How It "Takes a Village"
Why do people lament the lack of a village while doing nothing to create one?
CartoonsHateHer had a very nice post about how people don’t actually want a “village” while still lamenting that it doesn’t exist. A great quote from the post:
The village includes your aunt who voted for Trump, your mother-in-law who calls your 2-month-old son a “ladies’ man,” your father-in-law who has the TV on all the time, your sister who asks too many personal questions, and…like, honestly, your fourteen-year-old neighbor who wants to get babysitting experience. It’s fine to decide you don’t want help from these people, but the village has always just meant “the people around us,” not a bespoke neighborhood that you might curate in The Sims.
And she also finds
But parents rejecting the village, explicitly or implicitly, is only part of the problem. The other part of the problem is, let’s say you genuinely want a village—you want to be one of the people helping just as much as you want help. You’re cool with letting less-than-perfect people into your world. How are you going to build that world when nobody else wants it?
This has kinda been my experience as well.
So what is going on?
Some of it could just be being socially awkward, a trait I presume CHH shares with me. But that’s not all of it.
I grew up in a village
I grew up in a city as did my parents and grandparents.
But my grandfather had seven siblings who made it to adulthood, and six had at least three children. The ‘childfree’ sibling was disabled from polio and never married, and she raised all her nephews and nieces and then her grand-nephews and grand-nieces. All the siblings lived a 30-minute walk from each other by the time I was born.
Our household was a large one. We lived with my grandparents, uncles, my disabled great-aunt, and whoever the cat dragged in. My grandfather was big on social responsibility and filial piety, so there was always someone living with us, be it a cousin from another town who was here for college, an elderly relative who had nowhere to go, or well-regarded people down on their luck. Plus, people were always visiting. Every member of the household brought their friends. Relatives were constantly dropping by.
I have no clue how we all fit in that little house (my mother insists it was an architectural marvel), but we did so well that my noisy college dorm felt lonely to me. I think even as far as families in my hometown went, we were an extremely full household. Most of my friends might have had an ancestral home in their village that was full of cousins in the summer, but they lived in nuclear families in the city with maybe a widowed grandparent visiting now and then.
When I was a child, we had my grandfather’s brothers visit every morning to play with me. Then I’d go to the temple with my grandmother, and after lunch and a nap, my grandfather would take me out to chat with his friends. Then I’d play with an older cousin who lived nearby or the girl across the street whose mother was my mother’s best friend. Around tea time, we might have my uncles and aunts and their friends come by after college (which was a stone’s throw away) and play chess. After dinner, my uncle would take me on a walk around town, and I’d fall asleep on the way back.
I remember when I was 4, my mom said to me, “Come and speak to me sometimes, otherwise you might forget what I look like.” I was in demand, with a very busy social life with many relatives insisting I visit and my grandparents happy to cart me around.
Soon there were new aunts, siblings, and cousins in the house, and we had a wild time together and continue to be close.
And Yet…
My mother didn’t work outside the house because none of this childcare was guaranteed. Not only that, but the family was quite insistent that she was primarily responsible for me, and she couldn’t leave me with them and go off to work. She did work from home, though, while I played with about a dozen relatives. I was routinely visiting cousins and staying over on weekends and summers, which is a feat I cannot imagine doing with my kid, so she had a lot of time to build her freelance business.
But this was offset by spells where we hosted visiting cousins and friends and she barely got a spare moment. She couldn’t do a 9 to 5; she had to work freelance on-demand. Sometimes there would be a big order to fulfill while I was sick and clinging to her, and she’d be working with me on her lap, another feat I cannot imagine doing with my kid.
While my family focused hard on keeping the kids out of any drama, there was plenty of drama. You can’t have poverty, generational trauma, and a large, large family and not have drama. The grownups made it clear none of the drama applied to children. They did their best to treat us the same no matter what. And even this was something they had to resolve to do because they hadn’t been offered that courtesy growing up.
