JD Vance Enters the Mommy Wars

0:00Lauren Brody: State fair food is getting smaller and pricier. We'll have room for fried cookies. Okay, you never overspend on food. What's your deal?

0:08Dr. Jessica Calarco: What's his deal? He went to Metro and got$450 in value on the new Samsung Galaxy A37 5G for free and no activation fees.

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1:12Lauren Brody: Perhaps you too saw a headline about the Trump administration and child care funding and rolled your eyes.

1:24Lauren Brody: The Trump administration is considering a big change in who gets federal child care money. A draft plan would allow some married couples to collect a child care subsidy so one of them can stay home with the kids. This plan got floated over a weekend. It is a plan that would take money away from working parents and send it to families with stay-at-home parents instead. Of course, the devil was in the details. To qualify, you must be married. One spouse must work at least 35 hours per week, and you must meet certain income requirements. When I read about this, there was one person I wanted to talk to.

2:05Lauren Brody: My friend, Lauren Brody. Lauren, when was the last time you were in D.C. doing advocacy work? I was in D.C.

2:13Dr. Jessica Calarco: last in May, but I've actually been back since for a roundtable in August. I'm there all the time.

2:21Lauren Brody: Lauren helped found a group called Chamber of Mothers. It represents the interests of families in Washington. She also wrote a book. It's called The Fifth Trimester.

2:30Dr. Jessica Calarco: I think the report first was published, I think it was on a Saturday, because I remember sitting on my couch and it was a weekend. And my first, I went on a whole journey with this. I saw the headline and I was like, I think I did what a lot of people who consider themselves to be working moms did, which was to feel immediately attacked. And then I sort of put on my like right thinking person hat and said, OK, no, wait, but actually, like I've been advocating for this myself. Like stay at home parents should have the ability to afford to go to a daughter's appointment themselves. They should be, you know, their labor should be counted.

3:05Lauren Brody: This is not to say Lauren likes this proposal, especially because it seems designed to punish single parents, single moms in particular.

3:14Dr. Jessica Calarco: I realized, oh, wait, this is just one more time that this administration is trying to divide moms. Then I started thinking about the timing of it all, and I was like, oh, this is interesting.

3:26Lauren Brody: At this point, Lauren seamlessly glided into a story that was so her, so indicative of how she sees the world.

3:33Dr. Jessica Calarco: OK, so Caroline Levitt is leaving her position as White House press secretary, and she's saying it's to spend more time with her kids. And AOC is freezing her eggs. What are they both saying? They're both saying that working motherhood is not working in America right now. Like, wow, they're actually united in their messaging here.

3:56Lauren Brody: See what she did there? Lauren took these two really different people and she found a way to put them on the same page. I love this. Lauren does it all the time.

4:09Dr. Jessica Calarco: Even the idea that like a stay-at-home parent is conservative voting and a working mom is like is more progressive, that's not true. So there was research from Capita that also showed that stay-at-home parents, 38 % of them are Republican, 38 % of them are Democrat, and 21 % are independents.

4:27Lauren Brody: That's just kind of America. It is. It's just who we are, right? Yeah, I mean, you spend so much of your time trying to bring people together. And I saw this policy announcement, and the first thing I thought was, wow, it's like designed to try to split your coalition. Right, right. I think what you're saying, though, is you're not sure that's going to work. I don't think it's going to work.

4:47Dr. Jessica Calarco: I think that a lot of women are starting to unite around the idea that they're not going to be duped here. It's become insulting, honestly, to think that a$9 ,000 check or a baby bonus check is going to make all the difference to our ability to be able to raise and support our families in the way that we would like to and to feel healthy doing it ourselves.

5:16Lauren Brody: Are you saying it's too little? Oh, it's way too little. It's way too little. Today on the show, we're going to pick apart this White House plan to pay married couples to keep one of them home with the kids. Will it work? Could it backfire? I'm Mary Harris. You're listening to What Next? Stick around.

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5:56Dr. Jessica Calarco: What's his deal? He went to Metro and got$450 in value on the new Samsung Galaxy A37 5G for free.

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8:06Lauren Brody: After speaking with Lauren, I wanted to dive into some of the reasoning behind this new plan to transfer money from working parents to those who are staying home. So I called up Jess Calarco. So Jess, you're a sociologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison. You're also the author of a book that came out a couple years back called Holding It Together, How Women Became America's Safety Net. And I thought of you when I saw this New York Times headline, Trump officials draft plan to pay at-home parents using funds for working ones. It almost sounds, when you read something like that, like it is trying to be incendiary or partisan.

