Grappling with parenthood in 2025
In a series of three op-eds, I write about the challenges of being a new parent during the digital age and the earliest months of Trump’s second term.
The right wing plan to pay parents to stay home is a trap
After I gave birth this summer, the hackneyed cliches I’d heard about parenthood suddenly became true. I had never experienced love like the one I felt for my son. I was cracked wide open. I sporadically burst into tears because I felt so lucky to be his mother.
Also newly clear: the United States’ patchwork approach to parental leave is cruel. My son was three months old when I began cobbling together more than four consecutive hours of sleep, which is around the time that many new parents must return to work. From my privileged perch – on leave from graduate school and relying on my partner’s income – I couldn’t fathom working while my newborn still required constant care. This is already more work than a full-time job, I thought. Someone should pay me for it!
Imagine my surprise to learn this half-formed idea put me in cahoots with leaders in the Trump administration, who have proposed to pay parents to stay home. Of course, we only agree when their proposal is stripped of context. With context, it looks like a cynical attempt to trap moms at home and make their roles even harder.
A version of this proposal is outlined in Project 2025, a conservative roadmap intended to guide the Trump administration. It was co-authored by influential members of his cabinet. The plan also promotes a regressive social vision. It promises to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life,” narrowly defining the ideal family structure as “a married mother, father, and their children.” On page 486, it rejects universal daycare in favor of paying families so that one parent stays home with their children. It does not offer specifics on how to do that.
This echoes a series of posts Vice President JD Vance made in 2021, calling universal daycare “a massive subsidy to the lifestyle preferences of the affluent;” namely, the preference for two working parents. Instead, he suggested, “normal Americans” would rather have one parent who’s a breadwinner and one at home. He recommends expanding the Child Tax Credit to $5,000 to make it happen.
Vance wrote the foreword to Dawn’s Early Light, a guide to a “peaceful ‘Second American Revolution’” by Project 2025 director Kevin D. Roberts. Because of this overlap, it’s reasonable to examine both Vance’s public statements and proposals outlined in Project 2025 to learn more about what this group of influential conservatives has in mind for parents.
Vance’s use of “normal” is a clue. He might have used “average” to distinguish between families based on wealth. His word adds a different dimension, suggesting that families that prefer two working parents are abnormal, even strange.
Project 2025 gives us another hint about who, specifically, they imagine might stay home: women. It tells us that healthy children need a working dad; from mom, “love and nurturing.” These stereotypes are in line with a gendered division of labor: in 2021, only one out of five stay-at-home parents in the U.S. were dads.
Evidence from countries with a similar policy already in place suggests it would exacerbate the stay-at-home gender imbalance. The Finnish Home Care Allowance, though designed to be gender-neutral, is used “almost exclusively” by mothers. It also economically sidelines those moms: a 2023 study on the allowance, which makes payments to moms of children under three who stayed home, found those moms have lower rates of employment and lower wages long after the payments cease.
This finding is important for conservatives to note, because it shows how the policy might harm poor families. Today it is “normal” – meaning ‘common’ – for American children to live in poverty: as many as one in six. Some of those children are enrolled in HeadStart, a federally-funded program that operates as a de facto daycare and which Project 2025 proposes cutting. The program serves families who meet the HHS poverty guidelines – for instance, a family of four that makes $31,000 a year. Imagine that this family consists of two working parents, and now one parent needs to quit their job to provide childcare. Vance’s proposal to expand the Child Tax Credit would help, but $5,000 is not likely enough to make up for those lost wages, particularly if they continue to make less after their kids are in school.
Stripping families of this kind of crucial support is cruel. We need all the help we can get – even people like me with immense privilege. My son is now seven months old, and I’m back in school part-time. To make it work, I chose evening and Friday classes which overlap with times my husband is able to work from home; my mom comes over before work on Friday mornings to help. This arrangement gives me more support than most primary caregivers I know. With this ‘village’ – another cliche that rings true – I’m slowly learning how to inhabit an old self.
The right’s focus on nuclear families misses something crucial about parenthood
One steamy afternoon in late July, my husband and I emerged from Brooklyn Methodist Hospital with our newborn son and blinked into a sun we hadn’t seen in two days. We had just been discharged. After running final tests, the neonatal nurses removed my IV port, snipped off our hospital bracelets, and cut us loose into the world as a family of three.
Suddenly, we were on our own at the most vulnerable moment of our lives. My twice-weekly prenatal visits stopped abruptly even as the wound in my uterus continued weeping furiously for weeks. In moments when I wasn’t feeding, burping, swaddling, or bouncing my newborn, I turned to Google to assess whether I was experiencing “normal” postpartum bleeding or signs of an impending hemorrhage.
I came to understand that our isolation began the moment my placenta tugged away from my uterine wall. We were now a sovereign unit, inscrutable from the outside. But I knew immediately and instinctively that the nuclear family structure could not meet our needs as new parents.
At exactly the same moment that we were becoming a family, a strain of pro-family social conservatism was taking root among the upper echelons of the Republican party in a group being called the New Right. This philosophy, articulated by people like Vice President JD Vance, Senator Josh Hawley, and Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, holds that the health and stability of the United States hinges on the health of its nuclear families.
This view is clearly outlined in Project 2025, the 900-page policy roadmap for the second Trump administration compiled by the Heritage Foundation in partnership with a veritable CVS receipt of conservative thinkers. The foundation has published a similar document before most presidential elections since Reagan’s first victory in 1980. Earlier versions spouted conservative orthodoxy: reform the welfare system, cut taxes, curtail the federal government. Project 2025 is soaked in ideology. It opens with a call to reignite the Reagan revolution. The plan begins with the restoration of “the family as the centerpiece of American life” before continuing with more typical policy fare.
