Column
Please Spare Me Male Politicians Complaining About Parenting
As women are being forced out of the workforce, Andrew Yang needs to give credit where it’s due: to his wife
Andrew Yang appears to be just a tad out of touch. The former presidential candidate and current New York City mayoral hopeful really stepped in it on Monday when he expressed incredulity about parenting while stuck in a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. “Can you imagine trying to have two kids on virtual school in a two-bedroom apartment and then trying to do work yourself?” Yang said to the New York Times, Actually yes, Andrew, a lot of us can imagine it! We might even have been living it for the past year.
Yang, who has spent the better part of the past few months at his second home in upstate New York, drew well-deserved ire over his tone-deafness — as well as the fact that he’s running to take charge of a city he largely hasn’t lived in during its most difficult time.
But what struck me most about Yang’s complaint — how difficult it is to care for children during the pandemic — is how misleading it appears to be: Yang has praised his wife for her parenting work in the past and was criticized during his presidential campaign for repeatedly conflating childcare with…
