best talent.“I talked to a congressman who was telling me he was trying to get some of these companies on board to back a national paid leave policy, and they were saying: ‘We don’t want to do paid leave because then we give up our own competitive advantage.’ It’s so cynical,” Leonard said. “These are companies that have been able to create this image around themselves of being feminist and pro-family. Like: ‘They’re great places to work for women. They help fund fertility treatments!’”She continued: “They’ve feminist-washed themselves. They’re working against a national policy that would benefit everyone and that ultimately would benefit our democracy, because you wouldn’t have this huge inequality of benefits and lifestyles.”‘A grind’The US has become far more accepting of women’s careerist ambitions over the last 50 years – especially as it has become more difficult for US families to sustain themselves on a single income – but balancing work and family life is still often treated as a matter of personal responsibility (or, frequently, as a personal failing).View image in fullscreenTo improve mothers’ lives, Leonard found, a commitment to flexible gender norms – in the home and at work – must be coupled with a robust social safety net.Each of the women in Four Mothers struggled with male partners who, in various ways and for assorted reasons, failed to provide as much childcare as the mothers. Sarah, a teacher in Utah, was married to an Amazon delivery driver who got zero parental leave. Sarah was entitled to three months of leave, at partial pay, but only because her union advocated for it. Although Sarah and her husband chose to leave the Mormon church, she found herself longing for the community that the church provided because it offered some form of support and acknowledgment of motherhood.Finland perhaps fares the best in Leonard’s book. The country, which gives parents about a year of paid leave, invests heavily in its maternal care system and has some of the lowest infant and maternal mortality rates in the world; it even offers mothers prenatal counseling where they can discuss their own childhoods and how to break cycles of intergenerational trauma. (The US, by contrast, has the highest maternal mortality rate of any wealthy country.) Finland is also the only industrialized nation on the planet where fathers spend more time with their children than mothers do. (The difference is about eight minutes, “about as even as it can be”, Leonard wrote in Four Mothers.) Parents are also happier than non-parents in Finland – which is routinely ranked as the happiest country in the world – while the inverse is true in the US.View image in fullscreenStill, the birth rate is on the decline in Finland, just as it is in Japan and the US. It is not clear what kinds of pronatalist policies, if any, induce people to have kids. Nearly 60% of Americans under 50 who say they are unlikely to have children say that’s because “they just don’t want to”.“The pronatal argument here – that’s really focused on people who make the choice not to have children. That is not only cruel and mean, but it’s also ineffective, because people who don’t want to have kids probably aren’t going to have kids and none of this stuff is going to make a difference,” Leonard said.That said, had she been building her family in the US rather than Japan, Leonard doesn’t know if she would have had three children. Given the cost of US childcare, “it would have been more of a grind”.“I just think it’s harder and more expensive here. So it was somewhat easier to have that third child there,” Leonard said. “It’s not because they gave me a $5,000 baby bonus.” More

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      Republicans are attacking childcare funding. Their goal? To push women out of the workforce | Moira Donegan

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      Last month, the White House issued a proposed budget to Congress that completely eliminated funding for Head Start, the six-decade-old early childhood education program for low-income families that serves as a source of childcare for large swaths of the American working class.The funding was restored in the proposed budget after an outcry, but large numbers of employees who oversee the program at the office of Head Start were laid off in a budget-slashing measure under Robert F Kennedy Jr, the head of the Department of Health and Human Services. On Thursday, Kennedy said funding for the program would not be axed, but more cuts to childcare funding are likely coming: some Republicans have pushed to repeal a five-decade-old tax credit for daycare. The White House is entertaining proposals on how to incentivize and structurally coerce American women into bearing more children, but it seems to be determined to make doing so as costly to those women’s careers as possible.That’s because the Republicans’ childcare policy, like their pro-natalist policy, is based on one goal: undoing the historic gains in women’s rights and status, and pushing American women out of the workforce, out of public life, out of full participation in society – and into a narrow domestic role of confinement, dependence and isolation.The New York Times reported this week that the White House is now not only looking for ways to make more women have children, but to encourage “parents” to stay home to raise them. “Parents” here is a euphemism. Roughly 80% of stay-at-home parents are mothers: cultural traditions that encourage women, and not men, to