Ways to be part of a village

Sometimes I read parents lamenting that they don’t have a support system (of people who can help when parents or kids are sick, etc). But I wonder: how much support have they provided to other people during parenting, illness, or old age?

Cartoons Hate Her’s piece The village nobody wants is the piece I wish I had written on this. Personally, the Sesame Street type urban “village” I had idealized lost some shine for me at the neighborhood block party when the elderly lady around the corner just didn’t care that my kids didn’t want their cheeks pinched.

I’ve done a fair bit of living in “village” type settings (related: Experiences raising children in shared housing). This post focuses on parenting, but we can also ask ourselves how helpful we’ve been to friends dealing with disability, illness, or old age.

First: Why is there less of a village than we imagine there used to be?

It’s not that women are working more

I was expecting to find that part of the picture is that women spend more hours on paid work. But US women on average work fewer hours than when I was a kid. Men are also working a bit less on average than in the 90s.

The percent of women who are in the paid workforce also peaked around 1997.

It’s not that we move more than we used to

I was going to say this is because Americans move away from their hometowns so much, but this has actually been decreasing for generations. As of 2022 most American adults live in the same city as extended family, and 20% of American adults live in the same house as extended family. The rate of moving houses has gone steadily down since the 1940s, and most moves are within the same county. Most American adults live in the same state where they were born (source), although college graduates are more likely to move between several different states.

Grandmas have lives

In actual traditional villages, most childcare was not provided by parents, because able-bodied adults were needed to provide food. Childcare was typically provided by people not in their physical prime (older sisters, grannies, aunties). As the author of Anthropology of Childhood summarizes: “Whoever can most easily be spared from more important tasks will take care of the child.”

But we’re not hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers. Most grandparents in their 50s and 60s want to be bringing in money, and those in their 70s and beyond mostly want to enjoy their retirement. Some of the “village” idea seems to be the hope that grandmothers will not have a job in their 50s, or will crawl around on the floor with a toddler in their 60s and 70s. 

Unlike women in general, older women are more likely to be in paid work than they were in past generations:

Parenting norms also shift faster than they used to, and gentle parenting types may be less likely to trust old-school adults than they once were.

On the other hand, grandfathers are more capable than they once were. As parenting became less of a women-only domain over the 20th century, it’s now rarer to find a grandfather who essentially never changed a diaper for his own children.

Higher standards for childcare

I suspect some our reluctance to hand kids off to others is that standards for childcare have risen. We don’t like children to feel uncomfortable, and we have higher standards for safety than past generations did. 

My elderly neighbor had a twin who drowned at age 6 in the nearby river, while playing boats with a 10-year-old. That kind of thing is much rarer than it once was.

Cartoons Must Hate Her: “One day the mom showed up on our doorstep to ask if we ever wanted a babysitter because her fourteen-year-old daughter was really looking to get babysitting experience. This is the village. We rejected the village. We didn’t feel comfortable letting a fourteen-year-old watch our child (who was three at the time.)”

Norman Rockwell’s 1947 depiction of babysitting:

If you want to be a villager

If you want to be a better villager, either as a parent or non-parent, what are some options?

How helpful is occasional help?

I find it pretty stressful to onboard a child and a one-off caregiver to each other. We’ve had little interest from friends in offering one-off help, and I probably wouldn’t have been that keen on it anyway.

This is often true even if the caregivers are experienced with other kids, especially if it’s a new setting. When our neighbors had their second child, we offered to take their preschooler for a few hours to help out the parents. The child had never spent time in our house before, and he made it about 25 minutes before he was crying to go home. 

In general, the most useful help comes from

• With people who have experience caring for children
• And/or who know the child well
• In an environment the child is familiar with

But it’s still worth offering, if this is something you’re up for! There’s a special place in my heart for Jeff’s friend’s dad who volunteered to hold our baby at contra dances so we could do the occasional dance together.

Longer-term arrangements

Housemates

Before we had kids, Jeff and I spent a year living with another couple and their new baby. We got some experience seeing what the early months with a new baby are like. It was helpful to the couple, especially because I was in grad school and had some availability during the day to hold the baby while the dad was at work and the mom napped or ran an errand.

