On Tuesday night, vice presidential candidates JD Vance and Tim Walz faced off on the debate stage, addressing everything from Israel and Palestine to climate change to abortion rights. But one question was more revealing than any other: how each candidate would address the nation's childcare crisis and the need for paid leave.

Their answers revealed: both are fathers, but only one believes that child care is also a father's problem. The other one seems to think that childcare is a woman's job and that childcare is a problem for women to solve.

Walz says that child care and paid leave are her top priorities. During the debate, she stated that childcare is “the biggest problem” for Americans. He then described his own experience, in which he had to return to work just five days after his child was born. This travesty has encouraged him to change the situation for other new parents by introducing a more substantial paid family leave program in his home state of Minnesota.

Vance also claimed that he was “talking about this personally.” However, he did not speak personally, but quickly moved on to his wife, Usha, who said, “Being a working mother is ...... very difficult,” he noted, and lamented the ‘cultural pressure on young families, especially young women,’ to have to choose between work and family.

This moment was particularly poignant. Vance is, after all, a working father of those same children. He, too, had to make decisions about work, family, and child rearing. And his choice, it seems, was to push everything onto Usha. Because he had no anecdotes about the “difficulties” he faced as a working father.

Vance is right that childcare is an issue that makes life difficult, especially for women. But this is partly because men like Vance do not see caring for their children as equally their responsibility, and partly because too many (mostly male) politicians see childcare as a woman's job and a personal problem to be solved by women.

During the debate, Vance said he supports a childcare model that gives families as many “options” as possible. However, when Vance has spoken about child care in the past, he has not taken fathers into account, and has made clear that the “choices” he is talking about are encouraging women to stay home or relying on other (mostly female) family members to provide free child care. 'I think one of the things we can do is make it easier for families to choose the model they want,' he said. So one way we might be able to relieve some of the pressure on people who are paying a lot for child care is to ...... Perhaps grandparents might want to help a little more, or uncles and aunts might want to help a little more. That would take some of the burden off of all the resources that are being spent on day care."

In a previous podcast interview, he made a finer point: the podcast host, after telling a story about his mother-in-law taking time off work to help raise Vance's children, opined that raising grandchildren is “the whole purpose of postmenopausal women.” Vance concurred.

Debate moderator Margaret Brennan noted that “according to the Federal Reserve, parents spend almost as much on child care each month as they do on housing. In fact, many of these families are headed by a single mother rather than a single father. Even in many dual-earner families, the cost of child care is calculated only against the mother's income (how many times have you heard of women who quit their jobs because child care cost them as much or more than their salary?)

And that is precisely because there are too many men like Vance and too few men like Walz in American families and in the halls of power.