You see it constantly, some version of this claim: “The cost of child care is the single biggest obstacle to working women and families.”

From there come the familiar conclusions: “The state needs to subsidize child care.” “We need affordable day care for working moms.”

No, we don’t.

While claiming to elevate women, feminism has steadily lowered the status of motherhood and homemaking.

What we need is to recognize that it’s not normal — nor healthy — for children to be farmed out to strangers during their earliest years so that Mom can be “more than just a mom” with her career.

Yes, there are millions of families in which both parents must work to keep a roof over their heads. But there are millions more who don’t need two incomes. What gets called “need” is often just lifestyle expectation. What children actually need rarely enters the calculation.

Luxury expectations

Modern expectations in 2026 America look less like necessity and more like luxury — something closer to the “hands-off” child-rearing of aristocratic households than to ordinary family life.

People talk about “affordable day care” as if it were self-evidently necessary. It isn’t. It only sounds that way because repetition has made it seem normal.

Behind it sits an unspoken belief: “It is right and proper — even ideal — to leave our children with hired strangers for most of the day.”

Even 40 years ago, that would not have sounded normal. Most people still believed that all else being equal, children were best raised by their mothers (and with a father in the home). Day care might be necessary — but it was understood as a regrettable second-best option.

Today, even many conservatives won’t question it. To do so invites accusations of harming mothers or failing to support “hardworking single moms.”

But prolonged parental absence is not neutral. Children need their mothers, especially in their early years. We can cite studies, but we don’t need them to see what’s plainly in front of us.

Strikingly, the people who claim to “need” day care are often those who don’t. What they want is a standard of living that would have been considered extravagant a generation or two ago.

RELATED: Socialist Mamdani rolls out costly ‘free’ child care program to NYC workers — after crying financial crisis

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Maxed-out minimums

Take Democrat Rep. Brittany Pettersen of Colorado. She has cultivated an image as a sainted working mother, bringing her small child onto the House floor while lamenting the lack of day care for “working moms.”

There’s just one problem: Congress has had full-time day care on Capitol Hill since 1987.

What’s happening here isn’t necessity — it’s performance. The question she avoids is whether her child’s needs might outweigh the demands of a camera-facing career.

And it’s not just politicians. Middle-class Americans have adopted a set of “minimum” expectations that earlier generations would have recognized as indulgent:

Two cars (preferably full-size SUVs). Separate bedrooms for each child. A full slate of extracurriculars. No trade-offs between career ambition and motherhood. Children’s needs subordinated to adult preferences. Government support for single parenthood without fathers in the home.

Modern-day Tudors

In the feudal world, there was a distinction between a woman and a lady. A woman belonged to the working class; a lady to the aristocracy.

Women raised their children directly — feeding them, caring for them, folding them into the rhythms of daily life. Ladies did not.

In the Tudor royal court, for example, a noblewoman did not breastfeed. A wet nurse was hired in advance and took over immediately. Children were raised by nurses, governesses, and tutors, with parents appearing only intermittently.

The result was distance — emotional, developmental, and often moral.

For all our technological differences, the psychology isn’t so different today. The aristocratic habits of detachment have been democratized. What was once a marker of nobility is now treated as a baseline expectation.

There are better models to follow.

An old-fashioned approach

I have a friend, Tasha, a Catholic mother of nine. Her husband works full-time; she manages the home.

They don’t have two SUVs. They don’t have a large house. But they have what they need: a home, a van that fits everyone, good food, clean clothes, and a stable, loving family life.

How does she do it? The way families did for generations — before the late-20th-century promise that women could “have it all” and should expect it immediately.

She shops carefully. Buys in bulk. Reuses what she can. She hasn’t outfitted each child with personal screens to keep them isolated. Her household is structured around shared life, not individual consumption.

Degraded status

While claiming to elevate women, feminism has steadily lowered the status of motherhood and homemaking. For decades, we’ve heard that women are “more than just mothers,” that raising children prevents them from “being someone.”

Consider what that sounds like to a child.

The desire for status is natural — for men and women alike. Motherhood once carried that status. As it has been stripped away, many women seek it elsewhere.

But the substitute — career-first identity combined with outsourced child-rearing — is narcissistic, materialistic, and ultimately unsatisfying. It can be hard on families and hard on children.

It’s also hard on mothers themselves. I’ve known many women who report that their contentment increased when they let go of “girlboss” career-woman expectations to concentrate on raising their children and making the home a nurturing place for their families.

Where now?

How do we fix this? I don’t know. Many Western families can’t get by on a single income. Men who want to be good providers can work hard and it’s still not enough. Some mothers need to work.

But we can acknowledge that economic reality without accepting how it has distorted us. We can stop demanding a government solution to what is fundamentally a problem of values. We need to reacquaint ourselves with what we really are as men and women and what we really need. I can’t give a road map for how to achieve this. But it has to start by hauling our aristocratic assumptions into the sunlight and seeing them for what they are.

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Watching the reports out of Old Dominion University following the terrorist attack last month, the details came in the way they always do. Confusion. Fear. Families waiting for answers that arrive agonizingly slow.

There are no clever observations for moments like this. Only grief, a sober anger at what has been done, and a quiet respect for those who move toward danger despite the risks.

In the hours that followed, law enforcement stood before the microphones and said something familiar about the terrorist.

Past behavior predicts future performance.

The gospel does not offer a refined version of our past. It replaces it.