This order is not an accident. The New Right believes that the country needs traditional family units in order to achieve its other goals. “The world has never seen a thriving, healthy, free, and prosperous society where most children grow up without their married parents,” says Project 2025. Supporting American families is “true priority of politics,” and only once this is achieved can the Trump administration make progress on the remaining proposals: dismantle the federal government, undo the effects of globalization, and unleash market capitalism.
The group also seems to believe that it only needs to promote traditional family units and stability will simply ensue. Its policy recommendations are largely focused on corralling Americans into wedlock and stereotypical gender roles. Hawley’s child tax credit proposal includes a marriage “bonus” that rewards married couples with twice the tax credit that single-parent families would receive; Project 2025 proposes cutting HeadStart and instead paying one parent in two-parent families to stay home. Though it does not specify which parent, Vance, who Roberts called “the single most important person on family policy in the history of this country,” has given us some clues. In 2022, he tweeted: “If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had.”
Well, the New Right can take it from me that its plans won’t work. I have joined into a “traditional,” heterosexual marriage with a gendered division of labor. My husband works. I’m at home with our infant son. And it is precisely from the vantage of our nuclear family unit that I see clearly that this atomized structure is insufficient to fill the gaping maw of our new vulnerability.
As a new mom, I have suddenly needed support in ways I haven’t since childhood. I needed my mom to hold me while I cried. I needed my in-laws to hold the baby while I showered. I have needed friends to make me food, and to meet me in the middle of the day when I feel like I’m about to lose it. I have come to rely on the kindness of strangers: young men who have offered to help me carry my stroller up the subway stairs; restaurant staff who have given me control of their AC, or arranged the tables so no one would come near our newborn with hot food; cafe patrons who have seen me coming with a baby in my arms and rushed to open the door for us. And I have dreamed of institutional support: a way to stay home with my son that didn’t feel like giving up my independence; better, more regular medical care for my ravaged body; elevators in subway stations; ramps at restaurants – things that would make navigating the world a little easier with a stroller. A world where care and support transcend the strict limits of family ties.
Hell is the parents’ group chat
The digital village can be lonely and alienating
For almost an entire month, I lived in a state of postpartum bliss with my sweet, squirmy newborn. Our tiny apartment was a magical, timeless and sleepless cocoon where my husband and I took turns holding our son while he napped and sobbing about how much we loved him. But then the real world rudely intruded: against my will, someone added me to a parents’ WhatsApp chat.
My phone began to buzz with pesky notifications instructing me to join different channels. There was one for parents whose babies were born in 2024. There was a neighborhood chat centered on our rapidly gentrifying, historically Black neighborhood which occasionally stuck a toe into the casually racist hypervigilance one typically finds on the community policing app Nextdoor. I was encouraged to join a group dedicated to cheering on other “mamas” through challenges designed to help them re-learn to care for themselves. A recent theme: you deserve to drink water, mama.
When I read that, I rolled my eyes so aggressively I gave my ocular nerve whiplash. All month, I had been flattened by the weighty realization that the divine bliss I felt holding the brand-new, perfect person that I made, who I suddenly knew I would die for, was one of the most universal and ancient elements of the human experience. So why did this affinity community of new parents feel so flat and lifeless?
I got closer to an answer last month, after artist Chappell Roan compared parenting to “hell” on a podcast and inadvertently wandered into a live social media gunfight. The already-established pro- and anti-motherhood camps leapt into action, posting response videos on TikTok and Instagram. Everyone was mad: some parents got defensive; others pointed to the lack of structural support that makes parenting in the US difficult, and a few of those posters lamented the loss of the “village” we are supposed to raise our kids in.
I have heard about this magical village regularly since I gave birth to my son nine months ago. Invoking it almost always ends the conversation, leaving my companion and me in wistful silence. In these moments, I picture a community where the immense individual burden of keeping a newborn alive is lightened by extra, wizened hands. I imagine a house full of grandmothers and aunts whose wisdom and experience I can draw on as needed, instead of turning to Reddit or harassing my pediatrician over text while curled up in a ball in the dark.
Instead, what I have is the group chat. It is a dysfunctional village made up of people all in the same exact life stage and being subjected to the anti-communal force of social media.
In the ideal village, we’d be surrounded by different kinds of people, not just the ones in our exact lifestage. In this village, the thing that granted me entry – my son’s birth – is exactly the thing that makes me an unreliable community member. When I became a parent I entered the most selfish, needy phase of my life: an emotional black hole, orbiting my son’s every need. During brief get-togethers, I drink deeply from the oasis of small talk and then trudge back into the desert to parent alone: the baby still needs to be fed every few hours, still needs perfect conditions for his two-hour, twice-daily naps. His highchair still needs to be hosed down after each of his three meals, and the spoons he loves to throw on the floor need to be washed and dried. The other new parents I just left are at home, alone, doing the same thing.
It’s also hard to have meaningful conversations and connect deeply in a large or even mid-sized group chat. The medium is like a very narrow Twitter; it encourages one-way broadcasting, hard stances, and groupthink. It took me months to admit to the other members of a three-person chat that I was considering weaning my son off of breastmilk, since the other parents were adamant about breastfeeding for a full two years. When I finally did, I was met with confusion and a little distress. I quickly backtracked and now avoid the subject.
But not every aspect of parenting in the digital age is bleak. Since the beginning of this year, I’ve regularly attended a Zoom support group for new parents hosted by a licensed therapist. In it, I’ve met moms in all kinds of circumstances, who I likely would not have met in the coffee shop: mothers without partners, mothers without their own mothers, mothers in recovery, mothers who had experienced horrific loss. In these sessions, we listen. We validate each other. We take turns crying and sharing. When I leave a meeting, I know that even though I am just one of a hundred million current parents, I am not alone.