Why is it so hard to get families to live in communities?
Haven't we all heard it takes a village?
In my social circles, becoming a parent is seen as a gigantic sacrifice. You lose sleep, time with friends, time for hobbies. You’ll probably have to move to a less desirable neighborhood to afford the extra space for your kid. If you’re the one carrying the child, you’re ‘destroying’ your body and jeopardizing your professional goals.
But what if it didn’t have to be this way?
An Indian friend recently told me how his parents couldn’t fathom why anyone wouldn’t want to have a child. In his parents’ India, having children is just fun. Most families live in multigenerational compounds, where parents raise their children alongside their nearest and dearest. When they’re babies, you always have someone to help babysit. Past a certain age, the kids run around with their cousins and entertain themselves.
“It takes a village to raise a child” is perhaps the most common phrase I hear about having kids. It is, as Phil would say, an Obvious Truth. Children thrive when they are surrounded by a community of loving humans. No couple - much less single parent - can meet all of their child’s needs and their own.
And yet very few people raise their kids in community. In the US, 71% of children grow up in single family homes. This is despite the fact that most Americans can’t really afford it: one in three home owners and nearly half of rental households are spending over 30% of their income on mortgage/rent.
And, unfortunately but understandably, it’s making us miserable. Studies show that adults who choose to have kids are less happy during peak parenting years than those who don’t, especially in the US. And it’s something we hear all the time: parenting is exhausting and there’s never enough time or money.
Except, perhaps, if you live in a village. Frederic Laloux, author of Reinventing Organizations, and his wife moved their family from Belgium to an eco village in upstate New York. On the stress of modern parenting, he says:
“Here’s what I’ve discovered: much of that strain is self-inflicted. The dream of individualized lives, of the nuclear family as the basis of modern existence, is not conducive to joyful parenting. For hundreds of thousands of years, children were raised within multigenerational family structures. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors, and other members of the tribe or community watched over the children and interacted with them. Not everything depended on the parents!”
For years I’ve been seeking out friends who are choosing to raise their kids in some form of community. On the whole, the parents seem better rested and their children better adjusted than my friends doing the standard nuclear family life.
My co-author Phil and his wife Kristen have shared their experience in this Supernuclear post about Radish, their cohousing community in the Bay Area:
“People talk about the first year of having a kid as extraordinarily challenging. I feel like a bit of a jerk for saying this, but it’s been much easier than advertised for us. And we think our living situation plays a huge role in this.
Of course, it took a lot of upfront work to make this year easy. Building a community is hard. None of this came for free. But the payoff is there.
We’ve had to give up very little in our life to make room for our kid. We still eat dinner with friends every night of the week. We go out on a whim. And our baby girl has a whole clan of admirers.”
Then there are Priya and Andrew Rose, founders of the Fractal network in New York (and previously Rabbithole). They welcomed their baby girl last May and started experimenting with ‘baby coworking’.
By making baby-raising a communal project rather than trying to do everything alone, Andrew and Priya have found parenting to be less stressful than many of their peers. In Priya’s words:
It turns out that taking care of a baby is much easier and more fun when other people are around. When you’re alone with a newborn, even going to the bathroom can be stressful since they must always be watched. As babies get older, they become more independent but also need lots of stimulation and play. If they’re surrounded by many people, that stimulation comes naturally.
Since I live near friends, I am almost always caring for my daughter with other people around. That means baby care is easy, and I still get to socialize as much as I did before I had a baby. It even makes it easier for me to read and do traditionally solo activities. If I’m reading in a room with my baby alone, she gets bored and wants to play with me. But if we’re in a big group of adults, she gets lots of attention, and doesn’t mind if I read!
Since my friends see her so often, they’ve developed relationships with her. This makes them excited to babysit her, and in fact, a few of our friends babysit every Monday so that Andrew and I can have a date night.
At Feÿtopia, a creative commune in France, I’ve had long conversations over dinner with friends as their baby monitor lies on the table. If the baby stirs, one of the parents can be back at her bedside in a minute - but in the meantime the parents get to enjoy whatever dinner, salon, workshop, or party is going on in the castle.
During the work day, the parents sometimes ask other Feÿtopians if they can watch the baby when both parents need to get work done, and someone always volunteers. Like Tyler describes in his post about baby coworking, it’s a joy to spend an hour with a kid - and it’s often hard for non-parents to access this joy if they don’t live near or have family.
