Socialists Don't Understand Motherhood
To the socialist mind, families are not forces for good; they’re competitors to the state.
Self-proclaimed democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani just won New York City's mayoral primary, and, in a city crawling with Democrats who like free stuff, he's the favorite to win November's general election, replacing Eric Adams.
Mamdani—a 33-year-old Bowdoin graduate, with a multimillionaire filmmaker mother and a Columbia-professor father—styles himself a champion for the working class, someone who really understands what they need.
As such, he advocates for universal child care. "After rent, the biggest cost for New York's working families is childcare. It's literally driving them out of the city: New Yorkers with children under six are leaving at double the rate of all others," reads his platform. "The burden falls heaviest on mothers, who are giving up paying jobs to do unpaid childcare." He promises to implement free child care for all babies and children aged 6 weeks and above, until they start school at age 5. He wants child care workers to have wage parity with public school teachers
This program could take the form of an expansion of the city's existing 3K program, or could be an entirely new state-run day care program. It's not totally clear what he intends. His platform is characteristically heavy on the graphic design, light on the details.
But Mamdani, and all others who advocate universal publicly-funded child care, mistake the needs that mothers actually have—the things they say they want, the types of child care arrangements they favor—assuming all parents want the state to sublimate their roles. Socialists pretend they want to support mothers and motherhood. But they don't understand what type of help mothers need at all.
In 2022, the think tank Institute for Family Studies asked mothers of children under 18 what their "ideal situation" would be, in terms of time spent with kids vs. working. They found that 42 percent of mothers wanted to work full-time; 32 percent had an ideal of part-time work; and 22 percent would ideally choose no paid work at all. A Pew Research Center survey from three years prior found much the same: Half of moms said it would be "best for them" to work full-time, with 30 percent choosing part-time work and 19 percent choosing none at all. As of 2018, the majority of mothers with kids under 18—55 percent—are engaged in full-time work, up from 34 percent in 1968. And the share of mothers with little kids—those who have not yet entered school—in the work force went from 8 percent in 1940 to over 60 percent by 2000. It has only risen since.
Of course, "in the work force" isn't necessarily the same as "not engaged in the daily labor of childrearing." The advent of remote work has enabled more creative arrangements than ever before, with parents increasingly using the shift system and staggering work hours. Socialists don't give much credit to the many ways companies accommodate working parents—whether corporate overlords mean to or not—when they allow greater flexibility in the workday and for different people to work at different paces and in different shifts. What can benefit the company can also benefit the family.
"An ideal childcare system," writes Ivana Greco, a writer/homeschooler/lawyer-by-training with four kids, "takes into account the full range of 'childcare,' including parents, extended family, friends, and neighbors." It "considers and respects the wishes and needs of individual families, which will be different both from family to family and from time period to time period." It should allow for flexibility, which means it should provide "access to drop-in, part-time, or irregular hours" child care. It's "mindful of cost, broadly speaking, including second-order effects and non-economic costs."
Mamdani's proposal meets zero out of four of Greco's criteria. Socialists, in general, don't tailor to such criteria—or even necessarily understand it or wish to honor it—when crafting plans for universal child care.
Note Mamdani's sneakiness: He talks about child care as a "burden" which "falls heaviest on mothers" and seems to imply that giving up "paying jobs" to perform "unpaid childcare" is some great travesty. "This campaign/worldview does not grant mothers an active role in these decisions about how to make their family economies work, just assumes they are crushed by circumstance," remarks Meredith Thornburgh, who is researching household economics for her doctorate at Princeton, with a toddler in tow.
And in economic terms, sure, taking care of your own children is unpaid. But this ignores the fact that many mothers get value and fulfillment from nurturing their own children: That's why 54 percent, per IFS data, want to spend a substantial portion of every day with their kids, a number corroborated by Pew.
Stay-at-home and part-time mothers get more say over how their kids are raised. They have more margin and flexibility to serve the community around them. They can absorb disruption better. They can manage other care roles at the same time: care for the elderly, care for the sick, care for the disabled, care for the downtrodden. The individual may be the most fundamental unit of society, but families are the next rung up; shaping them and serving them can be a great joy for many women.
To the socialist mind, families are not these forces for good; they're competitors to the state. We can't have dual loyalties!
