How A Feminist Info Op Convinced Moms To Leave Their Babies With Strangers Every Day

“With this budget, New York is on a historic path to universal child care,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced last week. The left’s obsession with universal daycare is changing the way we think of parenting, which, after eating, is the most natural thing any living creature does and should not be fraught with complications.

But you won’t see feminists apologizing for how their seemingly benign agenda of equality for working women has turned into an imperative for all women to work. You will never see an apology from feminists for any ill effect brought about by their political objectives.

But if you listen carefully to Hochul, along with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and others, talking about daycare, here’s what you will see: they are pushing hard for an economy, backed by the state, that squeezes whatever child-rearing choice women have had, until it disappears.

The underlying assumption has evolved from “if needed” to “is a necessity for all.” Now we are simply to believe that federally funded childcare is required to raise a child, full stop. Note the lack of any modifier in Warren’s headline: it’s “families” not “working families.”

The information op on daycare, particularly federally funded daycare, is going through a strong cycle right now. An information op is when a topic trends in a coordinated way, with certain politicians, pundits, and media accounts discussing it, using similar categories and vocabulary.

Liberal opportunism and upcoming midterm elections, along with the Warren/AOC Democrat-sponsored bill aimed to provide universal daycare at tax-payer expense (“doing for childcare what the government has already done to healthcare,” a Cato Institute article wryly comments) with a dash of deflecting from fraud in the daycare industry, are coming together to present a united front on the absolute need for daycare, paid by you.

Feminist planners have always tried to arrange (and demand others’ tax dollars) for women to hire other women to mind their children. In the name of liberating women, they posit a wage-slave tier to support a marginally higher wage-slave tier. And none of it benefits children, nor is the question of the good of children ever raised.

Pushing daycare as a panacea to blunt resistance to feminism, which is now on the rise, is nothing new. I was there for the feminist revolution in the 1970s. I witnessed daycare becoming the perfect solution to the problem of what to do with the kids.

Women Kept in the Dark about Taking Care of Children

I even had an after-school job at a daycare, and though it was a high-end, superficially attractive place in a high-end town, it was really awful. I was awful at it. I was almost literally paralyzed at the thought of these children being away from home for hours and hours, and my distress had its effect on my performance. The job, for me, a 15-year-old, was not demanding, to be sure; I think I was supposed to get a snack from the supply room at an appointed time and then play with the kiddos, but I just felt so sorry for them and not convinced that the people who ran the place were all that, well, caring.

Though my mother worked, because my parents were divorced, she impressed upon me how important the mother at home for the child really is (and her sorrow that she was unable to fulfill that role herself). I felt this dumb daycare job was at odds with what she had taught me, and even though I myself was on track to become a professional, I knew I could never leave my own baby, when the day came, with anyone other than me. I don’t think I was unique in failing to reconcile these thoughts about my future.

Everyone knows daycare is bad for children. But we’re lied to about it all the time, simply because women are convinced they have no choice but to work, whether as an aspirational goal or from perceived economic necessity.

Women Working from Necessity 

It’s complicated, because weakening of religious discipline, combined with government intrusion into private life via the welfare state, stifle childbearing in wedlock. A confluence of progressive goals has made single-motherhood a judgement-free zone. It’s simply not politically correct to make a distinction between those who are married and those who are not; nor are we to prefer the former, as we ought to in any rational society. That silencing makes it hard to criticize daycare.

Single mothers obviously need to work — though less so if on welfare, which has its own perverse incentives — and so they just as obviously need some child-care support, as we are reminded by elite experts (who usually conveniently are married, well-off and rely on nannies, a totally different model from the one faced by those they are presuming to influence).

This is the complication for advocates of mothers at home: Feminism, as well as other social movements rooted in the ideology of equality, intentionally disrupts the family. The “difficult scenario” of the single mother or, for that matter, two-income household earners, is envisioned by feminism as a feature. Remember: “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” A woman must never depend on a man.

So feminists pivot from women working as an ideal to women working from dire necessity without missing a beat. Just try criticizing a well-off married woman touting the inherent value of working, along the lines I’m proposing here — mainly, that it’s not a blueprint for giving children what they need! The conversation immediately shifts to the dependency of the struggling family on the woman’s income. A bait-and-switch if there ever was one.

No Discussion of the Effect on Kids 

The information op has an answer to rising daycare skepticism: plowing ahead as if it doesn’t require an answer. Daycare is a given, it declares: most women are fine with it, and all that’s needed is affordability. Note carefully that its suitability for the child is not under discussion. It’s good for women and that is that.

Feminism specializes in what I call “magical thinking” — the actual experiences and situations disappear in the enchantment of gauzy vision. Every single mom is cast by feminists as a brave warrior in the battle of the sexes, whether she wants to be or not, because she’s a convenient tool to get the taxpayer to cough up for her difficult circumstances and become more enmeshed in creating those difficult circumstances. In turn, this scenario burnishes the feminist project’s patina. Keeping things out of balance works well in the crusade to remake the world.

Daycare as a Positive Good

And shortly you will begin to notice another level unlocked: daycare as an actual benefit for the child.

To make the claim that daycare provides what a child needs, an enhancement over parental nurture, you need to scrape up an anthropology, a theory of man, that makes it a positive for the child to be raised by professionals. Bonus points for implying that a mere mother, complemented and supported by her husband, cannot do it.

Put briefly, a new theory works pretty efficiently by using language as a teaching tool. Feminists carried out a bloodless revolution (unless you count the unborn killed in abortion) in large part by imposing their new anthropology of equality (rather than the traditional Christian one of complementarity) with “inclusive” — that is, political — language.

The use of the word “human,” ubiquitously imposed where “people” or “man” or “men and women” would do better, follows that trajectory. “Humans” implicitly puts us in a merely agricultural category, in which we are no different from animals. Children certainly seem like animals (especially those neglected by their parents), animals have utility that’s capitalized on when they are warehoused, so there you go: putting babies in facilities works just fine.

“Humans” also conjures by contrast a mechanical or digital category, and we already are daily fed the idea of computers taking over our functions. IVF has mechanized reproduction; so what difference does it make how the child develops?

As merely economic units, women at the mercy of the quest for enhanced GDP must be convinced that daycare is good, in case any doubts creep in:

(Click through to see the whole effort. It’s not very compelling, but honing these tropes takes time.)

If daycare is best for the child, our overlords will be looking for ways to chill whatever the opposite is; to punish “motherhood and homemaking.” Under President Joe Biden, the CIA warned that “traditional motherhood” and “Homemaking” are white extremist tactics.

Sadly, women can be manipulated into forgetting their agency in having children (after all, a completely voluntary activity) and therefore into abdicating responsibility as mothers for the children they have.

Society has been in the thrall of this political manipulation for more than 100 years. Economic utility, glossed with aspirational pursuit of male-defined “excellence” and “the greatest perspective,” becomes the only metric — not the good of the child. Conservative and even religious, “soft feminist” women are not immune to furthering this effort:

But in the end, the child is left without his mother, the one person in the universe he really wants and needs. Feminists claim they are just working for the freedom for women to not be oppressed in the professional world (if that is indeed their only aim, something that even they are by no means clear about). But that claim has become an assault on families, on the norm of the wife devoted to the home, and, like all leftist efforts, on the child.

Universal, imposed daycare is a big step in that assault and our intense informational delivery system is hard at work making it the new normal.

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Leila Marie Lawler is a mother of seven and grandmother of many. She is author of The Summa Domestica: Order and Wonder in Family Life (Sophia Institute Press); her Substacks are The School for Housewives and Happy Despite Them. She lives in central Massachusetts.