My childhood wasn’t the idyll I thought it was as a child, but it was QUITE idyllic.
Villages don’t spring out of nowhere
This meme is very popular:
Strong childhood memories mean people can forgive anything. My mom could be mad at her brother for sneaking me coffee, but she still was the one who beat up the bullies for stealing his marbles, so that irritation doesn’t last long. Plus, this is just a conflict about well-meaning treatment of a child, not even a property dispute or any of those big gun conflict situations that are so common in Indian families.
When we recreate a village with folks who aren’t family, we’re trying to imitate this type of structure that we vaguely remember from growing up. But when you don’t share similar bonds with other people, it’s not going to sustain itself.
People did grow up in another kind of village - company towns like Jamshedpur, or public sector employee quarters. All the dads were colleagues, jobs were for life even if they could transfer you to different locations, and everyone lived in a neighborhood expressly built for people like them. People were from all over the country, but they all still qualified to be employed at the same place, and had a lifetime to imbibe the sarkari culture. While you had imbibed the pattern of strong bonds from your upbringing, you also knew when to let go - not everyone followed the same culture as you, but you were all part of the same fabric that bound India together, so the new village had new rules, but nothing that made it emotionally different from the large families of old.
Generally, too, most people around the world, but especially in India, take the attitude of treating every kid like your own (but nicer) and this makes it easier to build this village
with strangers.
When I look at life in the present day, though, we don’t stand a chance.
There are too few institutions that bond
Most of the parents I hang out with consistently tend to be friends from college. We have a “been in the trenches together” type bond that seems to withstand a lot of crap. There are friends I’ve fallen out with, not spoken to for years, and then just picked back up like nothing happened (and eventually exchanged apologies).
Otherwise, there’s no religious institution we go to consistently where other families visit on the same schedule. The hobby groups I’m part of are virtual even if we’ve met offline. And with job hopping and related location-hopping being such a thing, it’s really hard to make lasting bonds at work or in the neighborhood.
Plus, I’ve personally found it hard to bring my whole life into work. They did try those kinds of things in tech companies where they say “Bring your whole self into work” but people still were super uncomfortable being themselves at work. It felt like politics was the most neutral aspect of your personality to share at work, and it all became an annoying clusterfuck where your colleagues had arguments about George Soros or something on Slack.
Even with those long-standing friends I have, people still move all the time, and not everyone feels accepted for all their choices. That’s just how far that bond goes.
Life just feels siloed. It’s harder to feel like people will accept all of you anywhere. Whenever I meet writers in the Bay Area of the Gen X slacker stock, they all moved to San Francisco to find their tribe in the 90s, did so, and stuck with it. I don’t know if people move to places ‘for the vibe’ that much, or if it lasts. I wonder if cities have vibes as much. I did move to the Bay ‘for the vibe’, but it was also because a paycheck was forthcoming, and the paycheck wasn’t for all of me, it was for the part of me that could keep a lid on the rest of me.
I’m sure other people lead more authentic lives with more friends and all, but given how much everyone seems to be struggling with parenting, I realize there’s another wrench in the works.
Becoming a parent is such a vulnerable thing
When I was single, I had an apartment that was a thoroughfare like the home I’d grown up in. There were always people visiting. I was rarely ever alone. I enjoyed hosting.
When I got married, I realized I had not allowed myself to look sufficiently inward and work on my issues all this while, and so I did. I was happy to finally allow myself to be vulnerable and lean in to a new kind of life.
But I ended up hosting so much less. One big aspect was that I was focusing on other big life goals, but another was my standards had gone up so much. It was perfectly fine if my bachelorette pad was a mess and I had no shame about having people over. I wasn’t expected to have it together. But the marital apartment seemed too small for all our stuff, let alone people visiting. It felt too messy, too little, not nice enough, and the furniture felt cheap. I didn’t feel like hosting as much.
