Communal Childcare for a Better Future

We Were Never Meant to Do This Alone

My son and his best bud and her younger brother on our annual family camping trip that encapsulates all that I want about raising my kid in community.

A couple weeks ago I traveled to a conference in Seattle–a three-ish hour train ride from me. Pre-children, the logistics of this little jaunt would’ve been nothing more than making sure I had time to pack my bag and get to the train station on time.

With a kid, however, there are seemingly a thousand more steps involved that start weeks in advance. One of those being my husband having to request time off work for two of the days I was gone. You see, my job makes me “the flexible parent.” The one who can receive the calls from school or drop what I’m doing if the kid gets sick or take him to appointments. My husband works in healthcare, though. While he’s fully “on” when he’s off work, his long shifts mean he’s already off to work by the time we even wake up in the morning and he’s often not home until the kid is in bed. As I was booking all my travel, I realized I had failed to have him request my travel day off and by that time I noticed, it was too late, his schedule was set. My train would be departing right around the time I’d have to be walking the kid to school and Cory would possibly not be home from work until 9pm. I also realized that our go-to childcare logistics backup–my sister and brother-in-law who live near us–would be out of town that week.

And so, two weeks before I was set to depart, I began to panic. Would I have to change my travel? But then I remembered all of the people we had befriended in our neighborhood over the last few months from starting Kindergarten at the neighborhood school. I enlisted our friends a block over to hang with Finch in the morning and walk him to school. And then I put out a call to our recently formed babysitting co-op* to find someone to pick him up from after care and get him fed and potentially to bed. 

It didn’t take too long for things to come together. And because we had already formed a mutual caregiving relationship in both formal and informal ways with these families, there was no guilt around the ask. They knew we’d do the same for them in a heartbeat. As I sat on the train texting with the friend watching Finch that morning (she was assuring me that he was, indeed, much happier than when I dropped him off), and another friend who was reminding me that we all have these shit moments as parents, my shoulders relaxed and I reflected on the gratitude I had for these people, this community around me, to help and to reassure me. In fact, it’s this kind of collective care–and perhaps an even more expansive kind–that I’ve been seeking since Finch was born six years ago. But there’s so much in the way our culture-built-on-individualism is set up to separate us from our neighbors and the people around us that we have to work very hard to create that community of collective care, especially when kids are involved. From the outset of this project, I knew I wanted that to become an element of the journey. I made a point to create that village to help raise my kid if it kills me.

But first, a disclaimer. I’m a White, middle-class mom in a pretty White middle-class community in a very White city. Simply put: I’m privileged both financially and racially. My parents could afford childcare growing up and we can afford childcare for my kid. That’s not to say it hasn’t taken a huge chunk out of our wallets the last 5+ years, but we can manage. With early childhood education largely falling on individuals through private education, a whole lot of people can’t even think about affording the exorbitant cost of childcare. On top of that, childcare professionals don’t get paid anywhere close to what they deserve, and, they are largely women of color who are in these low-paid, undervalued positions (that’s another justice issue I could write a whole story about). The lack of free, public childcare and early childhood education is one of the greatest failures in the U.S.

I say all of this because so many families have had no choice but to enlist their tight-knit communities for childcare help. Their family members, their neighbors, their communities around them provide the support they need. This is in the form of both childcare and other material needs. That’s the very heart of mutual aid, the solidarity-based support networks between people. I wrote about mutual aid in a previous post on anarchism, and it’s a concept I will continue to come back to. As Amanda Arnold wrote in this piece published in The Cut as mutual aid networks took on a whole new level of interest during the early pandemic, “throughout American history, wherever poor, marginalized communities have existed, often, so have mutual-aid networks…[which are] a form of solidarity-based support, in which communities unite against a common struggle, rather than leaving individuals to fend for themselves." And what better way to support one another than through collective child-rearing and childcare? Within these marginalized communities, people have had to band together to raise children. 

There is so much beauty in collective child-rearing. But I also wish and hope and advocate that we, as a society, should be doing more to create more connected communities around raising children that aren’t a last resort because of the exorbitant costs of childcare. What if the value of childcare and caretaking, in general, was more ingrained in our collective culture not just as a material need, but an emotional requirement?

