Late last year, I made my way hurriedly down the aisle and slid as quietly as I could into one of the last remaining seats. I’d been running late, as was my norm, and I had worried that my daughter would be looking at out from the stage and feel broken-hearted not to see me there. I made it just in time for her and the rest of her preschool class to start singing, breathing a deep sigh of relief. But really, I needn’t worry. In the row right behind me sat her dad and our long-time nanny, smiling brightly at my girl.
As the pageant wrapped up a merciful 20 minutes later and the aisles filled with a bustle of children lunging for their parents, my daughter’s teacher offered a big wave and warm grin. “Look!” she said, helping my daughter locate us, “Your whole team is here!”
My youngest child ran toward us with antler ears bouncing and arms outstretched. She ran first to her nanny, with whom she’s spent much of her days since she was toddling. Then equally enthusiastic hugs for me and for her dad.
I took a second to watch us like a scene in a movie. In the film version, there would be heartwarming music playing and this scene would be somewhere near the end, a hard-earned resolution of sorts. All of the characters standing worn and happy.
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I was thinking about that afternoon and the teacher’s comment recently as I reflected on what was making parenting lately feel – dare I say it – not actually that bad. I feel as though I am about to bring a curse upon my home or incur the wrath of exhausted moms of littles when I say this, here it is: I looked around recently and indeed realized that the experience of parenting had shifted from feeling almost impossible to basically manageable.
An unignorable aspect of that is the fact that the youngest of my four is just about school-aged now. These days, my nights are mostly not chopped up into two or three-hour increments, though I still have plenty of them with feet in my face. My kids can do chores, even if they act shocked and aggrieved whenever I remind them of them.
But equally important to this experience of a liveable parenting life has been what the teacher pointed out. My kids have an entire team.
In addition to their two parents and their nanny, they have a stepdad who is as loving and engaged as one could ever dream. While I’m certainly the lead parent when my kids are at their house with me, their stepdad is around for tea parties, video game battles, and homework reminders. My kids feel safe and held in his presence.
And their team doesn’t end there. They have living and local and loving grandparents, and they have friends’ parents who are my friends too, and who I trust implicitly to supply snacks, drive around, or lay down whatever law might be needed.
As I’ve written about before, one of the most surprising and relieving aspects of my divorce a few years ago was that it shockingly rebalanced the mental load. I’m well aware that this doesn’t happen universally, and in some cases the mental load substantially intensifies for moms in divorce, But in my case, it was a seismic enough shift that the cards got somewhat redealt. My kids’ dad still asks me questions he could Google (“What’s the last day of school again?”) but now he makes the dentist appointments and plans half of the birthday parties.
Divorce also did two other things. First, it forced me to lean harder into the help available to me by my community. Whereas before I’d been more hesitant to take up friends on what I knew were quite genuine offers for help with my kids, being on my own meant I didn’t have the luxury (or perhaps mental stamina) to say no. Unable to logistically manage solo, I began accepting more carpool offers and appreciating the limits our close friends would set for the kids. Meanwhile, our nanny became even more of a lifeline, stepping in for more transportation support and being a safe harbor for my kids in the midst of a big life transition. Second, as I mentioned, re-partnering meant that my kids got not another dad, certainly, but another warm-hearted, devoted adult in their lives who was looking out for their best interests.
I want to take a moment to acknowledge the immense privilege of my experience. I’m not blind to it. I have a devoted father as an ex-husband. I had the resources to employ a committed childcare provider. I found a loving partner to support me as a parent. None of these are givens.
What divorce did, ultimately, was to put into stark relief for me a truth that is valid and imperative for parents and families of all types. I saw clearly that parenting was never meant to be done alone. That all kids need not just one or even two parents, but many. That trying to be every form of parent and support that our children need is bound to result in burnout. That they – and we – absolutely need a team.
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There’s an anthropological term for all the care I’m describing, and it’s called alloparenting. Legendary researcher and prolific author, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, introduced the term allomother to describe the women doing the important work of mothering for children who were not their offspring.
In her extensive body of work, Hrdy makes the case that mothers in earlier times simply could not have produced as many children – helpful, obviously, for the propagation of the species – or contributed in the necessary ways to the social group without the alloparent infrastructure. This wasn’t a matter of neighbors popping by on a free afternoon to hold the baby to give mom a break, but an integral feature of the community structure.
For more than 95% of human history – somewhere around 200,000 years – we lived this way, with alloparents doing an immense amount of caregiving for their group’s young. Scientists believe that this practice of communal caretaking was so vital that we can see it in the way that our brains are wired. Studies have identified what can be called the alloparent substrate, the mechanisms of our neurobiology that drive us toward this type of care. As one example, we can observe how humans have evolved to have many more receptor sites for oxytocin – a hormone that urges us to nurture. Brain scans have shown the way in which oxytocin increases alloparental care.
What this all means is that evolution has primed us to take care of “other” kids. Historically living in groups of between 30 and 150 people, the concept of children being raised by the village was quite literal. In fact, according to Elena Bridgers who writes the award-winning Substack, Motherhood Until Yesterday, in many early societies, children under age three spent only about 25% of their time with their biological mother.
