Why are we raising kids all alone?

On developing close ties and community

Brice Marden, Chinese Dancing, 1994

A few of my friends are stressed-out young parents. They’ve done all the things society wants them to do (gotten married, bought apartments in nice cities, had children), but are in a state of such overwork that it seems like they’re reaping the worst reward for their compliance. Some of them are working long hours to pay for $40k/year French immersion kindergarten and their mortgage, while obsessing about screen-time, and trying to run a half marathon to be healthy. It honestly sounds miserable.

It’s all made me more empathetic towards my own parents. When I ask my mom what it was like for her, it still sounds extremely miserable, but she had help. “You know that you were with your grandparents for a bit. And your grandmother stayed for a year after I gave birth, and you spent a year with her in Singapore while I finished my masters.” My mom paid that support forward: my aunt, a high powered executive, would drop her kids off at my parents’ house over the summer because my mom was a teacher who had a summer break.

As kids, we also were watched by various unrelated community members. When we spent time in Singapore, we’d just go to the park and play with our neighborhood friends all day. Random neighborhood “aunties” and “uncles” of no blood relation would stop by and check that everyone was ok. Back in Connecticut, my parents’ friends took care of me after school — they fed me jelly sandwiches and taught me about the Chicago Bulls 1996 lineup. On the night that my sisters were born, 5-year-old me stayed at a family friends’ house. I even crawled into the couple’s bed when I had a nightmare.

In contrast, it feels so weird that my generation of friends are expected to raise our kids in isolation. Some of my friends have helpful parents, but most of the grandparents are pretty disengaged outside of video chats. They see their grandkids in person twice a year. There’s not a lot of help with babysitting. And there’s a difference between babysitting versus parenting — the latter involves moral and practical education in addition to ensuring that the child is safe and entertained. In contrast, I feel like I was parented by a lot of people. I have been scolded or tutored in Chemistry (my worst subject!) or music class (my second worst subject?) by at least 20+ people who had a vested interest in my success! My family is no Curie family homeschool co-op, but I did get explicitly taught dance, yoga, tennis, chemistry, economics, math, and biology by a community member. For example, my high school science fair project was a fuel cell that a friend’s dad and I built together.

What’s interesting is that this “village” that raised me didn’t do it for my sake. They did it for my parents, for the community. My grandmother loved me, but she took care of me because she cared about my mom’s independence and career goals. My cabal of extended family took care of me, but they did it because they cared about my grandmother’s wellbeing. My parents’ friends took care of me because they were their friends first! This community extended beyond childcare — the kids were just another life circumstance. The community also stepped up when my family members fell sick, when we had a house emergency and needed somewhere to stay for a month, and when someone hurt their back. In my parents’ case, their community was simply about providing support to one another, which happened to primarily take the shape of childcare support. This wasn’t a natalist cult — their community was not organized around any sort of “child-care” common goal.

The rare friends who have deep community — their siblings live super close-by, their parents come into town regularly, their friends have kids of a similar age — feel so much more stable and supported. However, I am not sure how to re-create something like this for myself. I live very far away from my parents and siblings. Our very far-flung geography at early ages has translated to drift in values: for example, one of my sisters is quite religious and traditional while I’m not. I have more in common with my friends than with her. And of course, it doesn’t feel like you can send a kid to the playground alone in San Francisco, to be watched by neighborhood aunties. Current solutions to this issue — people say “throw money at the problem” — feel both inaccessible to the vast majority of people, and empty. Even though nannies cost $70k a year, I’m not sure if that also buys you the moral education and “long term investment in the child’s success” that friends or family provide. All in all — at this rate, I’d have to do everything for my kid, while also earning the money to pay for the rare times where I would get childcare assistance. It really doesn’t make sense for someone in my position to have children, unless I want to sacrifice my entire life!

