The “Village” Isn’t Supposed to Mean MORE Work For Moms

I don't want to organize more birthday parties; I want built-in help and friendship.

I have been reading a lot of content about the “village” lately. Cartoons Hate Her made some very valid points in her viral piece, “The Village Nobody Wants,” in which she claims that, while parents are all busy whining about the missing village, no one actually wants to put in the effort required (or make the necessary sacrifices) to have one. You may, for example, wish that your parents lived closer and could help out with the kids, but they live in Kansas and, quite frankly, YOU do not want to live in Kansas (even if your remote job allowed you to do so). So you move to New York City and then complain that your parents are never around to help.

Similarly, no one seems to want to put in the necessary effort to organize social gatherings. Parents whine incessantly about being “forced” to attend endless birthday parties in the same breath than they complain about social isolation (I’ll admit that I fall into this category. I hate kid birthday parties, not because I am antisocial, but because I hate hanging out by the ball pit and drinking juice boxes. So if it’s not at your house or a space that’s nice for adults, and there’s no beer, I’m not coming).

But it’s not just birthday parties. Even low-key hang-outs are constantly being canceled because we are all just “too busy.” Katherine Goldstein has also written a lot about this in her newsletter on community building. As she puts it, “Finding and investing in a community is not like online shopping, where you can endlessly scroll for the perfect fit and click a button to have it delivered frictionlessly to your door. You have to invest time in trying things out, showing up over and over again, building relationships, responding to messages, following through on your commitments, and not quitting the moment things get rocky.”

I think she is underestimating how much effort and dedication is required to find that perfect online item (preferably on sale or secondhand), and then make sure you are there (and your husband is not) when it’s delivered, but I get her point.

And then there’s all the boundary-setting. As Cartoons Hate Her rightly points out, “increasingly, the default advice to [new moms] is not to accept help, but to find all the ways to reject it, or ‘set boundaries.’” This is so true. If you don’t want people holding, touching, or kissing your baby then you absolutely do not want a village. The !Kung were not worried about people giving their baby cooties. On the contrary, they encouraged this intimate contact with other group members, because it’s what kicks off the chemical reactions that keep them invested in the survival of the kid.

But while these writers are all making very valid arguments about the difficulties of village-building in contemporary society, with all due respect, I think most discussions about the illusive “village” these days are kind of missing the point. The point is that the “village” is supposed to make things easier for moms, not create another set of time-consuming tasks.

You see, humans are lazy as fuck. It’s not our fault. We just evolved to conserve energy whenever possible. It was optimal behavior in a context in which we evolved, where calories were scarce and it took a lot of physical work to acquire them. As I’ve written about before, most hunter-gatherers spend about half of their waking hours in leisure. I mean, it’s actually kind of amazing how much we manage to do these days without losing our minds. If our ancient ancestors could see the typical daily schedule of a contemporary working parent, they probably would have instituted the death penalty for anyone who tried to plant anything. There goes Grug watering the wild cereals again. Let’s nip this in the bud, guys, before things get out of hand.

Then there’s this little thing called social anxiety. There’s a great New Yorker cartoon, which I unfortunately could not find (if anyone finds it, please send!) with this shrimpy little person labeled “some research on loneliness and how it’s bad for you” and this towering giant of a person with the label “social anxiety.”

That pretty much sums it up for me. I really want more friends. I recognize the fact that I am happier when I have more friends and spend more time with those friends, but making friends makes me want to wet my pants, especially because we never seem to be able to decide which country we actually want to settle in, and I seem to have a particular talent for committing social faux pas when meeting new people. For instance, a friend of mine back in San Francisco once introduced me to a friend of hers, who has a kid my son’s age, thinking we might all get along. Her kid had a gender-neutral name, long hair, and bangs. I spent a good portion of our chat complaining about how hard it is being a boy mom before realizing that her child is also a boy (which, in retrospect, is a stupid and risky line of conversation, but again, I’m just being honest about how bad I am at this).

What I am trying to say is that there are very legitimate reasons for why we shy away from social encounters in the modern context –social anxiety around strangers, the level of effort required to organize hang-outs, the awkwardness stemming from living in a socially and politically diverse world–that would not really have been problems in our evolutionary past.

For most of human evolutionary history, sociality–and social support with child-rearing–were just natural, emergent properties of group living. It wasn’t something we really had to put any extra effort into, or overcome crippling levels of social anxiety to enjoy. Yes, we had to have a lot of tolerance for actually living with other people, and being annoyed by them, and making compromises, and sharing our stuff, but it didn’t take a whole lot of extra work to have a conversation with another adult or to line up a babysitter. They were just there, all of the time, whether we liked it or not.

If, for example, you wanted one of the older kids to watch your little tyke while you went off gathering food, you didn’t have to log onto “urbansitter,” post a long description of what you were looking for, vet twenty eager-beaver teenagers to make sure they weren’t secret psychos, and then come up with a bunch of extra cash to pay them to make a mess of your house. They were just there, hanging out, playing with one another, and because they did not go to school and were not enrolled in millions of extracurricular activities, it was no skin off their nose to watch your kiddo for you for free. (I suppose you could make the argument that society was “paying” them for this work, since they were, in turn, fed by adults when they brought back the day’s harvest, but the nature of the arrangement was less explicitly transactional than it is today).

