Parents Raise Children Better than Government Does?

I seem to be thinking a lot about right-wing rhetoric lately. I can’t get a recent sound bite from Mike Huckabee out of my head. Heading out of his Iowa caucus win, Huckabee said, “Parents do a much better job of raising children than the government does.”

Huckabee’s one-liner raises the specter of bony-fingered Uncle Sam breaking into houses all over America to steal children. Although as far as I know there is no such government program, part of the brilliance of this rhetoric is that it, one, speaks to parents’ real fears and stresses about raising children, and, two, identifies a cause for those stresses: Big Gubmint. In fact, of course, the tremendous difficulties American parents are facing—long work hours, too little money, unavailable or unreliable or way too expensive childcare—are caused not by too much government but by too little of it. That is, too little of the right kind of government policies.

It isn’t only the far-right that is seduced by this anti-government rhetoric. For example, most Americans seem comfortable with government-supported daycare only if it’s for the disadvantaged. The various social policies Europeans enjoy, from extensive paid family leave to highly subsidized daycare attended by all strata of society, haven’t made it to this country not only because we still have not accepted an egalitarian view of women’s roles, but also because we don’t see children as the entire society’s responsibility. (That, I think, has a lot to do with race.) Instead, the philosophy of You’re On Your Own rules, which leaves parents struggling terribly, while clinging to the only supportive institutions they find at hand, namely family, marriage, and churches. Meanwhile, right-wing purveyors of the You’re On Your Own philosophy mask its nastiness with misty-eyed odes to family values and pin parents’ troubles on the very institution that could provide practical solutions. Brilliant.