While JD Vance Rails Against ‘Cat Ladies,’ GOP Policies Are Making Parents Miserable

Americans with children are more likely to be unhappy, compared to people without children. The two policy issues that could immediately alleviate stressors on U.S. families: paid leave and universal childcare.

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), his wife Usha Vance and their two children at the Park Diner on July 28, 2024, in St. Cloud, Minn. (Stephen Maturen / Getty Images)

While there has been increasing outrage at JD Vance’s resurfaced comments about “childless cat ladies” who want to force their “miserable” emotional state onto the rest of the country, Vance himself has noted that most people have ignored the main points he was trying to make in his statement—that the Democratic party, which he argues is exemplified and represented by these aforementioned ladies, is “anti-family and anti-child.”

On one point we agree: Most people are missing the point. Vance’s implication about women without children obscures the reality of the lives of parents in the United States: People with children are more likely to be unhappy compared to people without children. Research indicates that this is because of the lack of institutional policies that support families—a lack that has been engineered by Vance’s political party.

The backlash to Vance’s comments has been robust and often humorous. However, the question of whether it is possible to maintain a decent quality of life and care for children in this country has been left unaddressed in the current debate. 

There are two policy issues that could immediately alleviate stressors on American families: paid parental and sick leave, and universal childcare. Yet, the GOP is decidedly anti-family on these issues.

Take their pro-business stance in opposition to proposed legislation such as the Healthy Families Act and FAMILY Act, which would legally protect paid time off in instances of illness and other family-related events such as pregnancy and childbirth recovery. Instead, the GOP has put forward the Working Families Flexibility Act, which would have employees forgo overtime pay in exchange for paid time off in the future. This proposition would strip working families of real earnings in a moment when most Americans report struggling to afford basic goods such as groceries and gasoline, let alone rent and mortgage payments. 

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The Cost of Childcare

The high cost of childcare is another issue plaguing U.S. families. With infant childcare costs now outpacing in-state college tuition in most states, family members are often forced to leave the workforce in order to provide care for young children, with more Black and Latino parents forced to do so relative to white parents.

Again, conservative politicians have turned their backs on families when it comes to policy addressing our childcare crisis. Republicans blocked the passage of universal pre-school in the Build Back Better bill, despite the fact that 70 percent of Americans want the federal government to fund childcare and early childhood education. 

“Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women,” according to sociologist Jessica Calarco.

In lieu of these much needed reforms, our country continues to ask women to disproportionately take on this labor, often for free and with little reliable support. Under the guise of “traditional family values” and opposing “big government,” GOP politicians often advocate for solutions that maintain the status quo of women as the primary caregivers and homemakers. Many mothers express feeling like they are failing and not able to do enough, which is because we are asking them to do work that other countries have accepted requires large scale systems, policies and institutional support to achieve.

When you drill down, mothers are more likely to report lower happiness than fathers, which points to the fact that women with children have the most to gain from these policies. Interestingly, men with children report higher levels of happiness than men without, suggesting that having a support system (mothers) makes parenting more enjoyable. Instead, GOP politicians like Vance prefer to gaslight the American public by dismissing the experiences of unhappy mothers, all while advocating against pro-family policies.

Despite conservatives’ insistence of promoting the “naturalness” and “superiority” of the “traditional family”—a concept that only began to emerge in the 18th century—families have taken various shapes and sizes throughout time and across cultures. Ours is no exception. Republicans, it would seem, dislike all families, including their classic scapegoats: single mothers, blended families, couples without kids (“DINKs”), same-sex and queer families, and undocumented/mixed-status families. Ironically, their policies also harm the “traditional” nuclear families they claim to champion. 

One of the saddest aspects of Vance’s statements is that the unhappy status of people with kids, especially mothers, is largely his party’s fault—and it is fixable. The GOP has consistently opposed policies that would genuinely support families, despite claiming to care about them. They continue to fight against measures like universal childcare and paid parental leave that could radically improve the lives of American parents. This hypocrisy is not just misleading, it’s harmful to the very people they profess to support.

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About and

Marya T. Mtshali, Ph.D., is a sociologist and a former postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School. Her areas of expertise include intersectionality, inequality and political sociology. Her work has also been published at Vox, The Nation and Cosmopolitan.
Katharine McCabe, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of women’s and gender studies at Bucknell University. She is a sociologist whose research focuses on the reproductive health experiences of marginalized groups and the criminalization of care in the U.S. Her work has also been published in Newsweek.