When I was growing up, more people knew their neighbors, especially the ones with kids. The kids knew which houses they could go to. So, if, say, your mother went shopping and wasn't home when you got back from school, you could drop in on one of the neighbors and hang out until your mom came home. Or, houses that you could go and play at if your mom needed to go and run an errand.
Nowadays, the number of neighborhoods where the neighbors know each other and support each others kids are fewer and further between (despite the one poster above who says she has a village of neighbors). I remember on days like with unexpected early pickup (I remember one day we went to school and during the day, a pipe froze and burst and they shut off water to the school, so we had to be sent home early), that some of the moms would call around and talk to each other and one mom would go and pick up like 5 kids from school and bring them home. The parents would call the school, we'd get an announcement to come to the office and we'd hang there until someone came to pick us up.

In addition to more people having remote extended family and no local family, this type of "village" support is gone, too.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I have a in village. It’s not family, it’s friends and neighbors with similar age kids. I help them and they help us, it’s rare but we know we are there for each other.
Last week during a storm my kid (11) was at the pool and they closed for thunder. I wasn’t there, a friend of mine brought her home, that’s being a village….

Meh. That’s not a “village.” That’s an emergency contact. Does the friend watch your kid while you work?

I agree with this. I think with lots of dual income couples and families whose lives are just scheduled down to the minute, it's really hard to form the kinds of casual, meaningful villages that families had in the past. I can remember spending all afternoon or even all day in the summer at neighbors homes while my mom got ready to teach an evening class or took a sibling to medical appointments. And it wasn't this carefully orchestrated thing, it was easy, because there were so many SAHMs around and the kids all knew each other, so asking a neighbor if they minded keeping me over for dinner was no thing. My mom did it for others too. That's a village -- where raising kids is truly a somewhat communal experience, and where something like bringing your kid home from the neighborhood pool during a thunderstorm wouldn't even register because it would happen twice a week without it even being discussed.

We've really individualized families and parenting and it creates huge inequalities in resources. Families with grandparents who are able and willing to help, or the financial resources to hire help, can self-sustain. Families without those resources limp along and hope nothing goes wrong. In a pinch, a friend or neighbor might be able to help with something, but it better not be a weekly thing or people will start avoiding your calls, because they too are trying to piece together childcare and manage two careers and kids, and they don't have the bandwidth to help.

Sad to say it, but SAHMs made a lot of things work back when they were more common. Heck, SAHMs enabled my mom to go to school and then work part-time throughout my childhood.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I have a village. It’s not family, it’s friends and neighbors with similar age kids. I help them and they help us, it’s rare but we know we are there for each other.
Last week during a storm my kid (11) was at the pool and they closed for thunder. I wasn’t there, a friend of mine brought her home, that’s being a village….

+1

The Village has to be reciprocal, OP - otherwise it is just “using someone”, which does happen.

I have been the friend who got used in this way and it's demoralizing. And also made me less willing to offer my time when people need it, because it's so draining to be generous with your time and energy only to have people totally disappear when you need help.

I think that's one of the big obstacles to forming a village. You need mutual buy in and reciprocity, and I think there are more people today who are happy to take and not to give, and that in turns leads to people like me, who have to learn to give less just for our own sanity.

+ Exactly this!

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I have a village. It’s not family, it’s friends and neighbors with similar age kids. I help them and they help us, it’s rare but we know we are there for each other.
Last week during a storm my kid (11) was at the pool and they closed for thunder. I wasn’t there, a friend of mine brought her home, that’s being a village….

+1

The Village has to be reciprocal, OP - otherwise it is just “using someone”, which does happen.

I have been the friend who got used in this way and it's demoralizing. And also made me less willing to offer my time when people need it, because it's so draining to be generous with your time and energy only to have people totally disappear when you need help.

I think that's one of the big obstacles to forming a village. You need mutual buy in and reciprocity, and I think there are more people today who are happy to take and not to give, and that in turns leads to people like me, who have to learn to give less just for our own sanity.