When my kid came around though, it kicked my insecurity into a completely new gear. People did come over to see the baby, but I never hung out with them and neither did the baby because we were cluster feeding for hours while watching Fabulous Lives Of Bollywood Wives and Is It Cake while my husband tried entertaining them. The house was always a mess, it felt like a safety hazard for any kid other than mine, and I hadn’t had great experiences when people did visit - they always felt like they were intruding and left. And I suppose they were; I was constantly attending to my kid.
But my village back in the day showed up to help, not to chat.
And they could, because they had been in my mom’s life long enough that she was okay navigating vulnerability with them. They also followed the same unwritten rulebook on what to do when faced with a new mom, so even if either party was uncomfortable with parts of it, they grinned their way through it. Because those things were what everyone did.
When the nice people in my life offered to help, I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to ask for. Do you want to wait around for an unpredictable amount of time until it’s time to wash all the bottles and breast pump parts? Do you want to make very specific postpartum meals exactly like my mom does? Do you know how to change diapers and then handle waking me up to feed the baby when I feel like a zombie and will snap at you? No one wants to do that, I thought, and I didn’t want to be around relative strangers doing that.
Turns out, doing all that, or just doing nothing and hanging around is super important. Because otherwise, you don’t have a grip enough on how we bring up our kids that I’ll trust you to watch them when they are out of diapers.
I did try and make friends with other moms, and it got much easier once our kids were down to one nap a day. But it never felt like a “village”. We were friends despite our differences in how we raised children. I’m not sure we’d be comfortable leaving our kids with each other for more than a short while. Plus, I was very insecure about how others perceived my daughter and my parenting because she was very demanding, and it felt like too much of an imposition on parents with very calm kids. It didn’t help that they felt the judgiest.
Play dates were nice, but what I really wanted was to have friends with similar kids two doors away so neither of us had to do the unpredictable dance of getting the kids out of the house or be anxious about how active our kids were.
I had that for a little while! It was great! I felt okay about my messy house because they hadn’t gotten in a car and driven to visit us. Our kids would run to play with each other with no prompting, sometimes in just diapers. We’d hang out and watch movies after the kids were in bed.
And then they moved away.
We’ve always self-segregated on our approach to raising children
People have always had different approaches to raising kids. But people in the same neighborhoods or families usually agreed on how to raise kids. They might disagree on details, but they had the same general idea.
Sure, my aunt taught me to sing Bollywood songs my mom didn’t approve of, but it didn’t matter because they had the same idea of how to get kids to sleep. My mom didn’t have to worry about my aunt sleep-training me, she’d sing and rock me to sleep, even if the song she was singing was Yeh Vaada Raha.
Which seems like a concern for a lot of Millennial American parents - they don’t agree with even their own parents on how to raise kids.
This has been a generational thing, though, ever since parenting books started getting written in the West. If you’re parenting based on “science”, how you parent will change as the ‘science’ changes, ‘experts’ get debunked, and ‘parenting styles’ go in and out of fashion. If you parent based on how you saw and experienced parenting, it’ll stay more or less stable. But in a multicultural society, that still doesn’t suffice.
There’s such a wide gulf in parenting culture between me and my MIL, where she felt I shouldn’t be so concerned about the baby crying because “babies cry”, and I had been raised in a culture where you’re not supposed to let babies cry. We disagree less as the kid gets older, though. And she herself disagreed with her family about how to parent and pretty much parented solo. But in her generation, the culture wasn’t yet fragmented and you could rely on people in your circle of friends or in the neighborhood you moved into, or those in your church parenting the same way as you. Even if people disagreed, they knew the dogma.
Now, though, there’s no dogma. Just because you live in a certain neighborhood or are from a certain income level doesn’t mean you’ll parent the same. That depends strictly on which influencer you follow on social media.