In Ada Palmer’s futuristic science fiction Terra Ignota series, she introduces the idea of a “bash” as the future family unit. The word comes from the Japanese “i-basho” which means “a place where you can be yourself.” It’s described as:

The bash' is the primary unit of social organization in the twenty-fifth century. Somewhat analogous to the historical concept of a family household, a bash' is a group of several people linked by close personal bonds and a shared place of residence. A typical bash' might include 3 to 6 adults united by close friendship or the ability to comfortably coexist, plus one or more romantic partners of said adults, plus children. In most cultures, young people join or form bash'es around the time they achieve adulthood or finish university studies. Bash'es are flexible and centered around choice and efficacy. Because of this mutability, it is rare for one bash' to persist with the same name and purpose beyond three generations.^[1] Some bash'es focus on providing a comfortable home for members to sleep and relax. Some bash'es focus on providing the best possible upbringing for their children. Some bash'es focus on professional collaboration and the completion of members' projects, blurring the line between household and small business.

I like this idea for many reasons, one of which is that it’s a sort of chosen-family focused around a wide range of shared values. Living together seems like a priority. Its downside, I suppose, is that it’s not that multigenerational and that it allows you to avoid rubbing shoulders with people you fundamentally disagree with (that one uncle at Thanksgiving!), which I like because it expands your empathy and worldview. It feels awfully futuristic to get rid of blood relations and the concept of marriage entirely, but it feels like we’re trending in that direction anyways in the Bay Area.

How do you think about creating tight community — real community you can lean on in times of need?

Here’s a few things (on that topic) I’ve been reading this week:

1. A Mother’s Work: the famous and controversial New Yorker article that is about the lives of nannies in NYC. This article went viral on Twitter because of the magazine cover image, featuring nannies absently watching their client’s children on the playground as they talked amongst themselves about their own birth-children.

2. Hot Friend Compounds: The ‘let’s all buy a house together’ dream, but real: Live with your friends, but an actual tool to make it happen!

3. My Pancake Playbook: A guide to throwing a pancake social in your neighborhood, made by yours truly. This is really about loose ties instead of the close ties that might babysit your kids!

4. “Let’s Bring Back the Block Party”: A bunch of little ideas to create loose ties — developing the type of neighborly relationship amongst community members that might lend you a cup of sugar (instead of the strong ties where someone would help you raise your children!)

5. The Surgeon General’s Warning about Isolated Parents: “Parents have a profound impact on the health of our children and the health of society. Yet parents and caregivers today face tremendous pressures, from familiar stressors such as worrying about their kids’ health and safety and financial concerns, to new challenges like navigating technology and social media, a youth mental health crisis, an epidemic of loneliness that has hit young people the hardest. As a father of two kids, I feel these pressures too. With this Advisory, I am calling for a fundamental shift in how we value and prioritize the mental health and well-being of parents. I am also outlining policies, programs, and individual actions we can all take to support parents and caregivers.”

6. The Terra Ignota series: I love this book series and bring it up all the time, but I have to warn you — it’s type III fun. You’ll read it and think “this is insane and weird and horrifying,” you’ll finish it and think the same thing, but you’ll reference its ideas for years. Bash’es are just one example of the new and crazy ideas!

7. The Curie Family Homeschool Co-Op: Imagine if all of your friends were Nobel prize winners, and you wanted to homeschool your kids.

   After her husband’s death, the great scientist Marie Curie homeschooled her eldest daughter for two years, in a group with nine other children. Marie Curie introduced the children to physics on Thursday afternoons, while the other parents taught other subjects. Marie Curie’s friend and neighbour Jean Perrin (who won the Nobel in 1926) taught chemistry. Paul Langevin (who won the Copley Medal in 1940) taught mathematics. Henri Mouton taught biology, the sculptor Jean Magrou taught art, and Mme Isabel Chavannes taught foreign languages (German and English). Mme Henriette Perrin taught French literature and history, as well as leading visits to the wonderful Musée du Louvre.

8. Kamala Harris’ Houses: I like this Berkeley article that outlines how Kamala was raised by the community. She went over a nice neighborhood auntie’s house after school and was taken care of by so many people. Man, the 70s in Berkeley sound so warm and tight knit.

9. KPop’s Labor Dispute: This has absolutely nothing to do with community and children, but was crazy to me: this week, the NYT covered the top labor dispute in KPop between artists and their label. In Korea, the label is so much more powerful than the artist. With NewJeans’ protest against HYBE (their label), are we seeing a tidal change, or are we simply going to see the young, promising group crushed?