On Sunday, almost immediately after prominent Democrats started endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president, attacks from the political right started pouring in. Will Chamberlain, a conservative lawyer who worked on Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign, posted on X that Harris “shouldn’t be President” because she doesn’t have biological children; “becoming a step-parent to older teenagers doesn’t count,” he wrote, adding that “The concerns of parents and families will always be abstract to her” because she doesn’t have “skin in the game, a stake in the future, and the lived experience of raising children.”

First, let’s note the obvious: If elected, Harris wouldn’t be the first American president with no biological children. There were five others: George Washington, James Madison, Andrew Jackson, James Polk and James Buchanan. (Warren Harding had a child out of wedlock and publicly denied paternity; that he was the father was confirmed by DNA testing almost a century later.)

But more to the point, if you think that the concerns of parents and families will always be “abstract” to someone who doesn’t have children, you’re telling on yourself. It’s not simply that, by all accounts, Harris has a close, loving relationship with her stepkids. It’s that it’s possible for people who have basic empathy to understand the needs, aspirations and concerns of fellow citizens who aren’t exactly like them — and to commit to their well-being.

It actually should be a requirement for presidential candidates to have compassion for people they’ll never meet. And it strikes me as anti-American to argue that a politician is any less invested in families or our country’s future because of his or her own parental status. It should go without saying, but: Having children doesn’t necessarily make you a better person.

This argument is also appallingly dismissive to so many adults who dote on the children in their lives and devote time, money and care to helping them grow, regardless of whether they are related by blood. It’s even more hurtful to people who really want to have children but are unable to.

This is, also, not a new tactic for the right. As a way of clinging to the tag line that the G.O.P. is the pro-family party — despite working, during the Biden years, to defeat federal legislation that included paid family leave and affordable high-quality child care — some Republicans are content to paint the Democratic Party as the party of “childless cat ladies.”

When JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, was running for Senate in 2021, he told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson:

We’re effectively run, in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. And it’s just a basic fact, if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, A.O.C. — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?

Vance has taken his feud with the childless even further than that, floating the idea in 2021 — apparently earnestly — of giving children votes that would be controlled by their parents, something that would have the effect of giving parents a greater say in our democracy than people without kids. (Vance has also spoken out against divorce and people who “shift spouses like they change their underwear,” but that criticism seems not to apply to his thrice-married running mate.)

Buttigieg has become a father since Vance and his fellow conservatives began this line of attack. But these critiques are part of the right-wing obsession with the traditional nuclear family. As the former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy put it: “The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind.”

Instead of using Harris’s biography as a way to dismiss her family-friendly bona fides, we should be looking at her record. By that measure, Harris could be one of the most pro-family candidates we’ve had in recent memory. She was the public face of Democrats’ efforts in 2022 to promote the expanded child tax credits that families received as part of the American Rescue Plan, and in his endorsement of Harris, Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado praised her commitment to this policy and her “dedication to our country’s security and our children’s prosperity.”

By contrast, when CNN’s Jake Tapper asked a question about child care in the presidential debate last month, Donald Trump responded with a word salad about firing a bunch of people, draining the swamp and how President Biden is terrible.

Elder care often gets left out of discussions about caregiving in this country, though many people without children are spending a great deal of resources caring for older family members. This will only become a more important issue in the next decade, as by 2030, an estimated 73 million Americans will be seniors. In April, Vice President Harris announced two rules that help support older Americans and their caregivers, including a minimum staffing rule at nursing homes that receive federal funding and a wage requirement for home care workers.

When Vice President Harris spoke at a child-care center in 2021, she looked out at the crowd and referred to the kids in attendance as “our babies.” They’re our babies, she said, because “I was raised to understand that the children of the community are the children of the community.”

I want a future for my own children in which everybody looks out for the babies of the whole community and isn’t distrusting of people who live their lives differently, whether by circumstance or by choice.