Let’s talk about JD Vance’s Grandma

And why she matters for the debate on childcare

This is the last political piece I will write until after the dust settles from the elections. Motherhood is political. That’s for sure. Even PARENTING advice is political (as I pointed out in my last post). But talking politics in our polarized environment has become so risky that I don’t think it’s worth it. I try to look at issues from all sides but somehow this feels even riskier than picking a political camp and going all in. I started this newsletter to talk about evolutionary mismatch and motherhood and that’s what I am going to (mostly) stick to moving forward. I’m an academic at heart, not a journalist. I will continue tying my research to modern motherhood and feminism but in a way that is mostly a-political (if that’s even possible). But I do want to write this last piece, because I think I was too dismissive of certain points of view in the past.

For the last three weeks I have been pitching an op-ed whose news hook is all about JD Vance and his notorious childcare line: “maybe Grandma and Grandpa want to help out a little bit more.” I am not the only childcare advocate who latched onto this. It was practically a meme. So many reels were stitched to that interview snippet that it practically broke the internet. I myself made at least one. 

Then, in the spirit of my last post on finding political unity in a highly polarized bipartisan environment, I decided to watch the Netflix film Hillbilly Elegy. Hillbilly Elegy is JD Vance’s memoir. Vance wrote the memoir in 2016 long before he had any kind of political career. The book was made into a film in 2020. Vance did not begin his political career until 2021, but he clearly did use funds from the film to advance himself politically. Does that make the film political propaganda? Not necessarily. Ron Howard, the director, has apparently since expressed disappointment and surprise over Vance’s politics, but said that “we didn't talk a lot of politics when we were making the movie because I was interested in Vance's upbringing and that survival tale.”

Glenn Close as “mamaw” in Hillbilly Elegy

I liked the movie. I thought that Glenn Close and Amy Adams gave stellar performances. I thought it was an important representation of the struggles faced by a certain subset of the American population, despite criticism that the film was little more than “bootstrapping poverty porn.” I will concede that the ultra cliche I-don’t-know-what-fork-to-use scene activated my gag reflex. Nevertheless, when you watch it, you cannot help but feel enormous empathy for Vance and his family. Of course, in any movie there are embellishments and stories are different from facts, but no one is denying that Vance had a hard childhood and that life is hard for many people in the Rust Belt. Some criticism of Hillbilly Elegy from the Appalachian community is certainly legitimate (and mostly aimed at the book, which I did not read). But let’s also acknowledge that in other cases the criticism is obviously politically-motivated and downright mean, like the rumor started on Twitter that in Hillbilly Elegy Vance describes having sexual intercourse with a couch, something that the John Oliver show has parodied multiple times, even while acknowledging that it is false. As Oliver puts it: “I think the reason it spread so fast is that A) nobody read that f–king book and B) it was incredibly easy to believe because if you asked me to draw a man who f–ks his couch, 10 times out of 10, I’m drawing this guy.” The ensuing montage of sexually-appealing couches is undeniably hilarious, but let’s also acknowledge that the classicism of the political left is often problematic and antagonizing and maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss Vance’s life story as “poverty porn.” 

But here’s what I want to talk about most. If we are to believe the film (and I think we certainly can in this regard), Vance’s grandmother (“mamaw” as he calls her) was a critical part of Vance’s life. She pulled him out of his mother’s home where he was headed down a path of drug-use and vandalism and got him on a better track. The film depicts her as loving but no-bullshit. She straightened him out, got him to do his homework, and gave him a safe place to live (away from his mother whose drug addiction often veered into violence). The film depicts them as food insecure, with his grandmother bartering for extra food from the meals-on-wheels delivery service in order to feed both her and Vance. 

So what does any of this have to do with childcare? In the original Fox News interview with Charlie Kirk, Vance is asked what we can do about the rising cost of childcare. His full answer is: “One of the things we can do…is make it easier for families to choose whatever model they want. One of the ways that you can relieve some of the pressure on families paying so much for daycare is…maybe Grandma and Grandpa want to help out a little bit more, or maybe there’s an aunt or uncle that wants to help out a little bit more. If that happens, then you relieve some of the pressure on all of the resources that we are spending on daycare.” He goes on to say that if we just got rid of the certification requirements that are allegedly preventing family members from helping out, the problem would be solved. 

