I’m Starting to Think You Guys Don’t Really Want a “Village”

This essay was adapted from the newsletter Cartoons Hate Her. Subscribe here.

It’s impossible to read about modern parenting, especially material intended for the highly educated, middle-class contingent, without coming to one conclusion: Parenting has become needlessly hard, and it would be easier (and better) if we had a “village.”

The “village,” of course, comes from the phrase “It takes a village to raise a child.” In the idealized village, parents might be a child’s primary caregivers, but children are also passed around to relatives and neighbors. This village—primarily composed of women—plays a big role in postpartum families, too, helping clean or cook while the mom rests. You can see the appeal.

I’m going to say something that might sound a bit mean, but bear with me: I don’t think modern parents really want the village, because most parents don’t behave in a village-y way.

Part of it is simple: Educated people live farther away from their extended families. Twenty-one-year-old college grads starting their careers are probably not thinking about who would watch their older child during the birth of their second. But if you want a village, and your parents don’t live close, you need to socialize with neighbors and friends. And when it comes to this, people repeatedly reveal their preferences: They are “too busy” to meet people. Things are “crazy over here” and they’re “going out of town.” Community is not a priority.

What takes priority over community, for people who claim to want it? A lot of the time, it’s spending time with the nuclear family (parents spend more active parenting time with their kids now than ever before) or the evergreen “going out of town,” which is what I hear every time I try to plan something. Yes, people work, but not more than they used to. At the end of the day, “going out of town” seems to be a far bigger priority than building a community. This is compounded by the fact that (again) the people I’m around are more likely than ever to live far from their parents or other relatives, and if you live far away, you need to travel to visit. Alternatively, maybe nobody likes me!

I’m not saying it’s bad or shameful to enjoy leisure time with your nuclear family. This applies to me, too. Creating community, especially when nobody else is participating, eats up a lot of time. I have some free time, but I spend it at home with my husband and kids, or on hobbies. Yes, I would enjoy having more of a community, but would I rather spend a Saturday playing with my own children, or helping my neighbor move? Building community isn’t my top priority either, despite my occasional attempts to manufacture it by hosting gatherings (the invitations to which are often ignored and never reciprocated).

There’s another element too: Our standards for caregivers are higher than ever. Social media is awash with mothers who decree it’s dangerous to let anyone watch their children, including relatives. People no longer feel comfortable with the 14-year-old neighbor babysitting (our teenage neighbor offered, and we declined). Grandparents can be presented with an email with a list of “boundaries” before the birth of a child, a custom that seems to have become increasingly popular since COVID, when everyone got increasingly worried about vaccines and baby-kissing. As a new mom asked a Parents advice column, “I’m worried about how to set baby boundaries within a family that doesn’t seem to have many. I don’t want my newborn passed around from relative to relative. What do I do?” On the other side of the aisle, a grandmother wrote in to Newsweek expressing dismay that her daughter-in-law won’t let her babysit, or even hold, her 5-month-old grandson.

Rules aren’t necessarily unreasonable—I had a few myself—but the trend is clear. We don’t really want a village, we want a free caretaker or cleaning crew who does things exactly the way we wish.

In real life, the “village” includes your aunt who has what you think are bad politics, your mother-in-law who calls your 2-month-old son a “ladies’ man,” your father-in-law who always has the TV on, your sister who asks too many personal questions, and … like, honestly, your 14-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 traditionally meant “the people around us,” not a bespoke neighborhood you might curate in The Sims.

But parents rejecting the village, explicitly or implicitly, are only part of the problem. Here’s the other part. 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. You’d rather host a potluck on Saturday than just relax with your own spouse and kids. Well guess what? People are too busy. There’s no good time. It’s crazy over here. We’re going out of town.

It’s not that everyone is lying about being busy—it’s that nobody (including me) wants to devote an inordinate amount of time to creating a village if nobody else is interested. I think some parents don’t want a village, but I think there are a lot of other parents who truly would be interested if only other people were willing to participate. But because very few people are, we prefer to invest our time more efficiently, on the people closest to us.

And at that point, we might as well say screw it. We’re going out of town.