Commusings: It Takes a Village to Raise a Parent by Jake Laub

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Dear Commune Community,

The adage “it takes a village to raise a child” conveys the message that it requires a community to provide a safe, healthy environment for children to develop and flourish. Indeed, for the vast majority of human history, children were raised communally. However, in modern America, child-rearing has become an increasingly individual pursuit. 

In many ways, our social isolation is a result of “the American dream.” The initial boom of single-family homes occurred in the early 20th century, facilitated by new building technologies and materials. After World War II, the middle class became increasingly enchanted by the lure of suburbia. Detached homes with yards, picket fences, garages, and multiple bedrooms and bathrooms became a symbol of social status and personal success. When every family has a pool, the community pool languishes — and eventually gets paved over. 

Our obsession with single-family living combined with digital connectivity means that, these days, very few of us know our neighbors. Compared to other species of animals, human babies are helpless … for years. They require protracted and thorough care — and yet the notion of childrearing in the context of a single family home has become increasingly less attractive. 

In today’s Commusing, Jake offers another path. 

Here at [email protected] and prowling the Serengeti of IG @jeffkrasno

In love, include me,
Jeff 

• • •

It Takes a Village to Raise a Parent
By Jake Laub

This is Part 2 in a three-week series on Rebuilding the Village. You can listen to all three essays on the podcast here.

It’s another lively, sunny BBQ at Commune Topanga and while wrangling my wiggly, strong-willed 2-year-old, I leave my iPhone unlocked on the table.  

Phoebe’s 20-year-old friend casually swoops it up and scrolls my Instagram feed. 

The Suggested Post shows a half-naked toddler, face down on the ground, screaming. The caption reads: “Your job as a parent is to ruin someone’s day by making them take a bath. And then ruining it again by making them get out of that same bath.”

The young woman looks up at me and remarks, “You guys don’t exactly make parenting look all that fun.”

I don’t disagree with either statement — regarding bathtime or the deep angst and frustration modern parents seem to express about parenting.

You don’t have to scroll too long to find a gushing Insta-essay on the miracle of bringing another human into the world, but the general vibe is head down, grind-it-out — like a second (or third) job with a constantly grouchy boss.

According to Pew data, mothers spend 33% more time with their kids than they did in 1965 while also spending 162% more time employed. Dads now spend 12% less time employed but 200% more time with their kids. In the early 1970s, the U.S. Total Fertility Rate was about 2.5 children per woman. Today it’s 1.6. While there are valid arguments both for having fewer kids (climate change, cost, women’s empowerment) and for having more kids (economic stability, human continuity), there is no question that on average we are parenting fewer children more intensely.

In a recent podcast, The Deep Conflict Between Our Work and Parenting Ideals, host Ezra Klein spoke with sociology professor Caitlyn Collins about how Sweden offers eight months of paid parental leave (per parent!) and yet that hasn’t budged their Total Fertility Rate, which is the same as in the U.S. From there they veer into this intriguing tangent:

Ezra: “I want people to have the options they want to have in life, but that is a policy built around intensive parenting. I don’t know what you’re supposed to do as a policymaker to make it easier to be like, ‘Yeah, you go play outside.’ I mean, if you want to conceptualize the fertility rate as a problem … What does it look like to say from a policy or a cultural perspective that we like children and we think children are great — and that it's not supposed to be a whole other job?”

Caitlyn responds: “I think this gets to the heart of total fertility rates, Ezra, because what we are talking about is how we spend our time minute-to-minute, day-to-day with our children often feels wonderful and often very exhausting. That’s just the truth of contemporary life as a parent today.”

So what is the “truth of contemporary life as a parent today”? 

You live in a single family home with your partner and offspring. (Though, almost a quarter of U.S. children under the age of 18 live with one parent and no other adults.) For many hours of the day, it’s you and them, mutually exhausting each other.

The free roaming range of your child is bound by the home’s walls and maybe a fenced yard. To get anywhere or do anything, you have to get into the car and drive. This includes getting groceries, going to the nearest park, and seeing friends.

Most social interactions and activities need to be pre-scheduled via tedious back-and-forth text chains in which someone inevitably bails at the last minute. Weekend plans revolve around what you think your kid might want to do, like go to a zoo or theme park. 

Parenting has become an all-consuming activity rather than a responsibility woven into the fabric of daily life.

It wasn’t always like this. 

