The Parenting Divide No One Talks About

How politics shapes how we think and talk about parenting

Spend enough time online and you’ll notice a political pattern that has very little to do with tax policy or elections. Conservatives and progressives increasingly speak entirely different emotional languages.

Conservatives tend to tell stories rooted in gratitude. Progressives tend to tell stories rooted in grievance. You see it everywhere. One side instinctively counts blessings, while the other catalogs complaints. One side looks first for reasons to be thankful, while the other looks first for reasons to be aggrieved. Obviously there are exceptions, but as a broad cultural tendency it’s difficult to miss.

The divide becomes even more striking once you enter the world of parenting.

Scroll through social media long enough, and you’ll notice that conservative mothers and fathers generally describe their children as blessings. Their feeds aren’t sanitized fairy tales—there are tantrums, sleepless nights, endless laundry, sibling fights, and toddlers determined to redecorate the house with a Sharpie. But those frustrations exist within a much larger story about the privilege of raising children. The difficult moments are acknowledged without becoming the defining feature of parenthood.

Progressive parenting content often feels like the inverse. Parenting is framed as an endless exercise in drudgery. Every inconvenience becomes evidence of the crushing “mental load.” Every ordinary sacrifice becomes proof that motherhood is fundamentally exhausting, monotonous, and underappreciated.

Those are profoundly different ways of looking at exactly the same reality.

Anyone who has raised children knows both stories contain elements of truth. I’ve had colicky babies who only slept while being held as I sat up in a rocking chair in their bedroom for months on end. I’ve folded enough laundry to clothe a small nation, cleaned up stomach bugs at two in the morning, and repeated the phrase “please stop hitting your brother” more times than I could ever count. None of that is to romanticize parenting. The difficult moments are real, and every parent experiences them. The difference is whether those moments become the defining story you tell about your family, or simply one chapter in a much larger and happier one.

I often think about one of Jordan Peterson’s simplest pieces of parenting advice: raise children you and others actually enjoy being around. It sounds almost offensively obvious, yet it captures something we’ve forgotten. Children are not static creatures who simply happen to us. They are shaped, profoundly and continually, by the adults raising them. The more time you spend with your children, the more they begin to resemble you. They absorb your habits, your sense of humor, your emotional responses, your values, and your view of the world. Which is why it is always so striking when parents publicly describe their children with open contempt. More often than not, they’re telling us far more about themselves than about their kids.

That dynamic was on full display recently during an episode of the podcast I’ve Had It, hosted by Jennifer Welch and Angie “Pumps” Sullivan (pulled by my friend Curtis Houck from NewsBusters). Discussing homeschooling, Sullivan declared, “I don’t trust somebody that wants to be with their kids 24/7. I think a lot of dumb people do it because it’s just easier.”

What fascinated me wasn’t even her opinion about homeschooling, which was absolutely ludicrous on its face. It was the assumption underneath it. She simply could not imagine wanting to spend that much time with your own children unless there were some selfish or pathological explanation. To her, the very desire to be around your kids required an ulterior motive.

It’s tempting to write it off as an extreme voice out for attention, but as a homeschool mother, it’s a sentiment I hear shockingly frequently. I’ll tell people that I homeschool and they reply, “Oh, I could never spend all day with my children.” I never know quite how to respond, because that’s weird and that’s shameful and it should be common sense to say so.

It apparently never occurred to her that some parents genuinely enjoy their children’s company, or that spending more time together might itself be part of what produces close families and delightful children in the first place. Imagine hearing your own mother say something like that publicly. Imagine realizing that she regards time spent with you not as one of life’s greatest joys, but as something only a fool would voluntarily choose. As painful as that would be for any child to hear, it also reveals something much larger about the way many progressives have come to think about parenthood.

This strikes me as one of the least discussed ways our culture is bifurcating. We spend enormous amounts of time talking about political polarization, but almost no time talking about the radically different emotional narratives Americans are telling about family life itself. One worldview treats children as the central joy around which adult life is organized. The other increasingly treats them as a series of obligations competing with personal fulfillment. Neither side denies that parenting is difficult. They simply disagree about what deserves the headline.

Part of the problem is that social media creates a profoundly distorted picture of modern parenthood. Influencing is a business, and outrage, resentment, and commiseration drive engagement far more reliably than gratitude ever will. Layer on top of that the reality that many conservative mothers have learned to avoid saying much of anything political online for fear of coordinated harassment or threats to their livelihoods, and you end up with a parenting conversation that is overwhelmingly shaped by progressive voices. The result is that many young adults scrolling Instagram or TikTok encounter an endless stream of mothers telling them how miserable parenthood is, while many of the parents who are quietly enjoying family life simply aren’t participating in the conversation.

I keep coming back to something I wrote five years ago in Deseret about what I called the public relations campaign against motherhood. The campaign has only accelerated. We have become so accustomed to hearing mothers publicly describe parenting as exhausting, limiting, and joyless that genuine gratitude is now viewed with suspicion. Spend enough time online and you’ll find people accusing mothers who genuinely enjoy their children of promoting “toxic positivity,” as though speaking warmly about your own family is somehow dishonest.

But gratitude isn’t toxic. It’s truthful.

It doesn’t require pretending that parenting is easy or that every stage is delightful. It simply refuses to let the hardest moments become the defining ones. Every parent has days they would rather forget. Every parent occasionally loses patience, longs for a quiet afternoon, or wonders if the laundry basket somehow reproduces overnight. But those moments aren’t the story. They’re interruptions in a story that, for most of us, is defined by laughter around the dinner table, bedtime conversations that go on far longer than they should, family vacations, inside jokes, and the quiet privilege of watching children slowly become adults.

Culture is, in many ways, simply the accumulation of the stories we tell one another. If the loudest voices in our culture insist that children are primarily burdens, inconveniences, and obstacles to self-actualization, we shouldn’t be surprised when young adults begin delaying parenthood—or deciding against it altogether. Children hear those messages. Teenagers hear those messages. Young couples hear those messages. If we want a society that welcomes children, values families, and encourages the next generation to become parents themselves, then perhaps the most important place to begin is by speaking about our own children with the affection, delight, and gratitude they deserve.