Parenting is never going to be free of worry, or comparison, or stress. But there can be significantly less of all of those things. To make that happen, we have to admit that it’s not enough to have progressive ideals about parenting. Our current iteration of patriarchal capitalism destroys those ideals, no matter how earnest or deeply held, and replaces them with their regressive opposite: dramatically unequal distribution of domestic labor, generalized undervaluing of women’s labor, and jobs engineered to favor those unburdened with primary childcare responsibilities.
