JD Vance said Kamala Harris has no kids. Stepparents would like a word.

When Ella Emhoff graduated from college in 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris posed smiling beside her stepdaughter. At Cole Emhoff’s wedding in October, Harris officiated her stepson’s ceremony. The Emhoff siblings have affectionately dubbed Harris “Momala,” a name she has said she wears proudly.

But Harris’ parental role was altogether erased in recent and resurfaced attacks from her political opponents. In a video drawn from a 2021 interview on Fox News’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” JD Vance, now the GOP vice-presidential nominee, said that Harris and other prominent Democrats (including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country’s future because they are “people without children.” In the clip, which has amassed more than 25 million views since it was shared Monday on X, Vance also refers to Democrats as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made.”

Others on the right have echoed Vance’s argument: Will Chamberlain, a conservative commentator and former Ron DeSantis staffer, posted on X on Sunday that a “really simple, underdiscussed reason why Kamala Harris shouldn’t be President” is that she has “no children.”

Among the torrent of outraged replies online, many offered corrections to these claims: In 2022, Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, celebrated the birth of their twins. Past presidents have been child-free (including James K. Polk and James Buchanan). George Washington did not have biological offspring; he was a stepparent who helped raise his wife’s children from a previous marriage.

And Harris’ relationships with the son and daughter whom she helped raise with her husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff, absolutely deserve respect and recognition, said Jann Blackstone, a co-parenting mediator, author and founder of the nonprofit Bonus Families, which supports divorced or separated parents and their combined families.

Blackstone, who has two stepchildren – she prefers the term “bonus children” – knows firsthand the lingering stereotypes and misconceptions that have long plagued stepparents, and stepmothers in particular: “That they’re not the real mom. That they don’t count. That they’re second-best,” Blackstone said. Over the decades that Blackstone has worked with blended families, she says, she has seen the toll that these messages can take on devoted caregivers.

But she has also seen more and more people accept and embrace the idea of blended families – which made Vance’s comments feel especially jarring, she said. “To say something like this seems so backwards to me. It’s just not our reality,” she said. According to a 2015 Pew Research Center report, 16% of American children are living in “blended families” – a household with a stepparent, stepsibling or half sibling – and 8% of children are living with a stepparent.

Blackstone adds that her reaction has nothing to do with Vance’s or Harris’ politics: “I don’t make judgments on people’s political decisions, as far as who I’m going to vote for, or who they’re going to vote for,” she said. “But the family system is changing, and to make a comment like that … it’s just not helpful to society. We don’t need people to say, like, ‘You aren’t qualified to be president because you don’t have children.’ I want bonus parents to be respected as a parental figure.”

For Rebecca Brodey, the vice president’s highly visible relationship with Ella and Cole has felt significant for years. “I feel so much solidarity with other stepmoms,” said Brodey, a mother of three, including two stepchildren, in D.C. “So I also feel solidarity with Kamala Harris. When ‘Momala’ was first put in the news, I jokingly said to my stepkids, ‘Why don’t you call me MaBecca?’ and now as a joke my stepdaughter has me in her phone as MaBecca.”

Brodey is close with her two stepchildren, she said, both of whom are teens. But she has also sometimes struggled with a role that is frequently overlooked or confronted with skepticism.

“My experience as a stepmom is that, at the outset, I’m normally met with distrust,” she said. “It’s just part of the role that you have to prove yourself, you have to demonstrate that you are there to support the kids, that you respect the ex, that you’re a loving person.”

So when she considers the recent condemnation of Harris, “I just roll my eyes,” she said. “It’s not surprising to me that they’re going to invalidate her role as a caretaker and as someone who is invested in the future of her stepchildren.”

It didn’t surprise Matthew Brake either. The stepfather of three said he’s noticed anti-stepparent sentiments growing in recent years, primarily in certain right-leaning corners of the internet.

The clip from Vance’s interview reminded Brake of a social media post he saw circulating a couple of years ago, around the time he was planning to ask his wife to marry him. The post was shared by a self-identified religious, conservative account, he said. “It was typical of other things I was seeing too – this guy didn’t understand how a single guy who did not have his own kids would choose to marry a woman who had her own kids already, and then choose to raise another man’s children,” Brake said. “There was this sort of ugly macho-ism, which, coming from a Christian background, was so antithetical to all the messages I always heard about how God adopts people into his family, about how we should adopt and love the orphan and those who don’t have parents.”

Brake has a strong relationship with his own stepfather, he said, and he approaches his stepchildren with the same depth of care and respect. When he married his wife, he said, his wedding vows included a promise to love her children as his own.

“You’re still concerned about their future. And if you think that someone having stepkids keeps them from caring about the future – that probably says more about you than it does about a stepparent,” he said. “It’s a politically gross thing to say. It’s disrespectful to every stepparent, to every parent who has adopted kids, to the people who can’t have children but nonetheless mentor and teach and take care of children – it’s disrespectful to all of those people.”

To Tomika Anderson Greene, who lives in Virginia with a blended family that includes her biological son and four stepchildren, the idea of dismissing a stepparent is ironic because their caregiving demands particular courage and commitment.

To become an adoptive parent or stepparent, she said, “is to step into a role that, in a lot of ways, is harder than the biological one. You’re starting at a place where the child is, not where they began, and you’re building a relationship with them from that place. You are challenged to shift and change and grow.”

Greene’s four stepchildren are adults, “but that applies to me, too,” she said. “We do family dinners; we start traditions we didn’t have before. It is a lot of good work.”

Like Harris and Blackstone, Greene generally avoids the term stepchildren: “I refer to them as my kids, or my bonus kids. And I’ve allowed those kids to define what my relationship is to them and followed their lead.”

When she saw the recent criticism of Harris, Greene says she felt a deep sense of recognition – and fury.

“This would not be levied at her if she was a man. It wouldn’t even be a point of consideration,” she said. “This smoke and mirrors and gaslighting that we’re seeing is par for the course when you’re a Black woman. I would laugh in the face of someone who dared to try to tell me what a real parent is and what it is not.”

Then she pauses, and does start to laugh. “I am excited to hopefully watch her just brush that right off and keep her focus,” she said. “Those are her kids. End of story.”