Villages are for everyone

Parenting gurus want you to pay for the things that used to be normal parts of life

Credit: Felix Mittermeier and Unsplash

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Recently, I read¹ this New York Magazine piece about Dr. Becky Kennedy. The piece states that Dr. Kennedy is one of the most influential voices in parenting, though I had not heard of her before. No wonder though; the article describes a gathering of Kennedy’s fans, who all appear to be wealthy Manhattan moms — which of course is not me.

But what really jumped out to me was the argument that parenting needs to be professionalized somehow².

“People accept that athletes have coaches, but they don’t think parents need coaches. But they do,” Dr. Kennedy’s business partner Erica Belsky told New York. “One of our goals is to elevate the role of the parent, to make it into something you might hire a coach for.”

That’s great if you’re an Upper West Side parent with time and money to spare. But most people don’t fall into that category. In fact, most people in Kennedy’s home city of New York don’t even fall into that category. Though media coverage often gives the impression that New York is a kind of District One in our collective Panem, the median household income in the Big Apple is just $76,607, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s not a huge sum to live on in one of the most expensive cities in the world³.

In other words, New York may be famous for its wealth, but in fact it is actually filled with people who earn middle class or lower wages. It’s still more Sesame Street than Succession.

Where were all these middle and lower-income earners the day of Kennedy’s gathering? Why did the event apparently draw such a homogenous group of rich people when it took place in one of the most diverse cities on the planet?

The answer is obvious: Because this idea of professionalized, ever more intensive parenting doesn’t scale up. It’s not really for everyone. And so we need a better, more egalitarian solution.

What I think is going on here is that Kennedy and a lot of parenting gurus have rightly noticed that people lack a supportive community — or village — and they’re trying to find replacements. But their solutions often just involve throwing money at the problem. Buy the books, pay the monthly subscriptions, hire all the right professionals, and voila, you’ve got yourself a village.

I’m skeptical that strategy actually works. Will a parenting coach help me remember the lyrics to the lullaby my mom sang? Can a monthly subscription instill in my kids a strong work ethic? Will an advice book preserve the stories of our ancestors?

Still, and as I’ve argued previously, this grasping for something that can replace a village is exceedingly common.

Take teenage babysitting, which according to a recent piece in the Atlantic is disappearing. The piece connects the issue to the rise of intensive parenting, among other things, which makes sense. But I also couldn’t help wonder if a big part of the problem is the collapse of communities that made teenage babysitting possible. My parents, for example, found all of their babysitters through our church congregation. More recently, my wife and I have struggled to find babysitters, but when we did eventually find someone, that contact again came through church.

These religious communities facilitated contacts, but they also offered a certain amount of vetting. A teenage babysitter with a shared religious or cultural background is going to have a basic understanding of a family’s values, for example, and may benefit from trust or friendship between parents. The community also provides some insurance to teenagers because the families they’re working for are not completely unknown.

The decline of religion, other social institutions, and “third places⁴” is well documented, and so it makes sense that parents and teenage babysitters would have more trouble today finding and trusting each other.⁵

That’s unfortunate for everyone, but I bring it up here in the context of the buy-a-village parenting philosophy because the Atlantic piece concludes with a discussion of “a babysitting-training program through the youth-leadership organization 4-H.” So, the solutions we’re talking about involve increased training and professionalization for babysitters. Sure.

And that’s the common thread here. Whether we’re talking about parenting gurus or the decline of teenage babysitting, again and again we’re trying to fix the problem of community breakdown with more money, more work, more professionalization — more of everything but community. The Atlantic article frames the decline of teenage babysitting as unfortunate, but doesn’t float the possibility of revitalizing the communities in which parents used to find babysitters. The New York piece doesn’t explore the fact that people of the past actually had parenting “coaches” — though they didn’t use that term — built into their communities. Why are we not making community building the goal?

I’ve made the point many times on this blog that we should be prioritizing village building as a means to solve our many family-related problems. It’s basically the whole thesis of Nuclear Meltdown.

But there’s a key point that I want to stress here, particularly in light of parenting gurus who cater to the rich: Villages are free⁶. Yes they require investments of time and energy. But there’s no monthly subscription. You don’t have to buy the book. Ticketmaster is not involved.

I think that’s why village building, difficult as it may be, is important. Fundamentally, it’s an egalitarian concept. You can exist in a village as a rich person or a poor person. Many actual villagers today, such as those described in books like Hunt Gather Parent, are by western standards quite “poor” (though I think that term is an inadequate way to describe traditional living that exists outside of the modern economy.) The concept has already scaled up, in many cultures and economic settings.

At the end of the day, we can’t turn everyone into the kind of person that attends rarified Dr. Kennedy events in Manhattan. But we can remind ourselves that once up a time, all of this parenting stuff that we’re supposed to pay for was a built-in feature of everyday life — and it didn’t cost any money at all.

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1. In truth I hate read the piece, which I think is the point; I suspect almost all news content about wealthy Manhattan parents is intentionally designed to simultaneously enrage and entertain the audience.

2. I was sufficiently annoyed by two other things mentioned in the Dr. Kennedy story that I wanted to discuss them here. The first is that one of the attendees at the event mentioned dropping her friends who weren’t into Kennedy. To each their own, but I thought this captured the way certain parenting worlds today have a kind of cult-like vibe. The second was this line: “One of the most striking aspects of the Good Inside approach is that it appears to emerge from the assumption that children feel worried and alone.” I’m sorry, but that just does not ring true to me at all. I’m sure some kids do default to a state of worry, but the vast majority of kids I have known in my life are not inherently worried. This feels like it is projecting parents’ anxieties onto kids in a potentially harmful way.

3. Similarly, the median value of an owner-occupied home in New York between 2018 and 2022 was $732,100 — again, not a huge value relative to the elevated housings costs of New York

4. A “third place” is a space that allows for social activity but which is not the home or a workplace. These can be parks, cafes, clubs, churches, etc. But in my mind one of the best examples is an English pub, which in the best cases functions as a sort of communal living room (and is rather unlike an American bar).

5. In fact, I’m skeptical that babysitting can function well at all for most people without a community that connects and vets people.

6. I’m anticipating some pushback here to the idea that villages are free, because of course they require plenty of effort to maintain, whether they’re literal villages or just communities of people. I mentioned my parents’ finding babysitters through church, for example, and it’s worth mentioning that my parents spent an immense amount of time on church, paid tithing, etc. But they weren’t paying for parenting coaching or an app to find babysitters, they were “paying” to strengthen the community generally. The shared values and stronger network were a collateral benefit. An analogy might be paying to build a house, which I later use to host parties and family dinners. I don’t then look at the party and think it cost me $500,000 because that how much the venue (my house) cost to build. I invested in a house, and then down the road enjoyed the benefits of having a house.