Is There a Secret to Having a ‘Village’?

Kathryn Jezer-Morton · 2025-11-08T12:00:11.589Z

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One of the painful realizations of new parenthood is that having friends is not the same thing as having a “village.” What constitutes a village anyway? I can’t say exactly, but to quote the late Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, “I know it when I see it.”

My husband and I didn’t have a village when we became parents. We did not live close to our families. It had been only a little over a year since we’d moved to a new city, so we didn’t have many friends, either. Of the few friends we did have, a couple had babies too, and those friendships kept me afloat during many an exhausted winter morning. But it wasn’t a village. There wasn’t much we could do for one another beyond keeping each other company. We certainly weren’t babysitting one another’s kids, and we could barely scrape together meals for ourselves let alone other people. We have happy memories from our first few years as parents, but it was a lonely time.

I got my first glimpse of what village life might look like three years into being a parent, when I was very pregnant with my second child. My husband announced he’d found a new tennis partner, a guy named David. He had three much older kids — high-school age, unimaginable — and when David invited us over for dinner, I could hardly believe it. We hadn’t been invited anywhere for dinner in what felt like, and might have actually been, years.

Their apartment was only a few blocks from ours. We were greeted by David’s wife, Sheri, an art teacher who immediately began referring to our 3-year-old by a new nickname, “Snuffy-Puffy,” which I soon learned is a default she uses for all smaller creatures. While we sat around the kitchen table waiting for dinner to be ready, Sheri set my son up with a whole pomegranate and showed him how to claw it apart, not flinching as he began to trash his entire vicinity with pith and seeds and juice. Their three kids drifted in and out. There were other kids over, too, with colorful streaks in their hair and good manners. David and Sheri’s daughter, Hannah, had made a plum cake, which was served for dessert with zero fanfare, as if having a child who bakes cakes were a taken-for-granted part of life. I was entranced by this vision of a tangible future I could see myself in.

In the months that followed, we became real friends, and their youngest son, Jack, became our 4-year-old’s favorite person and occasional babysitter. Once, Jack couldn’t make it on time to babysit, so he surprised us by sending over his friend Charlie, whom we’d met in passing a few times but who wasn’t what you’d call “babysitter material” — more of a moody young poet in a thrifted corduroy sport coat who may or may not have ever held a child prior to that evening. Nonetheless, we handed the kids over to him and went on our date night as planned, and Jack’s switcheroo is one of those stories we’ll enjoy into our dotage.

Becoming friends with that family was the start of our village. Village is really a misnomer — all you need is a couple of people in your corner. But even that feels out of reach for a lot of new parents — this is evident everywhere, from the memes of frazzled new moms joking that they’d “heard there would be a village” to the data about time use within families.

We’ve reached the blame-assigning stage of the village-discourse cycle. If families don’t have a village, it must be someone’s fault. Last year on Slate, the essayist who goes by the pseudonym Clare Haber-Harris wrote, “I’m starting to think you guys don’t really want a ‘village.’” The author’s claim was that many urban, upwardly mobile families structure their lives in ways that are actively anti-village, that their priorities make it really hard to pin them down into any kind of planning or accountability. I agree with parts of this argument — certainly a culture of striving and competition runs against the spirit of belonging to a village — but it doesn’t fully satisfy me.

Few writers have spent more time trying to get to the bottom of the conundrum of building community than Anne Helen Petersen. Over the past several years, she has written extensively about the dynamics between families and their child-free friends and the obstacles that can keep us from feeling a sense of belonging outside our immediate households. She has looked at the question from both sides: What parents can do to better integrate their child-free friends into their lives and how child-free people can show up better for their friends with kids.

Some parents might resent having something added to their list of things to do better, but perhaps that entire defensive position is part of what’s standing in the way of mind liberation. A theme that recurs among Petersen’s child-free commenters is that parents should silence the inner critic that harangues them about the impression they’re making with their messy houses, their loud children, their simple meals, their early bedtimes. Let yourself be perceived and even judged … and be free.

But there’s also a lot to be said for parents’ — and moms’, in particular, it gives me no pleasure to add — use of weaponized competence as a way of maintaining a certain kind of rigid “sanity” in their lives at the expense of a lot of unexpectedly nice outcomes.

Weaponized competence is the passive-aggressive insistence that no one else knows how to do things properly, so you’ll just do it yourself. If you’ve ever angrily cleaned a countertop while seething about how it must be nice being a complete fucking imbecile, you may be someone who uses your competence as a weapon. I have always had a problem with this, and it is ongoing, at the expense of, among other things, my children’s ability to make their own school lunches and my husband’s ability to make school lunches in a way that my children will enjoy. Do I love making school lunches? No, but I do it every single day because I built this fortress brick by brick, and now I refuse to leave it. I am trying to be less like this. That’s all I really have to say about that.

But the issue comes up in both Haber-Harris’s Slate essay and in Petersen’s writing: Letting people help you means accepting that they won’t do it exactly how you like it. Haber-Harris claims that bourgeois parents are too precious about their kids and whom they allow to care for them, and I wholeheartedly agree with that (I obviously don’t suffer from this particular hang-up, given what happened with Charlie). But I also know that no one chooses to become a frustrated and lonely parent. There is a kind of loneliness that makes a person double down. When nothing feels good, sometimes you have to warm yourself with the fire of your own resentment and disappointment. I suspect this maladaptive behavior is a win for consumer culture and that advertisers are subliminally encouraging us to turn inward — to self-care — and away from what can truly soothe us.

I sometimes wonder what the secret sauce was that made it easy for us to become close with David and Sheri, beyond the fact that they were interesting and we liked them. That is obviously not enough to overcome many parents’ self-imposed obstacles, so why did it work for us? Part of it, I suspect, was the flexibility that comes from precariousness. We didn’t have much money then and didn’t feel entitled to much control over our immediate circumstances because we lacked the resources to exert it. That’s also the reason we didn’t have much going on, so we started hanging out a lot.

Something that doesn’t get mentioned much in discussions of nuclear-family loneliness is the matter of age. It’s hard to build a life that you feel connected to without people to look up to. I’m not saying we can’t do anything without imitating other people. But I do know that hanging out with just your peers, mired in the narcissism of small differences, is overrated. You know what isn’t interesting, ever? Nervously comparing progress within a cohort of toddlers. Friends with older kids can be such a relief.

This past fall, we hosted a big get-together for my husband’s birthday, and David and Sheri’s family attended with the thrilling new addition of their grandson — the first grandchild in the village, an existential boost that feels prescription-strength. Everyone wants to hold the baby, to follow him around on his little journeys. At one point, my elder son asked Jack, who’s in his late 20s now, if he and his girlfriend were planning to have kids. (These are the sorts of questions you can get away with as a guileless teen.) When Jack replied that they weren’t sure about kids yet, my son pressed a little further: “I was thinking I could babysit your kids,” he said. “And then when I have kids, your kids can babysit them.” He had it all planned out.

Jack was laughing when he recounted this exchange. “It sounded like a pretty good deal, I had to admit.”