The Isolation of Intensive Parenting
If you were to ask me about the lowest point of my life as a parent, I could pinpoint it almost to the day. It was in early March 2021. The United Kingdom was a couple of months into its third and longest COVID lockdown. I had been living in the country for more than a year, but having arrived just a few months before the outbreak, I still felt like a stranger in town. My kids were 2 and 3 years old, and my youngest was going through a screaming phase. I was overwhelmed, depressed, and crushingly lonely. Something had to change.
“Household mixing” was, at the time, strictly prohibited. But tucked into the lockdown guidelines was a provision allowing parents to form a child-care bubble with one other family. So I sent a message to a WhatsApp group of local parents I’d been added to, asking if anyone was interested in forming such a bubble. Mercifully, a couple took me up on the offer—and they happened to live around the corner. Like us, they’d recently moved from the United States and had no family or friends to draw on for support. And like us, they had two young daughters. After a brief video call, we decided to take turns watching each other’s children for a few hours one evening a week.
It was, in hindsight, an audacious way to go about arranging child care. We didn’t really know these people. We had done no vetting and spoken little about what the children would do or eat while they were in the other household’s care. The expectation certainly wasn’t for either family to prepare special activities or entertainment for the kids—just to keep them alive for a few hours.
I didn’t presume that this desperation-induced pact would outlast the pandemic. But I was wrong about that. We’ve continued our “baby swap,” as we’ve come to call it, in an almost entirely unbroken pattern for nearly three years. In fact, it has grown: Now four families are involved. Two nights a week, one family takes all the children for three hours, giving the other parents an evening off. Even outside these formal arrangements, it has become fairly routine for us to watch one another’s kids as needed, for one-off Fridays or random overnights. A few months ago, while I was stirring a big pot of mac and cheese for the six kids scurrying around me, ranging in age from 2 to 7, I realized that, quite unintentionally, I’d built something like the proverbial “village” that so many modern parents go without.
[Read: What adults lost when kids stopped playing in the street]
Over time, I’ve concluded that the success of this laid-back setup isn’t a coincidence; our village thrives not despite the comically low expectations we have for one another, but because of them. And this, in turn, clarified something unexpected for me: The hovering, “intensive” approach to parenting that has steadily come to dominate American, and to some extent British, family life is simply incompatible with village building. You can try to micromanage your child’s care—whether they eat sugar, whether they get screen time, whether someone insists that a child apologize after snatching another kid’s toy—or you can have reliable community help with child care. But you can’t have both.
The term intensive parenting perhaps conjures images of achievement-obsessed parents drilling their 2-year-olds on their ABCs or pushing their 4-year-olds to take daily violin lessons. Here, I’m using the term a bit more broadly to encapsulate the tendency among many modern parents to assign outsize importance to any particular decision a parent or other caregiver makes. It reflects a highly deterministic view of child-rearing—one that offers parents little room for error. And these days, it comes in a variety of flavors. Some parents are neurotic about validating their kids’ emotions or guarding their individuality; others fixate on maximizing their career potential. Even those who repudiate overly achievement-focused parenting can become intensive about not pushing their kids, as if nudging a child to give soccer a try will somehow compromise their emotional development.
I believe that parenting, and parenting well, is important. It’s good to thoughtfully consider children’s needs. Taken to the extreme, though, the intensive approach can foreclose opportunities for community support. This is true in the simple sense that if your child’s schedule is jam-packed with enrichment activities, then it will be much harder for you and your would-be villagers to find time to help one another. (This was, no doubt, one reason it was so easy to coordinate baby swapping during the pandemic—we weren’t running around doing other things.) But it’s also true in a deeper sense: Inflating the importance of parental decisions assumes a degree of control over a child’s environment that is out of step with village life.
If you want to rely on your community, you have to rely on the community you’ve got. As the anonymous writer of the newsletter Cartoons Hate Her recently pointed out, parents who pine for a village cannot expect it to be “a bespoke neighborhood you might curate in The Sims”; traditionally, villages just consisted of “the people around us.” And you can’t expect to assert the same control you might in a paid babysitting arrangement. When I hire a sitter, we have a shared understanding that I’m still in charge—that I’m paying them to come into my home and largely replicate my systems of care. Money also helps cordon off the boundaries of an exchange: Once the service has been provided and the money handed over, each party can walk away knowing they’re settled up. But that’s not how “village” reciprocity works.
[Read: Don’t tell America the babysitter’s dead]
A village agreement is, in its way, transactional; our baby swap certainly involves a trade. But the nature of the deal is quite different. I’m not hiring the families around me to replicate all my household systems; I’m asking them to make room for my kids within their households for an evening, with the understanding that I’ll do the same for them.
Allowing each household to largely carry on doing its own thing makes the whole situation feel more relaxed. This arrangement is also better aligned with the real goal of village building: to forge a network of relationships defined by a sense of community obligation. In such a scenario, asking other households for help without settling up feels ordinary, because you’ll be in one another’s lives the next week and the week after that. The beauty of raising kids in a village is that, eventually, looking out for one another’s children starts to feel less like a series of one-off favors and more like an ordinary part of life.
Inevitably, building a village means developing trust. That means loosening up a bit, letting go of both judgments and self-consciousness about the varying ways that people live with and care for children. The kids in my little village can be quite frank about how our households differ. They don’t hesitate to let me know that my home is the messy house. And it’s something of a running joke that I pretty much never serve them anything but pasta. My husband and I are sticklers about “please” and “thank you” and basically never let the kids watch TV. Other families have their own rules and rituals. For this whole thing to work, I have to have faith that each household has its own sensible systems for managing manners, conflict, and screen time, and that whatever those systems are, they will not break my children.
Of course, I wouldn’t leave my kids with just anyone. Trusting people doesn’t mean never setting boundaries or never asking that accommodations be made for a child who needs them. But it does often mean accepting that other people will manage your child’s needs in ways that you wouldn’t. This can be a nerve-racking experience. It can also be an enriching and enlightening one. Handing off your children, relaxing your grip, might help chip away at the fears that make you think you need to control everything, and can show you that your children will adapt and thrive in a variety of settings. A village, that is, can provide one of the greatest gifts that anyone can offer parents: the reassurance that the path to raising healthy, well-adjusted kids isn’t as narrow as you think.