In general, housemates are busy with their own thing. But it can be useful and not much trouble for a housemate when they can 

• Take the baby monitor while the child is asleep, so the parent can run an errand
• Be a backup person for an older child while the parent is out
• Read or watch videos with a toddler while a parent does housework or rests

This is especially helpful for a single parent, or when one parent is sick or traveling.

Housemates vary a lot in how interested they are in this kind of thing! Don’t assume that housemates = free childcare.

Housing near each other

We bought a two-unit house with the intention of renting to friends, which has happened over time. One housemate bought the house across the street, and the flexibility between the two houses has been good for allowing people their own space but also joint dinners and more ease in swapping childcare.

The friends/neighbors situation that launched Oakland LEARN seems very nice, from what little I know.

Live Near Friends is one project aiming to foster this kind of thing, though I’m not sure how much they offer beyond real estate listings you could search in the usual way. Back in the day I feel like I learned a lot from the Foundation for Intentional Community about common roadblocks for would-be communities (some of your participants can’t wait for everything to come together so they go do their own thing, households have different budgets, not having money up front.) This story about the Radish community makes it sound very appealing.

Other parents you know well

Our former housemate who lives across the street has her own child now. The kids are in a nanny share together, and we’re at each other’s houses every week for shared dinners. So when our childcare provider is out sick, or somebody’s going to the library, or someone’s washing the dishes and someone else is keeping an eye on the youngest kids, we can swap work around to some extent.

When we’re with extended family who have young kids, there’s some amount of shared watching a gang of kids. The parents have different levels of energy, so the most vigorous people like Jeff do a disproportionate amount of taking all the kids to the playground, etc.

Chosen family

I also know housemates who have something more like a co-parent or aunt arrangement. This can have its ups and downs — we had something like this for a few months with one of Jeff’s sisters, but I get along with her better now that we’re not living in the same house and not co-parenting.

Rationalists aren’t really known for their emphasis on family, but the biggest stepping up I ever saw a person do for a friend was a woman in the rationalist community who provided a lot of practical, financial, and emotional support for a single mother and her child. I’d like it if both pro-life and pro-choice people did more stepping up for single parents.

Swapping with other neighborhood families

When we had a drop-off Halloween party for my kids’ friends, I realized that we planned it for the kids, but the parents also liked having an evening off. It was significant work for us, but very net positive. Another family in the neighborhood did a similar drop-off party for Diwali. So we had another party for Valentine’s day crafting. $25 worth of craft supplies and cookies can keep 10 kids busy for a good while.

We try to actively offer driving/walking other neighborhood kids to things we’re going to, and it’s helpful when other families do the same for us.

Maybe be the parent to start a group chat with other parents in your child’s grade at school. One of my kids has a grade where the kids and parents gelled more than the other, and it’s been nice arranging casual “we’re going to the park / we’re going to the pool” type meetups that way.

How much can money substitute for the village?

• Part of me feels grumpy about not having more help from a hypothetical village, but in fact we (and most parents we know) have the money to pay for more babysitting if we wanted to. But it is expensive ($20-30 / hour in major cities for an experienced adult sitter as opposed to a teenager), at a time when families are typically stretched thin with other child-related costs. To the extent that friends and family want to help, most parents would be happy to have more help.
• The most precious help per minute is often 5-30 minutes long, rather than something it really makes sense to hire for.
• The only situations where you can’t really hire help is unexpected last-minute things, like when your usual childcare is unexpectedly unavailable.
• I think bringing meals to people is overrated. It made more sense in times/cultures where more women were home during the day, and when lots of families basically ate the same casseroles. But in my circle it’s unlikely that my household’s no egg / no meat / no tomato dinner lines up with someone else’s no soup / no dairy household or someone else’s low legumes / low brassica household. Last time I did this, after finishing my workday early to do 45 minutes of cooking and 45 minutes of round-trip driving, and no facetime with the people the meal was for, I thought, “Isn’t this what Instacart is for?” I guess for some people this is more of a love language than it is for me.

Eldercare: I don’t know

I haven’t faced these decisions yet, and I don’t have advice to give. 

I’d guess that many of the features moving us away from childcare “villages” are similar when it comes to eldercare:

• Both generations prefer more privacy
• Family members are more likely to be able to afford paid help and their own spaces, vs. economies where relatives have no other option
• More intensive parenting, meaning the “sandwich generation” has more time taken by child-rearing
• More value on women’s time, vs the assumption that a stay-at-home mother will be available to care for basically unlimited people