Building a village isn't easy — especially when you're parenting in the US

My husband and I had our first fight about childcare before our baby was even born. His small company offered four weeks of paid leave, and he'd be the very first employee to use it. The details were fuzzy, but my position was unequivocal: TAKE ALL OF IT.

He still hesitated, wondering aloud why the company, or his coworkers, should subsidize his leave for what was ultimately a personal decision to have a child.

I was shocked — these words coming from the mouth of an Englishman — a man deeply proud of the National Health Service, a publicly funded system built on the idea of collective responsibility for care. And yet, when it came to parenting, he'd absorbed a common American assumption: Raising children is a personal choice, and much of the responsibility for making it work falls to each family.

This mindset may help explain why building a "village" in the United States — the web of people, institutions, and norms that share the work of raising children so it doesn't fall on a single household — can feel like a full-time job. In some other countries, such as Sweden, public policies — and, to some extent, social norms — are often more structured to support parents, and it's why my friend is having a much different experience.

Parenting privately

The isolation many American parents feel isn't just anecdotal. "Finding your village" has become one of those phrases that's entrenched in the zeitgeist of modern American parenting.

The US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy cited 2023 data that shows 48% of parents with children under 18 say their stress is overwhelming most days, compared with 26% of other adults without children under 18, with loneliness and lack of support among the key stressors. A year later, he'd go on to issue an advisory about the parental mental-health crisis.

Science writer and researcher Elena Bridgers, whose work draws on the concept of evolutionary mismatch, which examines how contemporary lifestyles diverge from the environments of our ancestors, said it's not surprising to her.

"Especially in America, there's this myth and ideal of total self-sufficiency," she told me. "It's very harmful to our ability to build meaningful ties with people, and very much in denial of the fact that we are a species that evolved to be deeply interdependent and social."

As Bridgers put it, childcare has been "aggressively communal" throughout history, with different forms of "collective child-rearing" appearing across just about every known hunter-gather society. (And by "aggressively communal," I don't mean the way I screamed "your turn, see ya!" when my husband returned home last night from a work trip.)

In some ancestral cases, she said, this meant mothers did "as little as 25% of the active childcare in the first year of a baby's life," with their community making up for the other 75%.

A return to form isn't exactly practical in modern American society, although it is happening in pockets across the country. That type of communal parenting, such as multigenerational living, mom groups, and faith-based community organizations, is a reality for some American parents, and at times, the envy of other parents.

In some other countries, however, government policies are designed to support parents as part of civic life.

Take, for example, Sweden.

Sweden's 'life puzzle'

Christine Clancy, 40, my childhood friend and an American who now lives full-time in Karlstad, Sweden, tends to make suspiciously good decisions.

I remember thinking she'd especially "figured it out" when she left the US after college, moved to Europe, and never looked back. Later, she became a parent within one of the world's more robust public infrastructures for families.

Clancy pointed out, "What does Ikea, arguably Sweden's most recognizable export, offer the second you walk in? Småland — free childcare right at the entrance." It's a small detail, but also a revealing one: Making space for children in this country is part of the culture.

Over the summer, I spent time with Clancy's family in Karlstad, and what struck me most was how thoroughly parenthood is folded into everyday life, from the shopping carts at the supermarket with infant seats built in (not just ones for toddlers) to the cafés featuring small toy nooks ready and waiting for kids to invite play.

Though the US offers many of its own family-friendly touches in stores with similar amenities, Sweden seems to take the idea a step further with its family policy. Clancy will receive a barnbidrag or universal "child allowance" of about 1,250 Swedish kronor a month (roughly $136) per child until age 16.

When families have two or more children, they also receive a "flerbarnstillägg" or large family supplement, ranging from 150 SEK to over 1,740 SEK a month (roughly $15 to upward of $200), depending on the number of children.

Parents can still receive a monthly allowance — 1,250 SEK a month — after their kid turns 16 through "studiebidrag" as long as their child stays in school.

Swedish parents are also entitled to 480 days of paid leave per child, much of it compensated at around 80% of income. The leave can be split between partners and, in some limited cases, shared with other caregivers.

To be clear, this level of support comes with a tradeoff: higher taxes. Sweden collects roughly 41% of its economy in taxes, compared with about 25% in the US, but it also means families aren't privately shouldering as many costs for resources like childcare.

When Clancy had her son in 2023 — and dear Americans, brace yourself — she and her partner took some leave at the same time, which she framed less as an indulgence than a survival strategy.

"We would have died if we hadn't done that," she told me.

