It Takes A Village (But We're Doing It Alone)

For the last 1.8 million years or so, children were raised village-style. But 2020 has meant a lot of us raising our kids without the usual help of grandparents or schools or caregivers or friends.

As New York Times parenting writer Jessica Grose explains: 

"Throughout basically all of human history, parents have never, ever raised children in isolated nuclear units the way they have been doing for much of 2020, with little to no hands-on family or community support."

And now we’re on month nine of no village. And it’s getting cold. And here come the holidays. Yes, this is as hard as you think it is.

The village doesn’t just benefit the kids– it helps the parents keep going, too. So make your own village, even if you don’t feel like it. Whatever community you can create right now counts, whether it's on Zoom or on social media or on a group text or in your podcast listening, or by posting your #danishbaby photos to our Facebook group, never apologize for what that village looks like. 

Here are links to the research and other writing on this topic that we discuss in this episode: 

• Jessica Grose for NYT: Parenting Was Never Meant to Be This Isolating
• https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/07/parenting/childcare-history-family.html
• Sarah Blaffer Hrdy for Natural History Magazine: Meet the Alloparents
• https://www.naturalhistorymag.com/htmlsite/0409/0409_feature.pdf
• Lynn Steger Strong for Time: Women Value Their Group Texts in Normal Times. During the Pandemic They've Become a Lifeline
• https://time.com/5894745/group-texts-women-coronavirus/
• Stephanie Coontz for The New Republic: The Way We Never Were
• https://newrepublic.com/article/132001/way-never

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