Mostly, I think this is a giant cop-out. Certifications are not preventing family members from helping to care for children. Vance’s 2022 campaign for the Ohio Senate was heavily subsidized by a $10-million-dollar donation from tech tycoon Peter Thiel, a staunch libertarian, who Vance worked for as a venture capitalist before getting into politics. Libertarians do not want taxes increased in order to pay for public services like childcare.

Later, however, Vance clarified what he supposedly wanted to say on X: “Many don't fully appreciate how federal (and state) policy penalizes particular family models--particularly in-home care and kinship care--over others. That's true of the Child Care Development Block Grant and the Dependent Care Tax Credit, though in different ways for each. So yes, parents or grandparents might not be able to help, but they might *want* to, and for those families federal policy should not be forcing one particular family model. We should try to encourage whatever is best for each individual family. Right now we don't: we try to force or at least subsidize one model on every family in this country. And if you open up kinship and other options for families, you will relieve some pressure on the daycare system in this country.” 

That seems eminently reasonable. Vance also said back in August that he wants to expand the child tax credit from $2,000 to $5,000 - a substantial increase. The current act is set to expire in 2025, shortly after this election. Vance’s support for a more flexible childcare model makes sense to me in light of his life story. Vance’s grandmother was a critical figure in his life, but she lacked the support she needed to adequately care for him. When Vance talks about funding in-home care and kinship care, that appeals to a whole lot of moms on both sides of the political spectrum. 

As I wrote about in this earlier post, Vance has called universal child care “a massive subsidy to the lifestyle preferences of the affluent over the preferences of the middle and working class.” He shared this data from a conservative think tank to support his statement:

When I look at this chart, I see more similarities than differences across people with different education levels, but clearly, people with a four-year-college degree do seem to want daycare more than those who do not. This probably has something to do with the fact that college-educated women enjoy their paid jobs more. But having one parent work and one parent stay home is the MOST popular option regardless of education attainment.Of course, this is just one data set, but it reinforces a lot of what I have seen in my online community of mothers as well. 

I have been a big advocate for publicly-funded daycare. My husband is French and this is how the system works in most European countries. As Emily Oster has written about for the Atlantic, this is also the model that makes the most economic sense at the macro-level. When you pool childcare and mothers go to work, GDP goes up and you have a larger tax-payer base. Whether or not you think daycare is good for moms and kids is a different matter (although Oster argues it’s generally good for all parties).

My contribution to this conversation has largely been based on evidence from hunter-gatherer societies that children were often left to play together without much adult supervision. Since humans lived as hunter-gatherers for 95% of our existence as a species, it is probably “normal,” from an evolutionary perspective, to leave your child in the care of others. But there are fundamental differences between our probable evolutionary past (as depicted by the hunter-gatherers) and our present model, and these differences matter. For one thing, most children did spend a great deal of time in close physical contact with their mothers for the first three years (until they were weaned). For another thing, when the mothers did go out foraging and leave young children in playgroups in camp, the older children in the group (who were often related) played an active caregiving role. So even while adult participation in playgroups was low, the young children were supervised by the older ones and they were all (if not related) at least intimately familiar with one another. Young children often protested when mothers left camp to forage, and mothers reported being worried that their children might not receive good care in their absence. In this sense, the worry about leaving a child behind to work is probably as old as our species. But the worry about leaving your child in an institution with strangers and a low ratio of caregivers to dependent babies is new. It’s also worth noting that children did not typically spend 40+ hours a week away from their mothers, at almost any age. Does this mean that it’s not okay in the modern context? The evidence is mixed and depends a lot on age, time spent away, and quality of the care received, but daycare advocates (including Oster) often gloss over a lot of the nuance. 

I have personally had very mixed experiences with childcare for my children. I have never felt uncomfortable leaving them with a nanny or a relative at home, even for long hours. My children absolutely love their afternoon babysitter (to the point that they sometimes prefer her to me). Both of them have also attended some very high-quality home-based daycares where they were very happy. But at one point when my son was about one year old and we had just moved to a new neighborhood, we enrolled him in a large institutional daycare with high staff turnover and frankly, way too many babies in the same group (this was the only place that had availability). He was not happy. He was constantly sick. My heart would break when I dropped him off. I struggled to focus at work. It was awful. I know other mothers who were perfectly happy with that same center and whose kids seemed fine, but it was not right for me (we eventually pulled him out) and my heart goes out to any mother who feels that she has to make a choice that is emotionally stressful for both her and her baby (as many of us do).