Early humans also knew everyone in their group intimately. Groups were fluid, and there were frequent additions and migrations (otherwise, incest would have been a big issue), but even if you left to join a new group, they were probably part of your extended social circle. You probably knew them already, and if you didn’t, your family certainly did. Gossip was the number one hunter-gatherer social activity, so chances were you had the tea on everyone before you even met them, and you knew to watch out for handsy Uncle Bonk, and that Cousin Ugga Wugga could not be trusted with an infant.

There was also extraordinary social homogeneity among groups of early humans. You didn’t have family reunions where Libertarian Cousin Sam systematically got into fights with Socialist Auntie May, and you wouldn’t have had tension between Grandpa who felt like the kids really needed a good spanking, and Mom, who had just finished watching all of Dr. Becky’s Instagram videos, and was trying desperately to explain to everyone that when little Jimmy has a tantrum, we need to take his feelings seriously and make sure he feels seen, otherwise he will never grow up into a well-adjusted adult.

And you probably would not have made the mistake that I did with the gender-ambiguous name-thing, because in many hunter-gatherer societies, like the !Kung, there are only about 30 possible names for each gender (and I hate to say it, but gender-neutral naming wasn’t really a thing among the !Kung, which is to say nothing about anything else, people, except that that’s just the way it was for them). Shared naming was important for maintaining social bonds, especially with non-kin, and bound you to a set of social obligations towards that person. So the more common your name was, the better, because the more alliances you had. With all due respect to Grimes (who apparently follows me on Instagram), there was no naming your children Exa Dark Sideræl and X Æ A-Xii just to be unique and edgy. (To be clear, I named my own children Viggo and Gaia and my midwestern American relatives were like WTF, Elena, so I’m not saying that I am above all of this, or that we should all do things the !Kung way). My point is simply that our ancient ancestors were much more likely to share a common worldview and set of social rules, which made social interactions easier.

At this point I think it’s worth mentioning that if you are motivated and willing to go do the work of building your village, and you have the guts to make small-talk with strangers at 10 AM on a Saturday with only juice-boxes for social courage, then more power to you, and we need more people like you in our communities. Now that my kids are 3 and 5, and actually play together sometimes without constantly coming up with new and creative ways of trying to kill one another, I will try to put more effort into improving our collective social lives. But when I had two under two, there was no WAY that I was going to be the one organizing a block party.

So, in the end, I think Cartoons Hate Her is right when she says, “You guys don’t want the village! You want a highly-vetted, safe nanny, who you can afford.”

Yes, that’s exactly what I want. I am okay with the nanny being 11 years old, but I want him or her to be trustworthy, vetted by my community, and affordable. And while we’re at it, I want more than one of them, including some older and more responsible ones, and I’d like them to be available 24/7 because that was the deal for most of human prehistory.

Of course, this means that I would have to be willing to live with other people, which is a thing that I think most contemporary Westerners (except for a few fringe weirdos, many of whom are my dear friends) sincerely do not want. We tried three different live-in au pairs when my kids were little and I could not make it work with a single one of them, so that’s not really a vote in favor of community living (my one-sided rationale for these repeated failures pretty much boils down to kids these days!)

On the other hand, hunter-gatherers did organize life around the nuclear family unit. It’s just that their shelters were small and temporary, and they lived most of their lives outdoors in the company of other group members. But they had their own hearths and did their own cooking in the family, and typically only slept together as a husband-wife pair, and with any children under age 10 or so.

Personally, I’d love to see more living spaces organized in this way: with family-friendly condos around the edge of a set of shared common recreational spaces. If there had been anything like this in the area we just moved to, I would have seriously considered it, even if it meant sacrificing my Pinterest-induced fantasies of owning a rustic French cottage with an acre of farmland where my children could run wild, naked and free, and I could wear gingham dresses with rain boots and make omelets from the eggs laid by my chickens that morning (something I would also probably get very tired of the second I realized that this kind of lifestyle is a lot of work, and I’d rather be arguing with people on the internet).

But even though communal living would solve a lot of the problems around loneliness and reducing the friction required to organize social gatherings, I don’t know if it would really solve the problem of moms needing more help. That’s because the common spaces aren’t likely to provide any real substitute childcare if no one is hanging out in the common spaces because everyone is too heavily enrolled in long school hours, extracurriculars, and busy going “out of town.”

At the end of the day, in the modern context anyway, daycare is the village, school is the village, the paid neighborhood babysitter is the village, not because they perfectly replicate our evolutionary past, but because these are the things that actually work to reduce mothers’ workloads, by allowing her to outsource part of the work of childcare, instead of adding to what is already an overwhelming amount of responsibility. Personally, I think we owe it to families to ensure that all of these services are higher quality, more affordable, and more easily accessible, because they were always supposed to be part of the package, not just a thing for people rich enough to afford them.

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, Nature basically made a deal with moms:

We’re going to make the experience of human motherhood really hard, as in harder than just about any other known animal (except for, maybe, the poor Octopus mom who literally kills herself cleaning and guarding her eggs. Where’s the gender equity movement for Octopi is what I wanna know) and in return, there’s gonna be a lot of built-in help. Birth is gonna be painful and risky. Breastfeeding is gonna nearly break you. But don’t worry, you’re only gonna have to do about 25% of the active childcare, because there will be 20 other people available to help.

And moms were like, Okay, fine. Deal. But then they took the help away (by “they”, I mean the inevitable progression of history–such an asshole, history). So we’re pissed. And we’re right to be pissed. We weren’t meant to do this alone, or with a husband who can’t figure out how to pick up toys, and it shouldn’t be all up to us to rebuild the missing network of social support, especially when no one else is making any reciprocal effort.