Excerpts 

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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). 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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