And that means the covert Jordan Peterson follower who believes kids need timeouts to behave is not going to approve of the covert Gabor Mate follower who believes in connection. And neither of them are going to approve of the covert Neha Ruch follower who is all about power-momming while pursuing a busy career, and all three are going to side-eye the one who touts Emily Oster because “Isn’t she the one who tells you it’s okay to drink while pregnant?”.
Everyone is so stressed out about who might harm their kids or their egos. Everyone’s looking for signs of a mom who doesn’t agree with them, or worse, someone who will judge them, and they use all kinds of hidden signals to weed out such moms. This one time, I hung out with a mom and casually mentioned making my own baby food and that I don’t use a stroller much…. and never heard from her again. About a year later a friend who’d come across both of us revealed to me that apparently I came off as too ‘crunchy’ and that mom had assumed that I was also an antivaxxer. I was just parenting as my mom did, and my kid hated strollers and I had no idea of these connotations. I’m sure someone will tell me that mom is crazy. But she probably wasn’t crazy, just overly cautious because there are higher rates of whooping cough around where we live; there are too many highly educated antivaxx moms.
There are also too many axes along which you can differ with moms. You can agree on all the things and differ on one thing and that makes all the difference. Maybe it’s screens. Maybe it’s yelling. Maybe it’s how they lock their kid in a room to discipline him, and you’re too anxious about your child even witnessing that, she’s so little. Maybe it’s how high they allow their kid to climb.
A Cure
We’re able to act so picky because it’s so much work to assemble your village and you’d rather put that effort for people who agree with you on how to raise your kids.
But as I’ve found, if the village is convenient, all those principles can easily go out of the window. Parents seem to put up with so much garbage from daycares that treat their kids much less nice.
I suppose this would solve itself if you lived near family or close friends, or a neighborhood where you got on well with your neighbors, and then had kids. This is what it seems like 80% of people do (and they whine anyway). The convenience of the village will override any irritations you have with it.
The real problem that’s not going away
Keeping a village running is at least a part-time job, and it doesn’t pay. For various reasons, not only are we living in smaller family units, but everyone also is employed fulltime. And those jobs are increasingly all-consuming to the extent that there’s no time to help run the village.
No matter what mythical village we think of, it involves women helping each other with children, not one woman being overloaded with all the childcare while the others go off to girlboss, whether or not it was real.
If there’s no time and bandwidth to work on making the village, then we’re going to be okay just scrolling instagram and texting our mom friends memes now and then.
The pandemic might have given white-collar workers a glimpse of what can be, but with return-to-office mandates and precarious work, we’re not in danger of suddenly having more time to devote to the community. ‘Tradwives’ might be going viral on social media, but along with them are also a ton of vlogs about tradwife divorces that leave the woman much much worse off.
All the stuff people consider great about any past comes from a slower life where there was time (and necessity) to nurture community. Devaluing that as ‘women’s work’ is the problem, but I don’t see that changing.
Putting it all together
This is one of those places where we can legitimately blame capitalism. When skills and labor get segregated and concentrated in certain areas, and the bulk of our day goes into productive work, communities are not sustainable. The lack of a village was a problem even in Industrial-Age Berlin and London.
If people keep having to move for college and work, and then change jobs and towns every few years, they can’t develop the strong connections they require to trust someone with their kids.
Even if you do have that, there’s a lot more diversity of lifestyle and thought around us that makes it hard to find people we vibe with right around us.
The problem is, though, this perpetuates itself across generations. If you don’t have pleasant memories of growing up around strong alloparent relationships, you won’t intuitively recognize and nurture those relationships when you’re an adult, so your child can experience the same. Of course, none of this is set in stone, you can just make friends and trust them with your kids. But if you didn’t grow up around that, you don’t even know what’s possible.
The best time to find a village was before you had kids. But the second-best time is now. And nothing’s wrong with you if you have trouble doing this - you’re trying to find strangers that you’d be comfortable trusting around your children. That’s not something we’ve ever been expected to do. Except, of course, when people floated their child down a river in a basket to be raised by wolves, but that likely never happened.