sacrifice their careers for caregiving, along with persistent wage inequalities that make women, on the whole, lower earners than their male partners, both incentivize women, and not men, to drop out of the workforce and stay home when they have children.This state of affairs has been worsened by the dramatic rise in the cost of childcare, which is prohibitively expensive for many parents. The average cost of childcare per child per year in the US is now well north of $11,000, according to Child Care Aware of America, an industry advocacy group. In major cities such as New York, that price is significantly higher: from $16,000 to $19,000 per year. Existing tax credits need to be expanded, not eliminated, to reduce this burden on mothers and their families and to enable women to join the workforce at rates comparable to men and commensurate with their dignity and capacities. Currently, 26% of mothers do not engage in paid work, a figure that has barely budged in 40 years. Largely because of the unequally distributed burdens of childcare, men participate in the paid labor force at a rate that is more than 10% higher than women.One might think that the solution would be to invest more in high-quality childcare, so that providers could open more slots, children could access more resources, and women could go to work and expend their talents in productive ways that earn them money, make use of their gifts and provide more dignity for women and more stability for families. This is not what the American right is proposing: Brad Wilcox, a sociologist who promotes traditional family and gender relations, has called such policy initiatives “work-ist”. Conservatives are proposing, instead, that women go back to the kitchen.The Trump administration, and the American right more broadly, wants the rate of women’s employment to be even lower, because it is advancing a lie that women are naturally, inevitably, uniformly and innately inclined to caregiving, child rearing and homemaking – and not to the positions of intellectual achievement, responsibility, leadership, ingenuity or independence that women may aspire to in the public world. “We cannot get away from the fact that a child is hardwired to bond with Mom,” says Janet Erickson, a fellow at the rightwing Institute for Family Studies, who once co-authored an op-ed with JD Vance calling on “parents” to drop out of the workforce to raise children. “I just think, why should we deny that?”This kind of vague, evidence-free gesturing toward evolutionary psychology – the notion that babies are “hardwired” to prefer mothers who are not employed – is a common conservative tick: a recourse to dishonest and debunked science to lend empiricism to bigotry. There is in fact no evolutionary reason, and no biological reason, for mothers, and not fathers, to abandon independence, ambition or life outside the home for the sake of a child. The only reason is a sexist one.Over the past decade, the left launched few vigorous defenses of a feminist politics that seeks to advance and secure women’s access to public life, paid work and fair remuneration. The American left has launched vigorous criticisms of the “girlboss”, a figure of malignant female ambition who seemed to make the exploitations of capitalism more offensive by virtue of her sex, and it has instead offered critiques of women’s ambition and romantic defenses of the labor of “care” that just happens to overlap with women’s traditional – and traditionally unpaid – roles in the home. This leftwing rhetoric has at times mirrored the similar romanticization of the unpaid housewife of yesteryear from the right, which has embraced tradwives, homesteading fantasies and an aestheticized rustic simplicity that aims to contrast feminist gains in the workforce with a fantasy of women’s rest. Together, these strains of rhetorical opposition to women in the workforce have made anti-feminism into a new kind of “socialism of fools” – a misguided misdirection of anger and resentment at the rapaciousness of capitalism towards a social justice movement for the rights of an oppressed class.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut what is on offer from the political right is not about the refashioning of work and life to be less extractive and exploitative for women, and particularly for mothers. It is instead about a sex segregation of human experience, an effort to make much of public life inaccessible to women. Combined with the right wing’s successful attack on the right to abortion, the Trump administration’s dramatic cuts to Title X programs that provide contraceptive access, and the rescinding of federal grants aimed at helping working women, what emerges from the rightwing policy agenda is an effort to force women out of education, out of decently paid work and into pregnancy, unemployment and dependence on men.Theirs is an effort to shelter men from women’s economic competition, to revert to the regressive cultural modes of an imagined past, and to impose an artificially narrow vision of the capacities, aspirations, talents and desires of half of the American people.Murray Rothbard, the paleoconservative 20th-century economist whose ideas have had a profound influence on the Trumpist worldview, once vowed: “We shall repeal the 20th century.” As far as the Republican right is concerned, it seems to want to repeal the gains of 20th-century feminism first.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Republicans say they want more American babies – but which kind?