8:45Lauren Brody: But actually, this is a statement of facts, right?

8:50Dr. Jessica Calarco: Yes. And I would say there are maybe two big picture things to keep in mind here in the sense that on the one hand, and maybe contrary to what many people would perceive, stay-at-home parents actually do need more support, that they are not the sort of boozy Tuesday brunch moms that we often think about when we think about reality TV. They are, on average, in a much more precarious economic state than that, in part because of why they're stay-at-home moms, which we can maybe get into. But at the same time, one of the big problems with this policy is that it's a sort of, you know, robbing Peter to pay Paul situation in the sense that the policymakers who have designed this policy, instead of using it to add more support for families who need it, are instead taking away support from mostly low-income single moms who are currently able to access child care funds and are redirecting that money to go to married, stay-at-home parents with kids.

9:49Dr. Jessica Calarco: Tell me the details. How would this even work? So essentially, we don't have a ton of details yet about how this would work, But what we have heard from reporting so far is that the money would come from the Child Care Development Fund, the CCDF funds. This is essentially a big block grant that the federal government provides to states to run child care programs.

10:09Lauren Brody: And block grants are like they're just big pots of money, which makes them sometimes flexible in terms of how you use them.

10:16Dr. Jessica Calarco: Exactly, though it also creates huge inequalities depending on where you live in the sense that different states can run these policies very differently. So in Indiana, a place where I've conducted some of my research, for example, the policies say that you can access support with child care if your household income is within 135 % of the poverty line, which for a family of four works out to be about $45 ,000 a year. So low. So it's support for just really people who are on an edge. Very low income families. Yes, exactly. And it's almost impossible to qualify for this kind of support if you have two working parents at home.

10:52Dr. Jessica Calarco: in part because once you have two incomes, you know, you're going to be kind of pushed out of eligibility for this kind of child care resource. And even then, the support that it provides is not particularly large. In Indiana, it's around$700 a month is the maximum that you can qualify for per kid. And so that's not enough to cover the cost of child care in a lot of places. So families are still having to add on top of it. So this is where the money is coming from. And the proposal at least says that what they're going to do is take some of that money to fund financial support to pay essentially stay-at-home parents who are taking care of their kids full time and who are married.

11:27Dr. Jessica Calarco: This is one of the key pieces of the policy that you have to be married in order to be eligible. And you also have to have a spouse who is working full time for pay. And so this is sort of the robbing Peter to pay Paul or the robbing Patricia to pay Pauline kind of situation where we're taking money away from mostly low-income single moms who are working for pay full time and giving it instead to stay-at-home moms who have married husbands who are working for pay.

11:55Lauren Brody: I wonder if we can talk about how we got to this point where this proposal is happening. Like a lot of people have framed this as a pet project of J.D. Vance's. And J.D. Vance has said a lot of words about women and families staying at home versus working. Do you see him as the one pushing for this? And if so, what is his mindset that believes that this is a good idea?

12:20Dr. Jessica Calarco: This policy, the way that it's framed as a sort of purity test version of policymaking, where you have to be married in order to qualify. You can't just be a cohabiting couple, for example, or a stay-at-home mom who happens to be an unmarried, unpartnered mom. This aligns with much of what J.D. Vance has said in terms of his own views. Thinking back even to what he wrote in his Hillbilly Elegy book, to things that he said on the campaign trail, to really disparaging comments about single mothers, about divorce being too common in U.S. society, this perception that families should be staying together for the benefit of the children, despite some evidence to suggest that that's not always the best outcome for the kids, especially in high conflict relationships.

13:06Dr. Jessica Calarco: But this is very consistent with his kind of very, what we often think of as traditional model of marriage and parenthood and gender relations more generally. And this policy is technically written as stay-at-home parents and not stay-at-home mothers. But we know that the vast majority of stay-at-home parents in the U.S. are mothers, in part because of those gender pay gaps. Close to 80 percent.

13:28Lauren Brody: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And we should say, it's not that J.D. Vance is like, I'm going to hang up my vice presidency hat here now that we have four kids and stay home with the children. That's just not something he's saying.