Anonymous wrote:I have a in village. It’s not family, it’s friends and neighbors with similar age kids. I help them and they help us, it’s rare but we know we are there for each other.
Last week during a storm my kid (11) was at the pool and they closed for thunder. I wasn’t there, a friend of mine brought her home, that’s being a village….

Meh. That’s not a “village.” That’s an emergency contact. Does the friend watch your kid while you work?

For some people it's family -- grandparents and siblings. When I was a kid, my grandparents didn't help out my parents, and because of their ages they didn't get a lot of help from siblings either. Though they did get some, especially when their kids were first born.

However, we lived in a neighborhood with lots of families and there was a lot of community there. In summer all the kids played outside together and all the SAHMs (it was mostly SAHMs) kept an eye out for one another's kids. I remember my mom was also a member of the Women's Center in our town and I recall going to events there where all the kids just played together, sometimes with supervision from someone's teenage daughter or sometimes the moms took turns, and it offered the women a chance to talk and get a break, and they also did a bunch of charity and outreach to help women in town who were food insecure or needed housing. I recall making meals with them at a halfway house for women and kids coming out of DV situations, and doing an annual coat drive for families as well. Very community oriented.

I've sought to create that for myself as a mom and really struggled. There was some when I was on maternity leave, but then people go back to work and it's hard to maintain that mutual support. I was on a group thread with my new moms group but it fizzled after a few years and now I'm only in touch with two of the moms from that group and neither of them live in the neighborhood anymore (one not in the area at all actually). I've tried reaching out to other moms at my work but people aren't interested in that kind of support group it seems. I actually do volunteer work with a local organization that works with DV survivors, and while the organization is kid-friendly and obviously invested in families and in moms specifically, it hasn't resulted in anything I would call a village for me -- it is mostly another obligation and tax on my time (a very worthy one, granted, I love the work I do there) and not a source of support. It's really different than the time I spent in that Women's Center growing up.

So for me, the idea that "the village" women used to have has evaporated feels very real. Another thing that kind of shocks me is how competitive women can be with each other, including (perhaps especially) around mothering, and I think it gets in the way of being more supportive of each other. I don't really get why that would be given the great strides women have made in so many areas. I think my mom had a much easier time finding supportive mom friends than I have had. I'd do anything for that Women's Center vibe I remember from my childhood.

Anonymous wrote:I have a village. It’s not family, it’s friends and neighbors with similar age kids. I help them and they help us, it’s rare but we know we are there for each other.
Last week during a storm my kid (11) was at the pool and they closed for thunder. I wasn’t there, a friend of mine brought her home, that’s being a village….

+1

The Village has to be reciprocal, OP - otherwise it is just “using someone”, which does happen.

Well I might be about to go into labor early and my family can’t fly in right now and we have two other kids so we’re trying to figure out who we can call at 3am in case we need someone to watch the kids. It’s a tough ask of other parents of young kids who also have their hands full.

We have a family “village” right here in DC. All four of our kids grew up, got married (only one to a local) and stayed here. Three of them now have kids. We all help each other out all the time. No nannies, no day care, no sitters. We even share dogs ha ha.

I have a village. It’s not family, it’s friends and neighbors with similar age kids. I help them and they help us, it’s rare but we know we are there for each other.
Last week during a storm my kid (11) was at the pool and they closed for thunder. I wasn’t there, a friend of mine brought her home, that’s being a village….

Close family or hired help.

Family to help out. Often multiple generations living together, or nearby.

However to me, at least in the DMV, that's really the distant past. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, I, and most of my friends, didn't have extended family local to us. In the DC suburbs it was usually our parents having moved here from various parts of the country for employment and grandparents weren't here.

Back in the day - people may have lived closer to family - my parents didn't, though. You can still make your own village. I have a village that I've cultivated.

For me, it’s grandparents who step in and provide childcare on a regular basis. And my sister, who I see every weekend.

We always hear how modern moms don’t have “a village” like in the past. What exactly is the village? What are we missing that past moms had?