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      Some of the children were too young to stand on their own. Instead, they sat on their parents’ knees or in their parents’ arms, waving American flags. Many of them seemed confused about what, exactly, was even happening.But these kids were in the midst of making history: their families were among the first to take advantage of Donald Trump’s February executive order granting white South Africans refugee status in the United States, on the grounds that Afrikaner landowners – who make up just 7% of South Africa’s population yet, decades after the end of apartheid, control about half of its land – are facing persecution. While the doors to the US refugee program have been slammed shut to virtually everyone else, these Afrikaners showed up in the US earlier this week, their refugee status promising a path to US citizenship.Days later, the Trump administration took a far narrower view of who deserves access to the American polity. On Thursday morning, a lawyer for the Trump administration argued in front of the US supreme court that the 14th amendment does not guarantee citizenship to the American-born children of “illegal aliens” – a view contradicted by more than a century of legal precedent.This split screen raises a vital question: is the Trump administration really interested in helping children and families flourish – or only the “right” families?Over the last several months, the Trump administration’s policies on immigration, families, and children have been pockmarked by all kinds of contradictions. The administration is reportedly considering numerous policies to convince people to have more children, such as “baby bonuses” of $5,000 or medals for mothers who have six or more kids. The Department of Transportation has issued a memo directing the agency to “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average”. And JD Vance has proclaimed: “I want more babies in the United States of America.”These moves are, in part, fueled by the growing power of the pronatalism movement, which believes that the declining birthrate in the US is an existential threat to its workforce and its future.Why, then, does the government want to exclude an estimated 150,000 babies born every year?“It’s hard to look at any of these policies and not believe that they’re created for the purpose of satisfying a political base that was promised some sort of notions of recreating a nostalgia for a white Christian nationalist nation,” said P Deep Gulasekaram, a professor of immigration law at the University of Colorado Law School.If the fate of the US workforce is really of concern, experts say immigration could help grow it – but the Trump administration has taken a hardline stance against immigrants from the Global South and their children. The administration has not only reportedly turned the refugee agency responsible for caring for children who arrive in the US alone into an arm of Ice, but also slashed funding for legal representation of children in immigration proceedings. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress are trying to block parents who lack Social Security Numbers – such as undocumented people – from benefiting from the child tax credit, even in cases where their children are US citizens.The Trump administration has also unveiled new screening protocols that make it far more difficult for undocumented people to “sponsor”, or take custody of, children who enter the US alone. Just last week, the National Center for Youth Law and the legal advocacy group Democracy Forward sued the Trump administration over the changes, which they say have forced kids to languish in government custody. Between December 2024 and March 2025, kids went from spending an average of two months in government custody to spending an average of six.“This administration has compromised the basic health and safety of immigrant children in egregious ways,” Neha Desai, managing director of children’s human rights and dignity at the National Center for Youth Law, said in an email.In March, KFF, a charity that conducts health policy research, conducted focus groups of Hispanic adults who are undocumented or likely living with someone who is undocumented. Many spoke of the effect that the Trump administration’s policies are having on their families and kids.“I have a six-year-old child. Honestly, I’m afraid to take him to the park, and he asks me, ‘Mom, why don’t we go to the park?’” one 49-year-old Costa Rican immigrant woman told KFF. “How do I tell him? I’m scared.”“Even the children worry. ‘Mom, did you get home safely?’ They’re already thinking that something is going to happen to us on the street,” added a 54-year-old Colombian immigrant woman. “So that also makes me very nervous, knowing that there might come a time when they could be left here alone.”The supreme court arguments on Thursday centered not on the constitutionality of birthright citizenship, but on the legality of lower court orders in the case. Still, some of the justices expressed concerns about what the case could mean for children.Eliminating birthright citizenship, Justice Elena Kagan suggested, could render children stateless. The high court needed a way to act fast, she said.If the justices believe that a court order is wrong, she asked, “why should we permit those countless others to be subject to what we think is an unlawful executive action?”Both the historical and legal record make clear that the 14th Amendment encapsulates birthright citizenship, Gulasekaram said. But, he said, predicting the supreme court’s moves is a “fool’s errand”.“There’s really no way of getting around the the conclusion that this is a call to some form of racial threat and racial solidarity as a way of shoring up support from a particular part of the of the of the Trump base,” Gulasekaram said. “Citizenship and the acquisition of citizenship has always been racially motivated in the United States.” More

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      West Virginians scramble to get by after Manchin kills child tax credits

