Parenting is not just for pronatalists: the progressive case for raising kids

The Guardian

4 hours ago

A few months ago, I was at a playground just a couple of blocks from our home in Washington DC, when a mom I barely knew turned to me mid-conversation and said: 'I think I might be the deep state.'
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It was mid-March. Doge was tearing through the city, dismantling federal agencies at dizzying speed. Donald Trump, re-elected on a promise to 'shatter the deep state', had fired thousands of longtime civil servants in his first weeks back in office.
The job cuts have been top of mind in Washington. Most of my kids' playdates these days begin with nap schedule updates and end in quiet dread.
It isn't just jobs. International students are being deported. Measles outbreaks are creeping closer. The climate crisis is at our doorstep: blizzards one week, wildfires the next. Every day brings fresh threats to public safety, democracy and the planet itself.
'It makes you wonder,' she said as we pushed our daughters on the swings, 'what kind of world did we bring our kids into?'
It's a question I can't stop thinking about. I've lived in and reported on parenting across five continents, and what continues to astonish me is how uniquely punishing early parenthood is in the west, especially for those most committed to building a fairer world. Progressives are rightly vocal about how hard it is to raise kids, but too often, we forget to make the case for why it's still worth it.
In the face of so many overlapping crises, the decision to have children can feel reckless, or worse, like an act of denial. But parenting can also be something else entirely: a stubborn act of hope.
Raising children offers a crash course in progressive values. It's a way of tying ourselves more deeply to the future, of feeling the stakes of climate change, inequality and injustice – not as distant headlines, but as urgent matters affecting someone whose lunch you just packed.
By failing to make a case for children and families, the left has surrendered these issues to the pronatalist right. We've handed over the 'family values' agenda, allowing it to be defined by a rigid, exclusionary vision of parenthood.
Project 2025, the policy blueprint shaping much of Trump's current agenda, pledges to 'restore' a Christian nationalist view of the family unit as 'the centerpiece of American life'.
Figures such as JD Vance and Elon Musk, as well as the conservative Heritage Foundation, have declared childbearing a moral and civic duty. Some have even proposed medals and cash for mothers. At this year's March for Life, Vance called for 'more babies in the United States of America' and more 'beautiful young men and women' to raise them.
When we see child rearing as a private project, we forget that many of the movements that shaped the left – civil rights, labour, climate justice – were powered by people who looked at the next generation and decided they were worth fighting for. In his most well-known speech, Martin Luther King Jr didn't just dream of a better world for himself, he dreamed that his four little children would grow up in a nation where they would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. His vision was rooted in legacy.
That's what parenting does. It gives shape to our politics. It puts flesh on our ideals. It forces us to ask: what are we building and who is it for? Raising children doesn't distract from that work; it clarifies it.
Of course, parenthood isn't the only path to caring about the future – but it makes it harder to look away. It compels us to feel the weight of policy decisions in our bones. It blows open our empathy and softens the edges of individualism. Suddenly, every child becomes your child. Every policy becomes personal. You start noticing the stroller-unfriendly sidewalks, the unaffordable summer camps, the lack of paid leave – not just for yourself, but for all parents.
There's science behind this shift. Researchers have found that becoming a parent activates a 'parental caregiving network' in the brain, lighting up areas tied to empathy, emotional processing and social understanding. It happens in both mothers and fathers. For dads especially, the extent of this neurological change is closely tied to how much hands-on caregiving they do. In other words, caregiving rewires our brains to connect more, care more and notice the needs of others. At its best, parenting strengthens the very instincts progressives say they want to build society around.
I've seen this empathy in action. Before I had kids, I was reporting on the Rio Olympics and walking the beach one night with a colleague, a mother of two, when we were approached by a group of children begging for money. I clutched my purse and walked faster. But my co-worker slowed down, took off her blazer and wrapped it around a shivering child about her son's age. 'Get home,' she said gently. 'Your mom is probably looking for you.'
I could tell right away we were operating on different levels of empathy. She saw that child as an extension of her own kids. I wasn't there yet. But eventually, I got there, too.
When I finally became a mother, I began to see stories I covered differently. Now, when I interview parents who've lost children to gun violence in Brazil's favelas, I understand their grief in a new way. I report with deeper urgency and deeper care, seeing myself in their shoes, and my children in theirs.
This rewiring of the brain creates a political opening. It expands our sense of who counts as 'us'. It softens the boundary between self and other. In doing so, it changes how we interpret harm, not as something happening 'out there', but as something personal, urgent and unacceptable.
