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.
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