Anyone who wants to make it easier for Americans to start families should support childcare policies like the ones being proposed by New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.
A few weeks ago, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won a landslide victory in the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City, defeating former governor Andrew Cuomo by twelve points. Since then, his most adamant haters have responded with an avalanche of red-baiting.
Many of these attacks have centered on his plan for a modest experiment with five city-owned grocery stores, one in each borough, in some of the neighborhoods with the fewest and most expensive private options. The Wall Street Journal, for example, ran an op-ed by grocery chain owner John Catsimatidis warning that building these five stores would “collapse our food supply, kill private industry, and drag us down a path toward the bread lines of the old Soviet Union.” Never mind that the US federal government already operates hundreds of grocery stores through the Defense Commissary Agency for service members and their families, or that seventeen states actually have state monopolies on liquor stores — no, five municipal grocery stores in New York would augur the downfall of Western civilization.
Other attacks have focused on a 2021 clip where Mamdani stated that the long-term goal of socialist politics is to socialize the means of production. Any dictionary will tell you the same thing, and democratic socialist parties around the world are openly committed to that goal. But on the Right, where private ownership of the means of production by a small coterie of economic elites is sacrosanct, Mamdani’s statement was taken as equivalent to a promise to reenact the worst horrors of Stalinism.
Most of Mamdani’s haters, though, have steered clear of attacking his family policies, since those are obviously appealing to ordinary people worried about the high costs of raising children in America (and particularly in New York City). As Robin Buller writes in the Guardian, Mamdani
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.
We often hear, particularly from conservatives, that declining birth rates are a serious social problem. Anyone who takes that premise seriously should want to address the reasons given by couples who either want children but haven’t had any or who have had less children than the number they’d consider ideal. Mamdani’s proposals do just that.
According to a survey several years ago in the New York Times, six of the top seven self-reported obstacles to having desired children are straightforwardly economic ones like “Waited because of financial instability” (43 percent) and “Not enough paid family leave” (39 percent). In fact, the only item in the top seven that wasn’t straightforwardly economic was “Want more time for the children I have” (54 percent), and that’s not exactly non-economic, considering that the United States is the only country in the developed world (and one of the only countries in the world, period) that doesn’t legally require employers to give workers even one lousy day of paid off per year.
And the top reason listed by these couples is “Childcare is too expensive” (64 percent). As such, you’d think that commentators who profess to be ardently in favor of families and to want to make it easier for people to start families — or who, in J. D. Vance’s blunt phrasing, “want more babies” — would be lining up behind Mamdani’s childcare proposal.
Hold that thought.
Do Socialists Not “Understand Motherhood”?
The libertarian magazine Reason ran a harsh and angry critique of Mamdani’s childcare plan. In itself, this isn’t surprising. Libertarians are generally opposed to redistributing wealth to help working-class people — so if the article (by associate editor Liz Wolfe) had stuck to arguing that it’s too expensive, or that people who can’t afford childcare shouldn’t have kids, or that taxation is theft, that wouldn’t have been especially interesting.
Instead, Wolfe argues that Mamdani’s plan proves that “socialists don’t understand motherhood.” She writes:
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.
As evidence for this claim, she cites a survey from the think tank Institute for Family Studies, in which mothers of children under eighteen were asked which work and family arrangements they would consider “ideal.” Oddly, this data not only fails to back up Wolfe’s contention but cleanly demolishes it.
Forty-two percent of the respondents said they would prefer to work full-time, 32 percent part-time, and only 22 percent said they “would ideally choose no paid work at all.” There’s no way to reconcile the idea that offering municipal childcare free at the point of service doesn’t fit with the childcare arrangements most mothers favor.
A supermajority of respondents in this survey expressed a desire to work. While some may have partners or family who can watch the kids while they do, realistically, a great many of them will need external childcare for some part of the day. As for the remaining minority, there’s nothing about the existence of free childcare that somehow prohibits mothers from staying at home, if that’s what they desire.
Wolfe points out that, given the increased popularity of remote work, “‘in the work force’ isn’t necessarily the same as ‘not engaged in the daily labor of childrearing.’” True enough. (Of course, using childcare for part of the day is also not the same as “not engaged in the daily labor of childrearing,” but nevertheless.) She thinks socialists “don’t give much credit to the many ways companies accommodate working parents,” seeming to imply that corporate flexibility policies, which are presumably already proliferating, are a better solution than universal tax-funded childcare.