13:39Dr. Jessica Calarco: Certainly. No, he is not. And if anything, I think we have seen with his own relationship, a sort of willingness to put more on Usha in terms of his wife, in terms of expectations to be there for the children in ways that his schedule might not allow him to be. Yeah. I mean, he writes about children in the home in these interesting

14:00Lauren Brody: ways to me. Like he said on Twitter, normal Americans, quote unquote, that's a quote from him, want a family policy that doesn't shunt their kids into crap daycare so they can enjoy more freedom, quote unquote, in the labor force. There's so many assumptions baked into that about what a normal American is, about what daycare is all about, like whether it's good or bad. Do we have any evidence that sending your kid to daycare is bad? No.

14:32Dr. Jessica Calarco: And unfortunately, this is a longstanding trope in conservative politics. This notion that daycare is this dangerous or damaging place for children, this dates back to Reagan-era policies and to this notion of what's often talked about as the satanic panic around daycare that happened in the 80s and 90s. There were a handful of high-profile cases, one in California, for example, of alleged abuse from a child care provider to a children that ended up turning out to be completely false accounts, but that were whipped up by the media and by conservative policymakers as a way to argue that mothers should not be going back to work for pay.

15:15Dr. Jessica Calarco: This was a time when we saw rapidly increasing rates of maternal employment and this kind of specter of the dangerous daycare, the specter even of daycare providers subjecting children to satanic rituals. This was something that was mainstream media news. And yet it was rooted in these deeply false narratives and promoted this sense of fear around child care in ways that we're still seeing conservative policymakers echo today in an effort to promote these kinds of deeply conservative policy agendas to kind of continue to perpetuate that fear as a way to undermine support for policies like universal child care and say we need stay at home mothers instead.

15:55Lauren Brody: I should say I'm biased here. I have two kids and they went to daycare starting at like three months, five months, little babies. Right. So it's and they're OK now. They're totally fine. And those daycare providers are actually like I still know them and talk to them. But I will say, when J.D. Vance wrote in the Wall Street Journal about all this a few years back, it did stand out to me that he cited a study about something that happened in Quebec, where Quebec made childcare available quite suddenly to a lot of the residents of the province in Canada. And economists went back and studied it to be like, what happened there?

16:36Lauren Brody: They seemed to find negative outcomes. I'm curious, what do you make of findings like that?

16:42Dr. Jessica Calarco: I mean, I think we have to be really careful in the sense that these are not policies where everyone is required to send their children to child care. And so we have to be careful to assume that putting those policies in place does not necessarily mean that everyone who is taking advantage of them is equivalent to those who are not, in the sense that that may be a situation where the more affluent parents are able to continue staying home with their kids and may be able to invest more. I think we also have to be mindful of quality investments. One of the things that we have seen with efforts to make child care universal in some parts of the U.S.

17:20Dr. Jessica Calarco: is that New Mexico, for example, put in place a child care policy where ostensibly any family with an income below 400 percent of the poverty line can qualify for child care funding through the state to be able to pay for the high costs of child care. But one of the things that they haven't done is invest enough at the state level to ensure that there's adequate supply of child care and especially the kind of high quality child care that many families would want. And so there's still lots of families, even though technically, if you can find a spot, you can get state money to pay for it. Many families are struggling to find spots that they want for their kids, in part because it's hard to find child care providers willing to work at the low wages that the policy is funded at and hard to find enough spots, especially in rural communities where it's hard to kind of create and build new centers to be able to satisfy this kind of demand.

18:10Dr. Jessica Calarco: And so I think we have to give these policies some time to figure out, you know, how do they make the investments needed to provide high quality child care and enough child care as opposed to just giving money to the problem and letting parents figure it out for themselves.

18:27Lauren Brody: We'll be right back after a quick break.

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19:51Lauren Brody: State fair food is getting smaller and pricier. We'll have room for fried cookies. Okay, you never overspend on food. What's your deal?

20:00Dr. Jessica Calarco: What's his deal? He went to Metro and got$450 in value on the new Samsung Galaxy A37 5G for free.

20:07Lauren Brody: And no activation fees. Free phone? Oh, sign me up. Get that more for your money feeling. Only on Metro by T-Mobile. Bring your number and activate$40 period plan. $450 based on device discount waived activation fee. Not available if with Metro or T-Mobile in the past 180 days.

20:26Lauren Brody: You're kind of nodding to the fact that we have a lot more data now to understand what a stay-at-home mother is. And I wonder if there's even more to that. Because when I saw this proposal, you know, my kids are a certain age, so maybe that's part of why I thought this. But it really felt like a throwback to like Mommy Wars 2014 to me. And I just wonder if now we have a more nuanced idea of how people thread caregiving throughout their lives and why it's not just like a singular choice of like, now I'm a stay-at-home mom forever or like, now I am a working mom, ride or die, those sorts of things.