It was not delivered with edge or indignation. It sounded more like a sigh, the kind that comes from seeing the same pattern unfold one too many times.

We all understand what that means.

As Americans stood in grief, that phrase was repeated as the events were recounted. Members of the media, pundits, and political officials picked it up as well, and it echoed for days. And it lingered. You know how some phrases land hard and stay with you?

Past behavior predicts future performance.

I couldn’t shake it. It followed me for several weeks. As Easter approached, that phrase pressed further.

While the pattern is clearly seen in terrorists and career criminals, the harder question is whether that diagnosis is limited to them. Or does that diagnosis reach further — into the human condition itself?

The apostle Paul describes the same struggle with unsettling honesty, doing what he does not want to do and returning to what he knows he should leave behind. The issue is not merely what we do, but what we are by nature.

That uncomfortable truth points to something we recognize much closer to home — not in acts of terror or even criminal behavior, but in patterns we cannot seem to break. We see that uncomfortable truth in the anger that resurfaces, the grudges we carry, the actions we excuse and quietly return to.

Our actions are different in degree, certainly. They are not the same in consequence — but not unrelated.

Scripture does not blur those distinctions, but it does press deeper than behavior. And that is where the discomfort settles in.

RELATED: Scripture or slogans — you have to choose

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Because if this is not just “out there,” then we are not merely observers of the pattern. It’s one thing to recognize the pattern in others. It’s another to consider whether it touches us as well. And that raises a question most of us would rather not sit with for long.

Are we simply watching something broken in the world, or are we looking at something that runs through us as well?

Because if it is the latter, then the problem is not occasional, but continual.

It is not just in headlines, it is in our hearts. And that is a harder place to stay.

Because if the future depends on us, then the trajectory is not uncertain. It is already set.

Our culture often insists that we are basically good people.

If so, then why would we need a savior? If not, then what are the implications?

The men who framed this country wrestled with that thought. They did not build a system on the assumption that people would consistently do what is right or that they are basically good. They built a government filled with oversight that restrains what is wrong, because they knew what resides in the human heart eventually shows up in government.

Which raises a harder question than any press conference can answer.

What breaks the pattern?

Because history suggests we do not. We adjust, we regulate, we respond, and all of that has its place. But none of it reaches far enough to change what drives the pattern in the first place.

And this is precisely where Easter speaks.

RELATED: Where Easter really comes from

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It’s not that people try harder or gradually become better versions of themselves. Left to ourselves, we cannot change. We must be changed.

The gospel does not offer a refined version of our past. It replaces it. Not my record, but His. Not a cleaned-up life, but a different standing altogether.

What Scripture calls sin is not managed at the cross. It is judged. And what we could not produce is given.

That is why the Resurrection matters.

Because death has always been the final confirmation that the pattern holds. It is where every life, left to itself, arrives. But if death itself is overturned, then the pattern it confirms is no longer absolute.

Something has interrupted it.

The apostle Paul captured it in a single phrase:

“And such were some of you” (1 Corinthians 6:11).

Were.

Left to ourselves, the pattern holds. It always has. But Easter declares that we are not left to ourselves.

Past behavior may predict future performance. It often does. But it is no longer the final authority.

Because the One who stepped into history, took our past upon Himself, and walked out of the grave now defines the future of all who belong to Him.

Not a second chance or a fresh start, but a new standing.

Not my record, but His. And that changes everything.

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On April 1, NASA launched the Orion spacecraft from Kennedy Space Center in the first crewed lunar journey in over 50 years.

While some celebrated the news as a historic feat, others condemned it as a waste of resources and an overstepping of natural limits.

“I had a lot of people push back and say, ‘Glenn, space is a waste of money, and it’s our Tower of Babel trying to make ourselves look so great,”’ Glenn Beck says.

But he disagrees. “I don’t look at it that way. I look at it from the view of an explorer, and I believe God wants us to explore.”

On this episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” Glenn speaks with Christian astrophysicist Hugh Ross about the ethics of space travel from a biblical perspective and the conspiracy theory that the first moon landing was fake.

Ross agrees with Glenn that space exploration does not overstep godly boundaries.

“He made us curious. … I think God gave us a curiosity for a reason. He really does want us to explore, but I think He also wants us to do it in the most efficient and effective way possible,” he says.

Glenn then pivots to the conspiracy theorists who hold that the 1969 moon landing — when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were live-broadcasted walking on the moon — was a hoax.

“A lot of people say we never even went to the moon the first time. … Did we go to the moon, and does it matter?” he asks Ross.

“I actually got to watch the moon landing live on television when I was much younger,” Ross says, “and what really thrilled me was watching Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong putting up a laser reflector.”

“There’s now three laser reflectors on the moon. Physicists beam laser beams off them every single day, and it’s because of those laser reflectors that the Apollo astronauts put on the moon that we’re able to test theories of gravity to a degree we’ve never been able to do before,” he adds.

But these laser reflectors aren’t the only proof.

“The vehicles left behind by the astronauts are still there, and they’re being photographed on a regular basis,” he explains.

Glenn then likens moon landing deniers to the people who contend there’s no evidence that the Great Flood documented in Genesis actually happened.

But Ross has spent years gathering scientific and biblical evidence to argue the contrary. His new book, “Noah’s Flood Revisited,” is a deep dive into his theory that the flood indeed happened — just not the way many have traditionally interpreted it.

To hear Ross explain his fascinating theory, watch the video above.

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