Yet, the demands of caregiving can pull us away from political life. A 2022 UK study found that parenthood temporarily reduces political participation among mothers. The reason is obvious: we're exhausted. Calling your representatives between diaper changes feels impossible. I get it. Some days, I fantasize about deleting all my news apps, retreating into a cozy, apocalypse-adjacent bubble with my kids, and calling it a day.
'Generally, I think parents are the worst at advocating for themselves because they are just too damn tired. It's one more thing in the lives of people who already have too much expected of them,' Jennifer Glass, professor at the University of Texas's department of sociology and Population Research Center and an expert on parental happiness, told me.
But parenting doesn't have to distract from political work. It can fuel it. When we do organize, our sharpened parental empathy can translate into political power. Around the world, it's progressive movements, often driven by the demands of parents, that have expanded what family support can look like. In Sweden, it was working mothers who pushed for what became the world's most generous parental leave system, eventually adding incentives for men to take their fair share. In Singapore, multigenerational bonds are built into policy: the government gives housing grants to families who live near grandparents and tax breaks to elders who help with childcare. In France, parents helped lead the 1968 protests that birthed a cooperative childcare system.
But when progressives step back from family values, conservatives fill the void.
This is not a uniquely American phenomenon. According to the United Nations, the share of countries with explicit pronatalist policies has nearly tripled since 1976. But these visions often center on traditional gender roles and narrow definitions of family, excluding anyone who doesn't fit the mold. We shouldn't let the only cultural narrative around parenting come from those who see it as a tool for enforcing hierarchy and control.
Progressives must also fight for a say in the values shaping the next generation. A 2023 Pew survey found that 89% of teenagers raised by Democratic parents identify with or lean toward the Democratic party. For Republican parents, the number is nearly as high, at 81%.
That suggests political identity is often passed down through environment and lived experience: what kids hear at the dinner table, what they see modeled at home and which communities shape their worldview.
From there, each new generation brings fresh ideas about justice. Social progress doesn't only happen by changing the minds of the old; it happens through generational renewal. Throughout the country, youth raised in the shadow of mass shootings are leading the charge for gun reform. In Montana, young people took the government to court over climate change and won. In Sweden, Greta Thunberg sparked a global climate movement at 15.
These movements exist because someone raised those children to believe they had not just the right, but the responsibility, to shape the world around them. But if we step back from parenting, or treat it as apolitical, we leave that space wide open.
The right is more than ready to fill it. That's why they're fighting so hard to control what children are taught, which books they read, whose families are visible in their classrooms and which identities are allowed to exist.
This is the moment for the left to reclaim family as a public good. Progressives shouldn't just defend the right to abortion, we must fight for people's ability to have families and raise them with dignity. That means paid leave, universal childcare, affordable healthcare and a livable planet.
It also means rejecting the caricature that progressives are a party of 'childless cat ladies' while conservatives corner the market on family values. We are, and always have been, the natural home of pro-family policy.
After all, children tether us to the future, but also to each other. Progressive values thrive in that space of interdependence, where no one is expected to go it alone. Caring for kids – whether as parents, educators, neighbors or policymakers – demands a communal ethic of care.
I've seen this ethic in action across the world. While writing my book, Please Yell at My Kids, I spent years studying how families around the world raise children in community. In the Netherlands, children as young as eight walk themselves to school. Parents trust that if they need help, a community member will step in. In Denmark, babies nap unattended in strollers outside cafes – not because parents are careless, but because they trust the society around them. In Mozambique, where formal support systems often fail, mothers rely on each other for food, childcare and safety, transforming neighborhoods into extended families. These cultures aren't perfect, but they understand that raising a child isn't a private endeavor. It's a collective one.
Some understandably hesitate to bring children into a world on fire. Others worry that parenting means stepping back from activism or ambition. But for many, becoming a parent doesn't dilute that drive; it crystallizes it. Climate change isn't just a policy failure – it's the air your child will breathe. Gun violence isn't abstract – it's a possibility you carry every time you drop them off at school. The broken systems you tolerated suddenly become intolerable when your child has to navigate them, too.
This isn't about idealizing parenthood. It's about refusing to surrender this human experience to those who would use it to divide us. So yes, the world is on fire. But refusing to bring children into it won't put the flames out. What may, perhaps, is raising a generation bold enough to rebuild it.
Marina Lopes is the author of Please Yell at My Kids: What Cultures Around the World Can Teach You About Parenting in Community, Raising Independent Kids, and Not Losing Your Mind, out now