What if Democrats listened to parents? Because, guess what, almost half of parents with young children would like to stay at home with them in their early years.

And yet it’s a tenet of the party that what parents want is daycare. They’ve thought that for a long time. Back in 1990, when Congress created the federal child care block grant, its purpose was to help parents get jobs. This is a good goal. But, unfortunately, the law’s subsidies went only to parents who worked or were in school, so families with a stay-at-home parent were ineligible. Fast forward to 2026 and the situation hasn’t changed. In fact, the party’s main child care bill, the Child Care for Working Families Act, keeps that rule. The party seems to believe that after twelve weeks or so, what moms want is to go back to work.

But that’s not what many parents want to do. In a recent survey done by New America of nearly 5,500 parents of children under six, 49% said their ideal was caring for the child themselves or having the other parent do it. Only 15% chose day care or preschool. And only 30% of mothers of young children want to work full time, compared with 64% of fathers.

That doesn’t mean every mother wants to stay home. It does mean that many would prefer to care for their own children in the early years if they could. It’s not that they don’t value working. It’s just that, when their kids are small, they’d like to be at home.

Unfortunately, many Democrats treat women who stay home as misguided. Stay-at-home moms are dismissed as conservative patsies and decidedly unfeminist. This irks me. If you ask me, feminism should be fighting for a woman’s right to decide how to live, and a woman who stays home with her young children is using that right as much as a woman who returns to work at twelve weeks.

Now, I know some will say that staying home hurts women financially, and that’s a fair concern. A mother who leaves work for a few years often earns less when she goes back. But money is one thing. The idea that a career is inherently more rewarding and interesting than parenting is another, and, really, that’s for parents to decide. In fact, maybe the whole idea that careers are more important than families is suspect.

The Democrats should support all mothers by adding a home-care option to the Child Care for Working Families Act. I like the idea proposed by Project 2029: a free child care spot for families who want it, or $1,000 a month for families who’d rather have a parent at home.

It would be smart politics. The Trump administration is reportedly drafting a rule to let married stay-at-home parents use federal child care funds. The rule would rightly treat caring for your own child as child care. But it covers only married couples, so a single mother at home gets nothing. And—also not great—it adds families to funds meant for low-income working mothers, which, de facto, puts those mothers in competition with stay-at-home mothers. Democrats could say, hey, we want to help both!

Liberals should support all moms, including the ones who stay home, and I’d love to see the party win over all those stay-at-home parents who vote. So, Democrats, how about listening to parents? Almost half of them have already told you what they want.