Category: Babies
The harmful entitlement behind ‘affordable child care’
You see it constantly, some version of this claim: “The cost of child care is the single biggest obstacle to working women and families.”
From there come the familiar conclusions: “The state needs to subsidize child care.” “We need affordable day care for working moms.”
No, we don’t.
While claiming to elevate women, feminism has steadily lowered the status of motherhood and homemaking.
What we need is to recognize that it’s not normal — nor healthy — for children to be farmed out to strangers during their earliest years so that Mom can be “more than just a mom” with her career.
Yes, there are millions of families in which both parents must work to keep a roof over their heads. But there are millions more who don’t need two incomes. What gets called “need” is often just lifestyle expectation. What children actually need rarely enters the calculation.
Luxury expectations
Modern expectations in 2026 America look less like necessity and more like luxury — something closer to the “hands-off” child-rearing of aristocratic households than to ordinary family life.
People talk about “affordable day care” as if it were self-evidently necessary. It isn’t. It only sounds that way because repetition has made it seem normal.
Behind it sits an unspoken belief: “It is right and proper — even ideal — to leave our children with hired strangers for most of the day.”
Even 40 years ago, that would not have sounded normal. Most people still believed that all else being equal, children were best raised by their mothers (and with a father in the home). Day care might be necessary — but it was understood as a regrettable second-best option.
Today, even many conservatives won’t question it. To do so invites accusations of harming mothers or failing to support “hardworking single moms.”
But prolonged parental absence is not neutral. Children need their mothers, especially in their early years. We can cite studies, but we don’t need them to see what’s plainly in front of us.
Strikingly, the people who claim to “need” day care are often those who don’t. What they want is a standard of living that would have been considered extravagant a generation or two ago.
Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images
Maxed-out minimums
Take Democrat Rep. Brittany Pettersen of Colorado. She has cultivated an image as a sainted working mother, bringing her small child onto the House floor while lamenting the lack of day care for “working moms.”
There’s just one problem: Congress has had full-time day care on Capitol Hill since 1987.
What’s happening here isn’t necessity — it’s performance. The question she avoids is whether her child’s needs might outweigh the demands of a camera-facing career.
And it’s not just politicians. Middle-class Americans have adopted a set of “minimum” expectations that earlier generations would have recognized as indulgent:
- Two cars (preferably full-size SUVs).
- Separate bedrooms for each child.
- A full slate of extracurriculars.
- No trade-offs between career ambition and motherhood.
- Children’s needs subordinated to adult preferences.
- Government support for single parenthood without fathers in the home.
Modern-day Tudors
In the feudal world, there was a distinction between a woman and a lady. A woman belonged to the working class; a lady to the aristocracy.
Women raised their children directly — feeding them, caring for them, folding them into the rhythms of daily life. Ladies did not.
In the Tudor royal court, for example, a noblewoman did not breastfeed. A wet nurse was hired in advance and took over immediately. Children were raised by nurses, governesses, and tutors, with parents appearing only intermittently.
The result was distance — emotional, developmental, and often moral.
For all our technological differences, the psychology isn’t so different today. The aristocratic habits of detachment have been democratized. What was once a marker of nobility is now treated as a baseline expectation.
There are better models to follow.
An old-fashioned approach
I have a friend, Tasha, a Catholic mother of nine. Her husband works full-time; she manages the home.
They don’t have two SUVs. They don’t have a large house. But they have what they need: a home, a van that fits everyone, good food, clean clothes, and a stable, loving family life.
How does she do it? The way families did for generations — before the late-20th-century promise that women could “have it all” and should expect it immediately.
She shops carefully. Buys in bulk. Reuses what she can. She hasn’t outfitted each child with personal screens to keep them isolated. Her household is structured around shared life, not individual consumption.
Degraded status
While claiming to elevate women, feminism has steadily lowered the status of motherhood and homemaking. For decades, we’ve heard that women are “more than just mothers,” that raising children prevents them from “being someone.”
Consider what that sounds like to a child.
The desire for status is natural — for men and women alike. Motherhood once carried that status. As it has been stripped away, many women seek it elsewhere.
But the substitute — career-first identity combined with outsourced child-rearing — is narcissistic, materialistic, and ultimately unsatisfying. It can be hard on families and hard on children.
It’s also hard on mothers themselves. I’ve known many women who report that their contentment increased when they let go of “girlboss” career-woman expectations to concentrate on raising their children and making the home a nurturing place for their families.
Where now?
How do we fix this? I don’t know. Many Western families can’t get by on a single income. Men who want to be good providers can work hard and it’s still not enough. Some mothers need to work.
But we can acknowledge that economic reality without accepting how it has distorted us. We can stop demanding a government solution to what is fundamentally a problem of values. We need to reacquaint ourselves with what we really are as men and women and what we really need. I can’t give a road map for how to achieve this. But it has to start by hauling our aristocratic assumptions into the sunlight and seeing them for what they are.