There are some valid arguments against group daycare models from too young an age and for too many hours a week. I covered some of those arguments in this reel and I am not going to dive deep on them here, but it appears that the most important factors are the quality of the mother-infant bond (or primary-caregiver-infant bond) outside of daycare hours, as well as the quality of care while the child is in daycare (again, this is mainly about the child’s relationship with the caregiver). There is also ample evidence to suggest that increasing social support for mothers improves the quality of mother-infant interactions and children’s attachment security, so daycare may actually be beneficial to children’s psychological well-being if it helps her get a much-needed break. 

But there are also some interesting counterarguments to the economics arguments in favor of daycare that Oster has articulated. 

I am a big fan of Elizabeth Warren. She was my pick in 2020. (As always, I feel the need to say I don’t back her on everything, but her thinking on the struggles of middle class Americans is smart). In her 2020 bid for the Democratic nomination, she was unequivocally behind universal free childcare. Radical! But what I did not know until someone recently pointed it out to me is that in 2016 she wrote a book called “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle Class Parents Are (Still) Going Broke” which is all about how mothers entering the workforce has hurt the middle class by robbing them of an “insurance policy.” “A stay-at-home mother served as the family’s ultimate insurance against unemployment or disability,” she wrote. “A modern family where mom is already working has no ‘give’ and is much more likely to be pushed into bankruptcy by job loss or family illness.” I have not read this book yet (only articles describing the book), but this is not the first time I have heard this argument and it makes a lot of sense to me. The question is then: how do we address that without sliding back in the 1950s model which was not good for women either?

Her other major point is that most of the income that second-earners bring in is spent on housing and educational opportunities (which are linked because housing costs more in good school districts) and both of these have skyrocketed. The middle class ends up in debt and, sometimes, bankruptcy (Warren’s research specialization). 

I identify with this. My mother never worked full-time outside the home after I was born, but my parents spent most of their income on housing and education (including sending me to Stanford, where I got zero financial aid and we collectively took out plenty of debt) and at 73 my dad is still working, despite the fact that my parents moved to a small house in rural New Mexico once my brother and I were finished with school. I do think that Warren overestimates women’s ability to just jump back into the workforce when needed (a key part of the SAHMs-as-insurance-policy thinking). When my dad’s business ran into trouble in the Great Recession in 2008, it wasn’t possible for my mom to just hop back into the workforce. It WAS possible for my dad’s business partner’s wife, however, and my key take-away from that was: get bankable, Elena, and never let your skill set lapse. 

Needless to say, social conservatives loved Warren’s book for its implicit support of conservative family models. But I doubt most conservatives would agree with Warren’s proposed solution: publicly-funded preschool paired with subsidies for stay-at-home parents (a level of big-government spending that would give most Republicans heartburn). 

Back to Vance. I don’t think Vance is going to do much to push policies aimed at supporting mothers if he makes it into office.Vance talks a good talk but just days before he said that he wanted to expand the child tax credit, he apparently failed to show up for a vote that would have expanded it. He and Trump have also been wishy-washy about paid family leave. Vance did, however, introduce the Fairness for Stay-at-Home Parents Act last year, aimed at reducing health insurance penalties for parents who choose to stay home beyond their leave (this also makes a lot of sense in light of his personal history as depicted in Hillbilly Elegy). 

Harris and Walz have been more vocal about their plan to cap child care spending at 7% of a family’s income, and Tim Walz has a strong track record of actually putting these kinds of policies in place, but the details remain nebulous. 

I do think that Vance is smart to articulate many families’ desire for “choice” in their childcare model. I also think the issue of how to solve childcare in this country is complex; perhaps far more complex than most liberals (or conservatives) make it out to be. I will say that I am glad to see this issue finally getting so much attention and there does seem to be some level of bipartisan support. That’s good news for moms, regardless of your political affiliation.