Jeff and I have been talking a lot about “evolutionary mismatches” — areas where our culture has moved rapidly and drastically away from what our biology considered the norm for hundreds of thousands of years. For example, putting on fat during a food surplus was an evolutionary edge in paleolithic times, but in an era of constant food surplus, it’s killing us.

The single-family home is an evolutionary mismatch. It’s so embedded in our culture that we don’t even see it as something artificial, but I guarantee your great-great-grandparents didn’t live in a single-family home. Even if they were aristocrats and owned a mansion there would have been scores of people sharing the space.

Most people lived in villages, and before that, tight-knit hunter-gatherer groups of 10 to 100 people.

What did the village offer?

In my previous essay in this series, I wrote about how true community springs from a combination of physical proximity, consistency, and culture. 

A village naturally combined all three. You walked almost everywhere and, for the most part, saw the same people all the time. Combined, this meant you had a lot of unplanned socialization and knew your neighbors well.

Rather than outsourcing many of your needs to paid professionals (nannies, therapists, restaurant chefs) you participated in a “gift economy” — a culture of reciprocity in which you frequently traded favors, from keeping an eye on each other’s kids to sharing meals and offering emotional support.

Furthermore, like all healthy ecosystems, villages were diverse. Young and old and everyone in between went about the activities of daily living in relationship with one another. Young children could roam under the wing of older children and babies were passed from elder to elder, making life a little better for everyone. 

Embedded in this beautiful essay about moving to a cohousing community in Ithaca, NY is this sage advice for struggling parents: Often when it feels hard, it’s because you are seeking a solution in the wrong context. Many modern parenting “dilemmas” can’t be solved within the nuclear family. You can only solve them in the context of community.

For example, you are a stressed-out single mom with young children dying for some time to yourself. Your toddlers aren’t going to magically leave you alone. You literally need to release them into someone else’s care. Or you have a teenager who has retreated into their shell and won’t tell you what’s wrong. Maybe you aren’t the sounding board they need, but another (younger or older) adult in the community might be. 

To Ezra Klein’s point, you make it easier to tell your kids, “Go play outside,” when there’s a group of other kids eager to explore the big wide world with them, while you know that dozens of adults – who know these kids well – are keeping an eye on them. 

I recently met a couple who moved into that same Ithaca cohousing community a few of years ago.

Soon after they arrived, their 7-year-old daughter walked over to a neighbors’ house to play. Later that evening the neighbor texted, “Everyone is having such a great time here, can your daughter sleep over?” And just like that, the couple had a free night to themselves. The experience inspired them to have a second child.
 
So how do we rebuild the village? As with many evolutionary mismatches, our culture is working against us. We have to go out of our way to self-impose the conditions for health and happiness.

That’s relatively straightforward in the case of artificially imposing food scarcity. You can intermittent fast. It’s more difficult when it involves the resurrection of an entire communal ecosystem.

My wife Julia and I have a tendency to dive headfirst into ambitious alternative-living projects. For five years we lived in an off grid yurt at Commune Topanga (two of those years with a baby). It was a marvelous experiment, but particularly demanding for two working parents. Now, determined to change the context in which we raise our daughter, we are helping build a 40-home cohousing village about an hour north of Seattle.

Cohousing projects are intentional, self-governing, cooperative communities where residents live in private homes clustered around shared space. Our project follows that model: walkable, tight-knit, and with a common house for communal meals and daily gathering. Our members are a mix of families with school-age kids, newly empty-nesters, retirees, and everything in between. When it’s fully built, the village will have about 80 to 100 residents.

In the meantime, while waiting for the project to finish construction, we live with my in-laws. The shift from single-family home to multigenerational household already has me feeling the fresh air of a new paradigm. This morning Maeva climbed out of bed at 6 AM and toddled across the yard to her grandfather’s door. She knows he’s up early.

Knock knock knock.
“Papu, let’s make the pool!” 

Delighted, Papu set aside his scriptwriting and helped Maeva fill the new kiddie pool. That’s where we found them at 7 AM — two early risers, chatting about fishing.

As I sip my morning tea poolside, I imagine what it will be like when there’s a whole village for her to call home.

P.S. If you also dream of living in a community, we are looking for more households to join our project, Rooted Northwest. Maybe someday Maeva can knock on your door at 6 AM 😉. Please feel free to reach out to me with any questions at [email protected].