21:08Dr. Jessica Calarco: Absolutely. And this is one of the things that I hear all the time. One of the projects that I did for Holding It Together, you know, followed moms from when they were pregnant through their first couple of years postpartum. And, you know, many women change their employment status multiple times over the course of the first three years of their kids' lives, in part because many of them didn't have access to paid family leave from their employers. And so it made sense to drop out of the workforce if they were otherwise going to have to navigate the complexities of going back to work, especially given that infant care is incredibly difficult to come by and is also much higher cost than care for older children, for example.

21:45Dr. Jessica Calarco: And so those very early days were a time when many moms got pushed out of the workforce. As their kids got a little older, maybe it got easier to go back to the workforce. Maybe they went back part-time and then maybe COVID hit and they got pushed out of the workforce again. And so there's all of these ways that we treat women's labor and particularly mother's labor in this country as a sort of toggle switch that we can move up and down depending on the needs of the economy as opposed to necessarily the needs of the family. And I think we see that very much in the context of stay-at-home motherhood not necessarily being this ideological choice that people like J.D.

22:19Dr. Jessica Calarco: Vance seem to assume that it is. And instead, it's often a response to the kinds of conditions and constraints that mothers face in their lives.

22:26Lauren Brody: It's interesting to hear you talk that way, because you're saying mothers in the workforce is a kind of toggle switch. I think about the employment situation in the country right now, how employment seems stuck. And whether if you want to make it seem like more people have jobs, you might want to play with that toggle switch and incentivize some women to get out of some jobs so some men can get into them.

22:48Dr. Jessica Calarco: Indeed. And it tracks with the fact that the jobs numbers from over the summer, there were months where women accounted for all of the jobs that were lost.

22:57Lauren Brody: You know, I read one researcher in this space who basically said this proposal from the White House is a trick. It's a trick that is designed to get liberals to say some version of stay-at-home parents don't deserve public support. And I see you very carefully framing your wording here and saying, no, no, no, stay-at-home parents actually do deserve support. Do you think this is a trick?

23:31Dr. Jessica Calarco: I think it is consistent with the kind of pro-marriage policies that we've long seen coming out of the current administration and certainly conservative politicians more generally. It's consistent with the long history of purity test policy in terms of things like welfare policies, Medicaid policies, food stamp policies, having these kinds of did you make the right choice restrictions built into them, you know, drug testing for welfare or employment testing for access to food stamps. You know, it's consistent with those kinds of ideas that you have to prove that you are deserving, that you have made the worthy choice before you can access, you know, the limited social safety net that our country does provide.

24:11Dr. Jessica Calarco: And I think it's also consistent with this notion that people ought to be divided, that we are less likely to turn a scrutinizing eye toward the people at the top of the economic ladder who are arguably benefiting most from all of these policies, from our lack of investment in the social safety net because we've kept taxes on wealthy people and corporations so low for so long. that the more divided we are as a country, the more we have stay-at-home moms fighting against employed moms, the less likely we are to say, hey, you know what? All of us would be better off if we started taxing billionaires more.

24:47Dr. Jessica Calarco: And we could actually fund universal child care and whether it's universal basic income or other types of support for stay-at-home parents who need to be able to take care of their kids on their own.

24:59Lauren Brody: I wonder if it's worth you and I talking about how complicated it might be to roll out a policy change like the one being proposed here. Because we've talked about how this is a block grant and the way it's set up, you could theoretically do a rule change without going through Congress. You have to make time for people to weigh in on the rule change, those sorts of things. Is it complicated to actually make this change?

25:25Dr. Jessica Calarco: I mean, I think it's telling that they are pushing this through as a rule change and not as a new law.

25:29Lauren Brody: Why?

25:30Dr. Jessica Calarco: It allows them to bypass Congress. And it means that no congressperson has to go on record, especially before a potentially contentious midterm, to say, hey, I'm voting against child care funding. That doesn't look so great right now. And even if we know that the beneficiaries of that child care support are disproportionately low income moms, single moms, black mothers, a group that has received its fair share of more than its fair share of policy hate. And I think it's still the kind of thing that no one wants to go on record in Congress right now and say, I'm anti-child care. And so I think it gives them an out in the sense of trying to push this through as a rules change is easier than it would be to get Congress to pass a policy that achieved the same ends.