Depending on the era in which you were yourself absorbing messages about mothering, this may or may not be as shocking. As someone who stepped into motherhood at an apex of attachment parenting in the culture, this goes against so much of the information I had personally internalized. Both in the books I was reading as a new mom and the studying I’d done on attachment and healthy development in my doctoral work, I’d unequivocally gotten the message that babies and kids will do best when they can spend as much time with mom as possible. There were sometimes half-hearted footnotes as attempts to ease the guilt these ideas induced in moms for whom working outside the home wasn’t a matter of choice, but the idea of mother as penultimate and singular caregiver wasn’t sugar-coated.
One might argue that we now know better than they did in earlier societies, and that moms spending all of their time with their babies is indeed healthier for all – but the data just doesn’t seem to support this. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that shifting to a nuclear family model of caregiving has made us significantly less psychologically healthy. And developmental science studies repeatedly show that more adults in a child’s life decreases the mother’s postpartum depression, increasing children’s resilience, and supports healthier life transitions.
As we consider how to square the multiple truths at play – the fact that science does support the idea that children need lots (and lots) of attention, holding, comforting, and attunement and that humans seemed to be in better shape when moms spent statistically less time with children – an explanation emerges. It’s the idea that children indeed need all of those things very much, but they don’t need to get it all from one person – even mom.
I think that this is one of those ideas that many of us can get on board with cognitively, but the idea of mother as singularly capable of providing certain things is so entrenched in our psyches that our bodies still tell us this feels off. There can be this strange tension for many of us – we want to believe (and partly do) that others are quite capable of meeting our kids’ needs, but we also have parts of us that want very badly to be uniquely necessary. And of course we are necessary, but it’s also possible that we’ve made ourselves a little too necessary, even if only in our minds.
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What I observe is that so many mothers today – myself included – will lament the loss of the village, but then will deny ourselves the benefits of it that could actually be available to us. I’m not suggesting that we don’t come honestly to this reality. In a way, we are the prisoners who have slowly become our own guards. We’ve been for so long fed the idea that our children rely so fully and completely on us that we allow the culturally prescribed guilt to keep us locked in patterns of parenting that are killing us.
I realize that last statement sounds dramatic, but I believe the situation is actually pretty dire. Intensive parenting – the type that so many American mothers feel expected to do – is indeed drowning us. We feel anxious, sad, lonely, and guilty much, if not most, of the time. Covid taught us this starkly: within a year of the pandemic starting, isolated with their children,parents were two to three times more likely than non-parents to be suffering with a mental health disorder, according to UC Berkeley.
Even if we recognize the need for a shift, most of us have lived so far away from a true alloparent experience that we’re not even sure what that might look like in modern life. As I’ve been thinking about how we can lean into a more alloparental lifestyle, I’ve been looking around for examples. Here are a small handful:
- Setting up a system of shared meal preparation with friends or neighbors. Each family prepares two meals per week, but increases the quantity to feed the whole group. Families can eat together or do an exchange of meals and eat separately.
- Similarly, set up a system of shared childcare. Each family has one day or evening per week (or month) of caring for all of the kids, giving the other families a night or a few nights of time to do other things.
- Allowing or even asking other parents to have important conversations with your children. Research shows that kids having other supportive adults and mentors is quite beneficial. We can remember that we are not the only ones who are capable of having meaningful conversations with our kids about things as sensitive as puberty, consent, personal goals, hygiene, self-confidence, or more.
- Releasing the guilt of leaving your kids with caring others. It’s not just about entrusting them in others’ care at times (often, in fact), but doing so without them internalizing your feelings of remorse or fear or guilt that signal to them that this is somehow bad or scary.
- Getting comfortable with directly asking for help from both other parents and non-parents. Some of us will hesitate more to request child-related help from our non-parent family and friends, assuming that they won’t want to or feeling weird that we can’t repay the favor. But if the evolution of alloparenting tells us anything, it’s that non-parents are often the best resource and exactly where we should be seeking help.
Like her fellow Hrdy, Margaret Mead, the so-called “Grandmother of Anthropology,” was also fascinated with the concept of alloparenting, which she studied in places like Bali, Samoa, and New Guinea. She was so convinced of the power of this way of raising children that she very intentionally cultivated this dynamic in her own household, a system that allowed her then to travel and expand her work. Mead’s daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, later wrote in her own memoir years later that she loved this arrangement and the childhood it created for her.
“She set out to create a community for me to grow up in,” Bateson writes. “I did not grow up in a nuclear family or as an only child, but as a member of a flexible and welcoming extended family, full of children of all ages, in which five or six pairs of hands could be mobilized to shell peas or dry dishes.”
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While I hope I’ve painted a picture here of how an alloparental life can be supportive for all involved, I won’t pretend that paradigm shift isn’t difficult at both a societal and maybe emotional level. Creating an alloparental society again will require some work, inside and out.
The other day we were eating dinner when one of my older sons asked my youngest son who he loved the very best. I was inclined to redirect the question, perhaps on some level fearing the answer, but I let the moment play out. My littlest boy was quiet for a moment, looking sheepish. They pressed him a bit more and he said in a low voice, “Mom and [his nanny].”
My heart did a little drop, but then it rose again. I put an arm around his small shoulders, pulled him close, and kissed his head. I said, “And we both love you so much too.”
So many people do, which makes each and every one of us so very lucky.
