President Obama Thinks Government Can Raise Your Kids Better Than You

President Obama recently gave a speech in Rhode Island that has come under heavy criticism from both his usual GOP adversaries and stay-at-home moms.

In the speech, the President takes aim at women in the workplace and the precarious position that leaving work to help raise the kids creates for them.

“Sometimes, usually Mom, leaves the workplace to stay at home with the kids, which then leaves her earning a lower wage for the rest of her life as a result. That’s not a choice we want Americans to make. So let’s make this happen. By the end of this decade, let’s enroll six million children in high quality preschools.”

President Obama was speaking in favor of subsidized daycares, and even though there’s no reason to think he has any bad intent by the comments, it does highlight a key problem with his presidency.

Government intrusion into one’s daily life.

From the outset of his presidency, Obama’s policies have indicated a feeling that the government can do better than you in every aspect of life.

In spite of massive failures like the V.A. crisis; the severely flawed and deceptive healthcare law now on the verge of costing Democrats the Senate; the broad overreach of government spying powers; the use of the IRS to target political opponents; the bullying of journalists; the rebirth of Russia as a global superpower and nuclear threat; the loss of Iraq to ISIS forces; and, perhaps most telling given the nature of his comments, the broken public education system, he still thinks that government — his form of government — can show you the way.

Now he’s targeting your kids.

By his own admission, President Obama wants to “zero in on the choices we need to make to ensure that more women are full and equal participants in the economy.”

(As if raising children into responsible adults doesn’t already have a greater economic impact than anything he’s done in six years as President.)

Mollie Hemingway, a columnist for The Federalist, summed up the problems with President Obama’s comments nicely with this excerpt from her recent piece.

“I’m not going to tell you that doing things the way my husband and I did is the right way. I can tell you it was the right way for us. I believe that parents have an obligation to provide for their children, but how they do it is up to them. Yes, they should make prudent decisions matched to their family’s needs, but that is going to be a different scenario for everyone. Studies show different results, sometimes seemingly contradictory, for how kids fare with time spent with parents and time spent with people to whom the parents have outsourced care of their children. And even as I stayed home with my children, my husband and I have used childcare for various reasons. But I reject out of hand the idea that parents staying home with their children — a choice that by definition means a change in labor force participation — should be viewed as a negative choice.”

President Obama likely meant no harm by his comments, but that doesn’t make it any better than if he had. Why? Because he doesn’t know the damage he is doing in devaluing the role of parents and the right of parents in raising their children.

To him, being “equal participants in the economy” in order to feed the political machine is a more worthy endeavor than staying home with your little ones and being an active part of their upbringing.

No one is saying that women (or men, for that matter) should DEFINITELY stay at home with their children in lieu of working. Many families can’t afford such a decision under the economic policies of President Obama.

But neither should the decision to stay at home be seen as inferior by someone who thinks he can raise his kids better than you, especially when that “someone” is leader of the free world.

[Image via Mykhaylo Palinchak / Shutterstock.com]