These questions were already circling around my brain as I went up to Seattle where, it turns out the brilliant author, Angela Garbes, who wrote Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, sat on several panels. In a featured panel on “Writing Motherhood in Post-Roe America,” she read from her book and her words struck me as resonant with all that I was feeling and thinking that weekend:

Central to precolonial Philippine culture is bayanihan, which means communal solidarity. Its roots lie in the shared labor of faring, child-rearing, house-building, and house-moving. Throughout Philippine folk art, you’ll find a recurring image of a group of people moving a nipa hut hoisted on bamboo sticks, a la Cleopatra being carried on a litter. In a tropical, monsoon-heavy climate, flooding is not uncommon. Though bayanihan, a community could relocate a family by lifting the home and moving it to higher ground….

In Modern American culture, that sort of tight-knit community structure seems increasingly rare. For centuries, extended personal networks have been eroded, replaced with privatized jobs and small, isolated kin units. ‘The extended family and relationships that could sustain families were transformed and professionalized,’ write [Raj] Patel and [Jason W.] Moore [in A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things]. A lack of shared responsibility and interconnectedness makes it difficult to find solutions for needs more easily addressed in community, such as childcare, meal preparation, and household maintenance. It leads to isolation and every-family-for-themsleves mentality. It leaves parents feeling common domestic strains as personal problems rather than structural ones.

Y’all, I cried hearing her read these words and I’m crying now having just written them down. What have we lost in our societal quest for wealth through capitalism? I wonder. I realize that my constant search for community, the Facebook groups for new moms I created, the email chain of new Kindergarten parents I started, and the organization for writer-moms I helped co-found, are all because I felt there was something missing in my life. They are an attempt to create that village, that community, that we are naturally inclined toward but modern American culture is not designed for.

So what does this have to do with climate change or the apocalypse? In my opinion, everything. We are where we are with our climate situation because of the individualism capitalism drives us to. We are having to raise our children by ourselves, not together with others, because of capitalism and because of the dissolution of the tight-knit community. Part of this whole journey for me is to re-envision what a better future could be for all people and then take steps to make that happen. 

And what do I want? I want collective childcare to be a part of all of our futures because it means more than being able to go out on the occasional date night with my partner. It means a deeper community. I especially feel this having an only child who I want to be raised with other kids that are not his siblings.

We have a taste of that community through babysitting co-ops and my sister’s family who lives down the street. But I get even grander visions about what it’s like to raise my child within a village during our annual camping trip with our best family friends (see the picture up top). In these three days in the woods together, the parents are sharing in all of the daily activities from cooking to cleaning to child-watching to playing. Certainly, we’re a bit more in tune with our own child’s needs and we’re responsible for putting our own offspring to bed. But everything else turns into an unspoken collective responsibility. I always come away from those weekends wanting more of that every day.

I want what Angela Garbes describes. And so I’ll leave you with her words because she does a damn good job at describing what I want and what we all need:

Meal trains, playdates, and hand-me-downs are not proper substitutes for a society that provides affordable childcare, adequate wages, and time for leisure, but these patchwork solutions are precisely how so many of us survive. We will always find a way to take care of one another. When we lean into this natural, unstoppable, and very human urge, the results are expansive. And I want more.

I want more friends, more casual impromptu hangs, more dropping by with dinner, more walking and talking and advice sessions, more kids underfoot, more asking for and saying what we need, more hands to carry heavy boxes, more laughing and cackling and snorting, more children farting at the dinner table, more of what makes life mess, less painful, more sweet. I want to give and receive, to always be swapping tupperware and food, all of us crowded together like curvy lumpen mangoes in a baking dish.

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*More on the babysitting co-op I mentioned above. In case the idea of a babysitting co-op interests you, it has truly played an outsized role in my son’s early babyhood from a co-op formed in our previous neighborhood and now into his school years with a few fellow Kindergarten parents just beginning to form one. 

Essentially, a babysitting co-op is a grassroots effort of families coming together to share babysitting responsibilities. There are a number of ways to form and the co-ops I’ve been a part of have been as small as five families and as big as 15. The “currency” (to use a very capitalist term for a very community-based activity) is the hours spent babysitting. Not only has it been great to have free childcare, but there’s a built-in community and emergency network with these families. In fact, I realized as I was heading up to Seattle that every single emergency contact on Finch’s school pick-up list was either out of town or across the river, so I frantically texted my friend who was babysitting Finch that night to see if I could add her. )It does help that this friend is also an old college friend and we’ve known each other for almost 25 years.) And of course, she said I could! Here’s a great guide on how to form one on your own. Also, if this is something you want to do, feel free to reach out and I can let you know how the ones I’ve been a part of were organized.