It's a far cry from a common split-parental-leave strategy in the US, where parents stagger their time off (sometimes with slight overlap) to drag it out for as long as possible.

In the US, family support at the federal level looks different, and access can depend a lot on workplace, household income, and location.

About 27% of private-sector workers have access to paid parental leave through their employer, and qualifying workers can use the Family and Medical Leave Act to take a job-protected, unpaid leave. The US also offers limited tax credits for parents and families.

Each US state offers subsidized childcare programs for low-income families, and some also provide publicly funded preschool options. Eligibility requirements vary by income and state.

Beyond direct support for the child, however, Sweden offers "RUT-avdrag," a tax deduction that can cover up to 50% of household services like babysitting and house cleaning, up to 75,000 SEK (roughly $8,000) a year.

Clancy described the difference between Sweden and the US as less about individual parenting choices and more about the systems that shape those choices. "Here, there's an understanding that there needs to be at least one person whose job it is to take care of the kid," she said. "Whereas in America, people are kind of like, 'Oh, you can piece it together.'"

Much like America's "village" verbiage, Sweden also has a common term for the ongoing familial balancing act: livspussel or "life puzzle." The phrase captures the reality of trying to fit the competing pieces of adult life (work, childcare, household labor, relationships, friendships, and self-care) into something resembling a functional week.

"People usually talk about it because it's a struggle to manage, so it's not an entirely positive term, but I will say that most workplaces in Sweden are quite understanding of the life puzzle for parents," Clancy said.

Even in a country designed to support parents, Clancy said, community support isn't automatic — especially for expats. Many Swedes, like Americans, maintain long-standing social networks, which can make it harder for newcomers to form a "village" right away.

In a country whose family policies are considered among the most generous in the world, parents still report trade-offs such as career slowdowns, uneven household dynamics, and the mental strain of balancing work and caregiving.

But when paid leave is more generous and public systems are more attuned to families with kids, you're at least less likely to feel like you're parenting from scratch.

Our messy American village

In the US, a lot of the "village" work falls first to the nuclear family, and when they tap out, to the private sector. The result is an ecosystem of services, apps, and AI tools that promise to make modern parenting more manageable.

I've tried some of these solutions, like Eve Rodsky's Fair Play card game, based on her book that makes invisible care work, historically held by women, visible. In theory, I love it: Each card lists a household or caregiving task, encourages a conversation around what's expected to get that task done, and gives couples a way to renegotiate the workload equitably without playing the "who's more tired" game until everyone is drained.

Even if the card game or similar solutions work, they reinforce a familiar premise in the US: that the solution lives largely inside the couple without changing the broader system in which the family operates.

It's partly why there's a rapidly growing market for emotional support tools, especially for mothers. Ohai and Em, for example, are AI-driven apps designed to help parents navigate and reduce the mental load of parenting.

With my first child, I had a group of real-life humans I could text at 2 a.m. with a picture of my baby's rear, and count on them to be a) awake and b) talk me out of rushing to the ER because I thought it was certainly some kind of rare tropical butt disease. (Spoiler alert: It was diaper rash.)

While tools like this can offer on-demand support for parents who don't have a "Mom Coven," they also raise questions about what might be lost. An app can't fully replace the slow, occasionally awkward process of building real relationships, or the broader systems that help make those connections possible.

Bridgers agreed.

"You're never going to fix maternal isolation or postpartum depression with an app," she said. "This is about how humans live together."

To me, a more promising category is programs and tech that actually help people commune in real life. The Parent Collective, a US-based prenatal education program, for example, brings expecting parents in the same area together for education and social events, aiming to provide them with a ready-made postpartum community.

I hate cooking so much that I also see some promise with Potluck, a meal-sharing platform that matches nearby families to batch-cook and swap meals. The pitch is practical: families cook less and waste less food. There's also the added value of more neighborly contact and opportunities for reciprocity.

Still, Claire Zulkey, mom of 10- and 13-year-olds in Evanston, Illinois, and author of the parenting newsletter Evil Witches, warned that if parents rely too heavily on technology, it can backfire, adding more stress than it relieves.

"When you have kids, so much technology is foisted upon you," the 46-year-old said. "There's all these different apps and systems for sports schedules and school communications."

What helped Zulkey's family wasn't tech or a special program — it was connecting with another nearby family with kids the same age. The families have been able to meet up spontaneously at the local playground and easily carpool to activities.

"We're basically each other's village, and we lucked into it," she said.

The American "village" may never look like a Scandinavian one. It will perhaps be messier: part government, part tech, part paid help, part neighbors who hopefully text back.