In our intro survey for Supernuclear subscribers (please fill it out if you haven’t already!), many of the responses to ‘why are you interested in coliving?’ centered around childcare. Some are from parents who want support or an easy way to hang out with friends while raising kids. But a surprising number are from child-free people who long to be involved in raising the next generation, regardless of whether they are their ‘own’ kids. For example:
‘As someone who isn’t having kids and isn’t connected with her extended family, I find I’m still craving the “group project” energy that comes with the rhythm of domestic family life. I just want to share something with others. The treadmill of deciding what I individually want and then acquiring that desire has lost its meaning. Sharing feels like an antidote.’
I’ve experienced this myself: last year at Casa Chironja, my coliving community in Puerto Rico, I sent my friends on a date night with the promise I’d keep an eye on their kids, who were sleeping one floor above me. I was working on a deadline for my accountant and knew I wouldn’t be leaving the house so it took no effort from me. My friends were effusive when they got home: they said it was the first time in three years that they felt like they got to be adults and not just parents. How many times do you get to feel like a hero when you’re doing your taxes?
A couple days later, on the last night of their week long visit, I wanted to go out with my friends. I encouraged them to ask in the house chat if anyone was willing to ‘watch’ their kids like I had. My friends resisted: they felt they couldn’t impose on the community, many of whom they’d just met. I pushed them, and sure enough multiple people volunteered. We had a great night out while our housemate Matt occasionally poked his head in their apartment to make sure the kids were sleeping soundly.
A few months later I learned that my friends had sold their apartment in Brooklyn. In January the mother wrote me:
I want to have kids - and I want to raise them around a wealth of adults who model different ways to be successful and happy. I want them to grow up with a diverse and fun group of kids who will become their extended family. I want to inherit strollers and baby clothes from my friends, and pass them on to the next family in our community when mine have grown out of them. I want to teach my friend’s kids to sing and mentor them when they build businesses.
And yes, I want support when life throws me curve balls. And I want to be that support for other friends when they need it.
Writing Supernuclear has been a great excuse to research why most people in the US don’t live this way, and how we could. My hunch is that many more would live in ‘villages’ if they had clearer models for how this could work - just like my friends whose week long experience in a coliving space helped inspire them to move into an apartment building with their friends.
We’re looking for more stories of people who are raising kids in communities. So far we’ve written about Radish, The Village, Windhover, and Open Field Coliving. Rhaina Cohen also just published ‘A Grand Experiment in Parenthood and Friendship’ in the Atlantic, which dives into several more examples.
If you are living close to friends and raising kids, we’d love to hear about your experience: please write us at hi@gosupernuclear.com.
Suggested further reading:
Supernuclear Book Review: Other Significant Others by Rhaina Cohen
In-person opportunity: If you want to meet Gillian, my esteemed co-editor at Supernuclear, she will be at Rhaina’s book event tonight in NYC. If you are reading this, you are invited.
Great piece. I can only speak to my own experience -- the opening line to my book, Brave New Home, was about how I had no idea how isolating young parenting would be.Prior to being a parent, I was never really at home, so I didn't really think about needing community in my living arrangement then. Having kids really changes how much time you spend at home. Unfortunately I think a lot of people come to realize how much they want to raise kids in community after they've bought the house and birthed the kid.
The example in India is interesting -- kids there grow up always knowing how important community is for childrearing. That makes it a lot easier and more intuitive to plan to live with or near family as you approach starting a family.
Currently, most of my friends are the parents of my kids' friends, and we all live near each other because our kids attend a walkable, neighborhood school. We all share a playground in our neighborhood where our kids also mix with kids who are not part of their friend group. We also support a community of stores and public transit etc. My next book is about spending too much time at home -- I love the idea of building a community around a home, but think it's as important or even more so to build a community around public spaces and public life.
This is a great piece and I have many thoughts on it. I think a huge part of the barrier is around housing design and how hard it is to find housing that can work for families and people who might want live with them, but not be sharing a wall with a crying baby. I definitely think there’s some openness to group living situations where the adults far outnumber the kids. I think there might be less interest in openness when the number of children is more than the number of adults. Those children go from adorable gurgly babies to tornadoing toddlers and elementary school children who take up space in a different way. (I speak from the perspective of having three rowdy boys myself.) however I do think it’s heartening that there’s more discussion and interest from people who do not plan to have children to be more involved in the day-to-day life of families.