In true communist societies, privacy—and thus family life, and the kitchen table—must be eradicated. "The abolition of private property was an essential part of the Marxist-Leninist agenda," I wrote back in 2021 ("Communism Destroyed Russian Cooking"), "but the government realized another convenient side effect of this mass upheaval: Peasants would be housed in communal apartments, called kommunalkas, where they would share kitchens and bathrooms, allowing comrades to spy on one another in perpetual service of the state."
Today's socialists, to their credit, do a better job of hiding this impulse than Josef Stalin did. Sophie Lewis' Abolish the Family asks "if we could do better than the family" and tries to make the case for deeply communitarian modes of living.
"Parents, it is supposed, derive nothing so much as joy from the romance of this isolated intensity. Constant allusions to the hellworld of sheer exhaustion parents inhabit notwithstanding, their condition is sentimentalized to the nth degree: It is downright taboo to regret parenthood," writes Lewis in her book. "All too seldom is parenthood identified as an absurdly unfair distribution of labor, and a despotic distribution of responsibility for and power over younger people. A distribution that could be changed." (Contra Lewis, wielding some despotic power over my toddler makes sense, as he recently tried to drink paint.)
The family, Lewis writes, "incubates chauvinism and competition." In her view, "it should be elementary socialism, not some fringe eccentricity of queer ultra-leftists, to be striving toward a regime of cohabitation, collective eating, leisure, eldercare, and childrearing in which no one, to quote M.E. O'Brien, 'is bound together violently any longer' like sets in a ghoulish deck of playing cards." Dark.
Most socialists, Mamdani included, aren't as radical as Lewis. And most socialists would say the tactics of Stalinism aren't to be replicated. But they're going to run into basic issues beyond the fact that they're not listening to the actual mothers they're trying to help.
In New York City, which Mamdani hopes to reshape according to socialist fashions, if you're a mother who wants to take care of your own kids, your household—through your tax dollars—will be forced to subsidize those who use the state-run day care system. But will you receive any tax credit or subsidy in equal amount to compensate you for lost earnings? Ditto if you rely on grandparents, a nanny, or any sort of local child care collective. Mamdani and other socialists like him are saying that one form of child care is above all others and that New Yorkers should be forced to pay for it.
And pay for it they will! There's no workaround for the fact that human labor is expensive, and babies and young children require vast amounts of human labor: constant supervision, comfort, diaper changes, frequent feeding, mediation when conflict arises. Mamdani hopes to bring day care workers' pay parity with public school teachers, which means at least doubling their income. And state-mandated ratios for babies 6 weeks and younger are one worker to every three babies; for babies 6 weeks to 18 months, it's one for every four; for toddlers, one for every five. Those are the bare-minimum ratios—ones I wouldn't feel comfortable with—but the point remains: Mamdani might be underestimating how pricey his program would be.
A better model would be the one used for Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) in states like Florida and Arizona. Lump sums of cash are handed to families who opt out of traditional public school, and they can devote these dollars to private school or defraying costs associated with homeschooling or tutoring services. The program is values-blind: whether it's a parochial school or a rationalist-tinged homeschooling curriculum or the creationism collective, you get the same amount of money. Why can't New York's child care system—if it is to be collectively funded at all—operate the same way, with lump-sum caregiving stipends handed out to families, regardless of which specific child care method they choose?
But perhaps the obvious flaws with universal child care as Mamdani conceives of it make the case that no politician should be involved in designing it: They will always fail to understand what parents actually need, and they will not be able to craft programs that are sufficiently flexible and values-neutral. And given how labor-intensive raising young children is, any program to compensate for care would end up being extremely expensive.
My city insults me when it takes the dollars I pay in taxes and allocates them toward alleviating parenting burdens in one particular way. That's not the help that I—or roughly half of mothers nationwide—want.
I wrote this article from the under-the-sea tunnel area of a children's play space deep in Queens, and at times, with The Jungle Book (1967) playing in the background. My focus has been repeatedly interrupted by my son. My other son, still in utero, keeps giving me heartburn, breaking my concentration during those rare moments when the toddler is pacified. I'll be the last to claim that parenthood doesn't involve tradeoffs.
But my cobbled-together work setup is far preferable to me than any alternative. Socialists don't understand that. They didn't even bother to ask.