26:17Dr. Jessica Calarco: It doesn't necessarily mean that it will be easy in the sense that, yes, as a block grant, if it's run in the same way that the CCDF funds are, then states have a lot of discretion about how to implement this kind of policy. But one of the things I can imagine coming out of that is something much like what we see right now with child care policies or with welfare policies, which is that we have blue states being fairly generous and often adding to the programs and policies going beyond what the federal government provides. And red states instead stripping away that funding and providing even less support than what the policies are designed to offer and instead kind of shuttling that money into other conservative pet causes for those states.

26:59Dr. Jessica Calarco: It's one of the reasons why, you know, in places like Indiana, mothers, the maximum amount of financial support that they can receive if they are on welfare is far lower than what it is in many other states is because some of that money is going to fund marriage promotion campaigns in the states instead. And that's what block grants allow states to do. And so my worry coming out of a policy like this one is that in part because it is easier than passing laws and in part because it leaves so much discretion up to the states that we will continue to see deepening inequalities along political lines between states and between people in those states in the U.S.

27:35Lauren Brody: I had the exact same thought as you. Because I've seen some people point out like, well, if you look at the text of the legislation that made this block grant possible, it's clear this is about working parents. It's not about stay-at-home parents. It doesn't have all these other sort of bells and whistles attached to it. And I just think we're in a funny moment where the question of what is legal is really up in the air. The courts take a long time to act and states can run into that space and run with things if they're given the go ahead by the federal government.

28:17Dr. Jessica Calarco: Absolutely. And I think the other complicating factor here is that certainly, you know, among stay-at-home mothers, there has been a movement to say, you know, we are working mothers. You know, we are mothers who are working at home, even if we're not paid for it. And I think there's, you know, some logic behind that in the sense that, you know, like I mentioned, you know, a lot of the stay-at-home moms that I've talked to in my research aren't necessarily there because they wanted to be, but because this was the best option for their family, given the limited job opportunities that they had. I talked to one mom, for example, who she used to work at a grocery store and her husband worked at a mine.

28:49Dr. Jessica Calarco: And between the two of them, they were making around$50 ,000 a year, which was too much to qualify for child care support. And so she calculated that, you know what, if I'm if I'm working this low wage job, if my husband makes more than me, if income, if child care is going to cost my whole paycheck, if we're going to be going into debt to pay for child care, it makes more sense for me to take a couple of years at least out of the workforce to stay home. But she still very much thinks of herself as doing work for her family and for her kids. And so I think this, some of the language here, I think the policymakers who are pushing this can lean on to say, you know, this is a group of working parents that we have underinvested in.

29:25Dr. Jessica Calarco: But in the process, they may end up taking resources away from, you know, employed parents who are working for pay and who need child care support in order to be able to keep a roof over their family's heads.

29:36Lauren Brody: Yeah. And I think, too, about the amount of money here. $9 ,000, it doesn't come close to replacing an income.

29:43Dr. Jessica Calarco: Exactly. And certainly, you know, for many families, this does help. You know, it's enough money if you're a family that's getting by on$40 ,000 a year, you know, to be able to make a substantial difference in terms of the ability to, you know, avoid going into more debt in most cases. but it's certainly not enough to replace an entire income. And it certainly does not say much about the way that conservative policymakers value women's time when it comes to the work that they're doing at home.

30:10Lauren Brody: Jess, I'm really grateful for your time. Thanks for coming on the show. It's been good to chat with you. Thank you. Jess Calarco is a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She's also the author of four books. Her most recent is Holding It Together, How Women Became America's Safety Net. Earlier in the show, you heard from Lauren Brody, who's the author of The Fifth Trimester and an advocate over at the Chamber of Mothers. And that's our show. What Next is produced by Evan Campbell, Madeline Thames-Ducharm, and Patrick Fort. Paige Osborne is the senior supervising producer of What Next and What Next DVD.

30:46Lauren Brody: Mia Lobel is the executive producer of podcasts here at Slate. Ben Richmond is the senior director of podcast operations. And I'm Mary Harris. Go track me down on Blue Sky. I'm at Mary Harris. Thanks for listening. Catch you back here next time.

31:26Lauren Brody: We'll have room for fried cookies. Okay, you never overspend on food. What's your deal?

31:32Dr. Jessica Calarco: What's his deal? He went to Metro and got$450 in value on the new Samsung Galaxy A37 5G for free.

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