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      West Virginians scramble to get by after Manchin kills child tax credits Without those monthly checks 50,000 children in the state the centrist senator represents could sink into deep povertyLast fall, Krista Greene missed a week of work after her sons were exposed to Covid and could not return to school. Greene, who manages a tutoring center and yoga studio in Charleston, West Virginia, does not receive any paid time off. Normally, she would have been worried about this loss of income. But the Greene family’s budget had recently become a little more flexible, thanks to the monthly child tax credit payments that began in July 2021.“The first thing I said to my husband was, ‘The Biden bucks are coming next week, so I won’t miss any bills,’” Greene said.It was nice while it lasted.Families probably received their final monthly payments in December after Congress failed to pass the Build Back Better Act. The legislation, the cornerstone of the Biden administration’s domestic policy, would have made the payments permanent. But one Democrat stood in the way – Greene’s senator, Joe Manchin.A week before Christmas, Manchin appeared on Fox & Friends and announced he would not vote for the Build Back Better Act, effectively poleaxing Biden’s plans in a Senate evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans.“I have always said, ‘If I can’t go back home and explain it, I can’t vote for it,’” Manchin said in a press release after the television appearance. “Despite my best efforts, I cannot explain the sweeping Build Back Better Act in West Virginia and I cannot vote to move forward on this mammoth piece of legislation.”The announcement came after months of negotiations between Manchin and the White House, some of which involved the child tax credit. Manchin wanted to limit the credit to families making $60,000 or less annually. He has also said he will not support a permanent credit unless it includes a work requirement.The child tax credit was one of a number of Biden proposals that were surprisingly popular in the deeply Republican state of West Virginia – not least because Manchin’s constituents have benefited from it more than most.Ninety-three per cent of West Virginia children – about 346,000 in all – qualified for the credit payments. That extra $250 to $300 per child a month lifted about 50,000 of those children above the poverty line, according to the West Virginia Center for Budget and Policy (WVCBP).Now that the credits have vanished, so will those advancements. The timing could not be worse. Like the rest of the country, West Virginia is suffering a surge in inflation unseen in decades, a surge that disproportionately affects the poor.“The checks aren’t coming on,” said the WVCBP executive director, Kelly Allen. “Fifty thousand kids in West Virginia are at risk are dropping into deep poverty.”America got more expensive in 2021. Who is really paying the price? – a visual explainerRead moreQueentia Ellis is a single mother with three daughters, ages seven, three and two. For a while, she supported her family with a minimum wage job but found she was always coming up short. “It’s impossible to take care of three kids on a minimum wage job,” Ellis said.She decided to get a college education. The monthly child tax credit payments, along with child support and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), allowed her to stay home with her kids while taking classes full-time.“It helped me pay my bills and buy things for my kids that they needed,” said Ellis, who hopes to someday start her own business.With the monthly payments ended, Ellis said she will probably have to return to a minimum-wage job, which means it will take longer to complete her college degree. She will also have to find childcare for her daughters, which will cost up to $100 a month for each child, even with help from a state childcare assistance program.“That takes a toll on the income, especially if you’re working an hourly minimum wage job,” Ellis said. “I have to figure out what and how I’m going to go about making things possible. But where there’s a will there’s a way.”After announcing he would not support the Build Back Better Act, reports surfaced that Manchin was concerned parents were using the child tax credit to buy drugs.Bar chart showing most Child Tax Credit recipients spent their money on food, rent/mortgage and utilities.But the evidence shows that in West Virginia and across the country the money was spent on necessities – 91% of low-income families used the money for basic needs like rent, groceries, school supplies and medicine, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ analysis of US census data.“Families know what they need. In some cases, that’s putting food on the tables. In some cases, that’s paying rent. In some cases, it’s allowing mom to stay home for a few months, or paying for childcare because mom needs to go to work,” Allen of the West Virginia Center for Budget and Policy said.Hunter Starks is a single parent with a four-year-old daughter. Theypreviously worked as a social worker, while also working part-time as a political organizer, often logging more than 50 hours in a week.But things changed in 2021.“I’ve worked since I was 15, usually multiple jobs. And I’ve never had a hard time finding work like I did this year,” they said.Starks had difficulty finding employment because they could only take jobs with hours that aligned with their child’s daycare hours.“Service jobs and fast food don’t need folks during those hours,” they said.Starks said the $300 child tax credit payments were “the difference between getting by or not”.“And I still had to ask multiple folks for help,” Starks said.Starks said January’s budget will be tight without the tax credit payment, “but it’s been tight”.They will soon start a new full-time job as a paralegal, in addition to their part-time organizing work. While that will help their bank account, Starks said it will mean less time with their daughter.“I kind of hate the fact that I’m going to go back to working multiple jobs and spending less time with my daughter,” they said. “Even though I’ve struggled financially, I’ve appreciated having that time with her.”While Manchin has balked at the child tax credit’s price tag – about $100bn a year – the credits pumped $470m into West Virginia between July and December 2021 alone. Allen said that money was probably immediately reinvested in the state’s economy, since low- and middle-income families typically spend tax refunds as soon as they receive them.Yoga studio manager Krista Greene said that’s why it was so important the payments arrived monthly instead of once a year, at tax time.“It became part of your monthly income,” she said. “If a hospital bill comes around, I can’t say, ‘Can you wait four or five months until I get my income tax?’”Allen also said the money would have long-term positive effects on the state’s economy as well. Living in poverty has a deleterious impact on children’s health, education and future earnings.“If kids are lifted out of poverty and have access to more economic security, it pays for itself in the long term,” Allen said.Manchin’s office declined the Guardian’s request for comment.TopicsWest VirginiaJoe ManchinChildcareChildrenEconomicsUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More