The Village Nobody Wants
Parents say they wish we still had "the village" to help raise our children. But people’s behavior tells a different story.
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It’s impossible to engage with content about modern parenting, especially aimed toward the upper middle class or highly educated contingent, without coming to one conclusion over and over again: parenting has become needlessly hard, and it would be easier (and better) if we had a “village.” The line was repeated during the latest episode of the New York Times podcast The Daily just last week, when they discussed the detrimental effects of “intensive parenting” on parents’ mental and physical health. Yes, we might be “over parenting” but if we had a village to help us, it wouldn’t be as hard.
The idea of the village comes from the oft-repeated phrase, “It takes a village to raise a child.” The idea is that while parents might be a child’s primary caregivers, children are also passed around to grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Perhaps neighbors step in and drop off some home cooked food when a new mother gives birth. In the postpartum phase, perhaps the new mom spends all day in bed breastfeeding the baby while “the village” comes around to clean the house, cook food, and help with the older siblings. The primary helpers in this village are women, of course, especially older women whose children have grown up.
But I’m going to say something that might sound a bit mean, and I want you to bear with me: I don’t think modern parents really want this.
It’s not controversial to say that we live in an increasingly isolated world. People have fewer friends, see friends less often, and spend increasingly more time in isolated “nuclear families” (think mom, dad, and kids, not extended relatives.) Parents are more likely than ever to live far away from their own parents, especially if they’re highly educated. Their careers are part of it. Prior to remote work, people from Kansas who wanted to work in tech couldn’t stay close to their families while also following their dreams. And maybe, even if it was always possible to work remotely from Kansas, they wouldn’t have taken the option anyway. Many people want to live in high cost of living urban centers because these places have more stuff to do, more potential singles to meet for relationships, and are simply more fun. When a twenty-one-year-old college graduate is planning the next year of their life, they probably aren’t thinking about how beneficial it would be to live near their parents once they have kids. Sure, it might occur to them, but I don’t think it’s the driving factor behind where they choose to live.
Nick and I initially didn’t think we’d want to live close to our parents. We always knew we wanted kids, but we hadn’t thought much about the logistics of raising them. But what we didn’t consider were questions like: if we had more than one child, who would watch our older child while we were in the hospital for the second? If I had a C-section, who would help around the house while I was recovering, especially if we also had an older sibling who needed attention? It turned out that both of these scenarios would happen, and thankfully, by then we had moved to a location where Nick’s parents were able to visit. But it’s a long car ride for them, not a situation where they can just drop by. We feel fortunate to have their help, but having in-laws live five hours away isn’t the “village” that people talk about.
I don’t think people moving far away from their parents in their early twenties indicates that they don’t want a village, though. I think that’s just what young people do. They’re not thinking about what they’re going to want fifteen years later. The reason that I don’t think people want a village—including parents who claim to want a village—is the fact that those parents do not behave in a villagey way.
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