Socialists would certainly welcome such policies, but we won’t hold our breath for them to be voluntarily implemented at scale — and even then, they wouldn’t be a panacea. First, not all jobs can be worked remotely. And second, it’s not a given that all companies that do offer remote options will be understanding about workers dividing their time during working hours as much as is often necessary with very young children.
Besides, the reality is that many women with young children want to hold onto specific jobs that require them to leave the house because particular career paths are important to them. (It’s strange to have to explain to libertarians that different people are different.) And an even larger number simply have no choice, owing to larger facts about how our capitalist economy is structured that are well beyond the power of the city government of New York to correct.
Wolfe quotes Mamdani saying that the “burden” of figuring out childcare “falls heaviest” on poor and working-class mothers, and manages to interpret this as a claim that motherhood is a burden, and thus evidence that Mamdani (and socialists in general) don’t understand the freely chosen joy and fulfillment of raising children. She then segues into a strange digression on communal kitchens in collective farms in the USSR and extreme “abolish the family” positions that exist on the fringes of the Left. (More on that below.)
This is such an obviously bad-faith reading of Mamdani’s statement that it verges on parody. The burden in question is figuring out how to juggle the time demands of work and taking care of children, and how to come up with the money for privatized childcare. As the same passage in Mamdani’s platform from which Wolfe plucks the word “burden” notes, these costs are “literally driving” families with young kids “out of the city: New Yorkers with children under six are leaving at double the rate of all others.”
Trying to solve that problem is very deeply pro-family.
Childcare, Family Leave, and Socialist Priorities
A far better critique of the left demand for universal free childcare comes from within the Left. In a thoughtful article in the socialist magazine Damage, C. Kaye Rawlings worries that this demand has displaced an emphasis on achieving “robust, paid, and extensive maternity leave policies that protect women’s jobs or, alternatively, afford them real opportunities to leave the workforce, even if for only for a few years.” She points to many problems with existing childcare options and directs her readers to a wealth of research showing the benefits of parents themselves being able to spend more time at home, especially in the crucial early years.
This is a reasonable critique, if the point is that democratic socialists should put more emphasis on paid family leave, especially in the context of national-level politics. There isn’t much New York City can do to force private employers to offer more leave, though, so an emphasis on universal childcare makes sense on the municipal level.
Even when we imagine state and federal policy changes in the future, there’s a place for universal childcare. Even if we implemented exactly the kind of leave policies Rawlings rightly advocates, some families would need childcare for at least part of the day, and a decent society wouldn’t commodify that service.
No, Mainstream Socialists Aren’t Family Abolitionists
Of course, views at the opposite end of the spectrum from Rawlings also exist on the Left. In the Reason article, Wolfe devotes three full paragraphs to the views of Sophie Lewis, who wrote a book called Abolish the Family. In it, Lewis identifies the institution of parents raising their children “as an absurdly unfair distribution of labor, and a despotic distribution of responsibility for and power over younger people.” Lewis wants to strive “toward a regime of cohabitation, collective eating, leisure, eldercare, and childrearing” and says that this view “should be elementary socialism, not some fringe eccentricity of queer ultra-leftists.”
Wolfe quotes that line, but somehow misses the implication that, as things stand, family abolitionism is a fringe eccentricity and not the position of most socialists. In the archives of Jacobin magazine, for example, one can find exactly two articles on “family abolition” — one published last month and one from five years ago. Both are strident critiques of the idea.
Most socialists understand that the point of trying to create a more economically equal society isn’t to try to dictate to anyone how they should live their lives but to give them the material resources they need to live whatever kind of lives they want. Indeed, some people who defend the “abolish the family” slogan insist that all they mean is that they want to make it easier for people who want to experiment with nontraditional arrangements. If so, though, they should choose accuracy over edginess and ditch a slogan that will read to almost anyone who hears it as a call to apply pressure to socially engineer that outcome.
More importantly, I’ve never heard Mamdani mention Lewis or come within a thousand miles of “family abolitionist” rhetoric himself. Instead, he seems to be saying quite loudly and clearly that he wants to make life easier for families with young children. The real question is why critics like Wolfe disagree.
Wolfe says her city “insults” her when it takes her tax dollars and “allocates them toward alleviating parenting burdens in one particular way.” But why? Does New York insult nonreaders when it funds the New York Public Library? Does the existence of taxpayer-funded public parks where parents can take their children to have picnics insult people who prefer to play board games with their children indoors?
I suppose it’s possible that some libertarians might think so. But none of the rest of us should take these insults seriously. And anyone who cares about making it easier to raise families should support Mamdani’s proposal.