The New Republic editorializes (subscription may be required) in favor of requiring companies to offer paid maternity leaves, increased subsidies for child care, and incentives for telecommuting. It presents these policies as a logical response to the fact that most children “now grow up with two parents working outside the home.” Enactment of these policies has been thwarted by short-sighted business lobbies and atavistic culture warriors. “Republicans have long denounced federal funding for child care as a threat to the American family. . . . [T]he view persists that for the government to legislate on behalf of working women is to take sides in the culture wars.”

I’d be all for a subsidy for “child care” that took the form of a tax cut for all parents and let them decide how to use the extra money: to buy commercial day care, to let a mother drop out of the paid labor force, or to finance some combination of paid care and part-time work. (In the course of outlining a tax reform in the magazine, I recently argued that this kind of tax cut wouldn’t actually be a subsidy at all.)

But attempts to make employers “family friendly” have a way of doing more to make families more employer-friendly, as Neil Gilbert has pointed out. Different families reach different arrangements, and there’s no getting around the fact that most of the “family-friendly” policies on offer are better deals for some of those families than others. They offer advantages to some family arrangements than others, that is, and therefore they do, in fact, “take sides in the mommy wars.” Would most parents–would most mothers–really prefer for the government to encourage them to choose commercial day care over other arrangements? Or would they prefer getting some assistance in making whatever arrangements they chose?