Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, has spent the week defending comments he made a few years ago in which he, among other things, referred to having children as an “investment in the future of this country.”
That didn’t bother me. My wife and I have four children, and at low points we remind each other that we are putting in the work now so that it pays off with a beach vacation with grandchildren in the future. Our oldest two daughters are 14, so we are what an actual investor might call long and illiquid on the future of this country.
Vance made clear, however, that he thought people with children are more invested in the future of America than people without them, and, so, we should get an extra vote for each of our children.
This seems tricky. I don’t know how my wife and I would negotiate custody of the extra four votes. Maybe we would alternate presidential elections and I’d take the midterms.
Vance has since said that this was just a thought experiment, so ultimately even he’s not comfortable giving us the extra votes.
My question for the senator is this, though: What makes him so confident that raising four children has made me more likely to vote for Republicans?
There’s an assumption among conservatives that growing up nudges you to the right, as you start paying taxes or get mugged by reality. I found that having a bunch of kids pushed me to the left.
Some stages of life, such as having young children or encountering old age, are inherently difficult. My wife and I need a lot of help right now, and it’s when you need help that you understand how important it is to share the responsibility of stable, consistent and simple support programs.
We chose to have four children, and we’re happy every day with our decision. Like the Vances, we also chose to have a two-career family, and so every day we accept the trade-offs that come with that, too. We put away money for college. We pay cash for orthodontics. My wife is a doctor, and when she finished her medical fellowship we moved back to my hometown, where we still have family who can pitch in. We are okay. It works. Some stages of life, such as having young children or encountering old age, are inherently difficult. My wife and I need a lot of help right now, and it’s when you need help that you understand how important it is to share the responsibility of stable, consistent and simple support programs.
If my wife and I were single-issue voters on parenthood, though, we’d give our four extra parent-votes to the candidate who could credibly promise to make parenthood a little cheaper and a lot less complicated. Vance has proposed that we raise the child tax credit to $5,000 per kid. Sure. I’ll take the money. But that doesn’t really get to the problem. Children are expensive because raising children in America is unnecessarily complicated — a maze of stripped-down public services and private choices choked with hurdles and paperwork.
Vance has three young children. That’s a blessing — seriously. Little kids are the absolute best. But they do take a lot of work. I don’t know how Vance and his wife are managing, but I can tell you that when we had four kids under 4, the cheapest option for us was the au pair system, expensive private matching services for foreign nannies, overseen by the State Department.
They are rife with labor abuses, require an exhausting new search every year and are only available to families secure enough to have an extra room. We gave bedrooms to our au pairs and put all of the kids into a single room we called The Thunderdome. Do the Vances have a Thunderdome? Ours was not great.
My children are now in the same public school system I went to. But since I graduated, that system has stopped offering every program at every school, so in the fifth grade we entered our kids into lotteries for magnet schools for performing arts, or math and science, or a public charter school with a robotics team. Two of my children are now at the charter school, and I guess I should be grateful. It’s a great school.
We shouldn’t have had to win a lottery to get a good school, though, and it’s still a complicated outcome. My youngest is on the autism spectrum, and would thrive near his siblings — but that’s not what the charter school does, so he’s alone in the middle school he’s zoned for. Our other daughter doesn’t want to focus on math and science, so she’s at the high school she’s zoned for.
