I recently saw a video of my niece standing behind her two-year-old son as he toddled excitedly toward a dandelion, plucked it, and blew it into the air. She talked from behind him about what he was seeing, acknowledging his wonder. He turned back toward her, clutching the stem, anxious to show her.

The video centered on him, but I found myself thinking about her: a highly educated, exceptionally talented musician who could have been in any number of important places. Instead, she was watching her toddler blow dandelions into the air. Yet there was no denying what her presence meant to him. It was written across his face: she was his secure base — the foundation from which he could explore, return, and share the meaning of what he discovered. Over time, these repeated, responsive interactions would provide the basis for his identity, emotional understanding, and trust.

Why, then, do we stigmatize mothers who stay home to nurture their children? Over the past week, various Right-wing accounts have been mocking “SAHMs” (stay-at-home mothers) as self-serving and immature. Implicit in these attacks is that mothers who choose this lifestyle are somehow lazy, entitled or ungrateful for the lives they lead. What was once viewed as a noble sacrifice is now all too easily dismissed.

The research is clear: children’s healthy development is relationship-dependent, beginning with their earliest caregivers. Despite decades of rising maternal employment, most mothers continue to stay at home with children, especially young children, preferring part-time or no employment to full-time work. Many are working more than they would like to.

Mothers share a unique bond with their child, and that closeness provides a foundation as children move from profound dependence toward independence — a process that, for human beings, takes years.

Yet mothers and children are not the only ones who benefit when families have the freedom to remain home. Stay-at-home mothers have historically supplied much of the recurring volunteer labor, informal neighborliness, and organizational leadership on which local social capital depends. Paid employment has expanded women’s economic opportunities, but it has also reduced the time available for this flexible, place-based civic infrastructure.

The question is not whether women should work. It is whether our culture can respect care work as real work — and value it as fundamental to human development and the social capital on which we all depend.

Former policy director for the US State Department Anne-Marie Slaughter ignited a national conversation when she left a prominent position to spend more time with her adolescent son. She described discovering how deeply Western culture denigrates care, even though caring relationships, beginning at home, give life much of its meaning. “Workers who put their careers first are typically rewarded,” she wrote, while those who choose their families are “overlooked, disbelieved, or accused of unprofessionalism.”

Slaughter later said that when people told her, “I’m home with my kids,” she no longer responded, “Oh, what a pity.” Instead, she said: “You’re doing really important work.” As she put it, truly believing in equal opportunity for women means “respecting, enabling, and indeed celebrating the full range of women’s choices.” That includes stay-at-home mothers, who are part of what Jean Elshtain called “the self-sacrificing, loving virtuous power that has bound together the whole human family”.