It Takes a Village! How we Built a Community and Share Childcare
You’ve heard this before: it takes a village to raise a child. In a city where many live far from family, parents find it tough. This is how we’ve built ours and what we’ve learned along the way.
[photo from the In Chan Kaajal community garden at 17th and Folsom, open to the public Saturdays 9-11am]
But first,
Free Community Events Round-up!
Community rollerskating on Monday afternoons in Hayes Valley, 3-6pm
Work and play at Manny’s for parents, Thursdays 11-1pm.
Night of Ideas has a family program this year! An afternoon of arts at the Main Library, Saturday March 2, 4-6pm.
Intergenerational singing at Mission Arts Center on Saturday March 2, 3-4.30pm.
Sequoia Fabrica is hosting crafts for families on March 9, 11-2pm.
Fort building and tunnels at Glen Park library on Saturday March 9, 10.30-12.30am.
CCSF offers parenting classes five times a week. Just drop-in to enroll.
Natural resources hosts play afternoons on Fridays 3.30-5pm.
Parks and rec has events for young children every day in various parts of the city.
The magnolias are in bloom at the Botanical Garden! Go soon if you want to catch them.
Bean Sprouts Family Days at the Botanical Garden are back on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.
Children’s Council playgroups are Tuesdays 10.45-11.45 at Dolores Park or online.
Ruth’s table hosts an intergenerational crafts workshop on Wednesday 1-3pm.
Join our Meetup group to get invitations to all our events! Also, the hours on our family swimming page are current (until March 9), and we will update them as soon as spring hours are posted. Joyful splashing!
We Need a Village
Many parents feel lonely. Many people past thirty find it difficult to make new friends. It doesn’t have to be this way! We’ve built many strong, deep friendships since becoming parents. Taking a community-based approach to raising our kids has allowed us to share childcare responsibilities and to learn helpful parenting strategies. But above all, it created the invaluable village we always needed.
Earlier this month, I was solo-parenting, my baby had a really bad night, and in the hazy morning I accidentally poured boiling water on my hand trying to make coffee. I called a friend, who took care of him for the day while I slept. Other friends made us dinner. Yet other friends brought the baby to and back from preschool the next day. Friends watched him on Saturday. Then another friend got me to leave him at her church daycare on Sunday. This is my village at work. I feel incredibly grateful, and wish we could all count on one.
Many Eyes Makes Child Rearing Easy
There’s been a lot of coverage recently on cooperative childcare. Instead of hiring help, parents and family, by blood or by choice, help each other raise children. For Romper, Elizabeth Doerr describes her Portland-based babysitting cooperative, where parents cash in and out childcare hours. For The Guardian, Adrienne Matei talked to parents building communities: organizers of baby happy hours in Vancouver and parents living in an intentional community in Oakland called Radish. Baby happy hours enable parents to meet and talk while children play, a formula we love too. Cooperative living goes even further and offers a vision of how our world could be: parents describe being always able to find someone to keep an eye on the baby monitor when they go out at night, and a supportive environment for their family with many eyes and hands during the day. For non-parents, it’s a chance to live near the wonderful creative energy of children before (or instead) becoming parents themselves, and a setting in which they will be similarly supported.
Caring for others makes us happier and healthier - as long as it does not take over our life. But we’ve found that it’s not that easy to get started with a more cooperative way of living. It’s hard to trust others to care for our kids, especially when they are little. It’s hard to believe we can take care of multiple kids when we already feel like we’re struggling with our own. Yet, in many ways, many kids are easier than one! They entertain each other, they’re happy to be together, you can’t stress about details, and then again: in turn, it gives you more free time to yourself.
Here are what we’ve found useful, why cooperative childcare may be especially hard in San Francisco. And we’d love to hear your own stories of cooperative childcare.
Playground Parents and Playdates
Have you ever looked after another kid at the playground to let their parents go to the restroom? That’s cooperative childcare! Have you helped look after a bunch of kids at one of our events? That’s cooperative childcare. From a very young age, we got our kids together for impromptu dinners, playdate afternoons or time at the playground. They may not play with each other, but they were still together. We became comfortable with their needs and habits, and they became comfortable with us. It requires little organization, and it gave us time to hang out with other adults.
Kids Swaps
Next, we did kids swap, first for a couple hours, and stretching to a day. I worked part time for months using baby-swaps as my childcare! It’s easier to live nearby, and requires parents to have similar needs and schedules, like being both on maternity leave or part time work with flexibility. It started with helping out during a medical appointment and a yoga class after meeting at a Joyful Parenting meetup, and it went so well we continued until one of the babies went to preschool.
The Cool Aunt
The cool aunt is in! That is, women who have no children on their own but are a supportive adult to youth in their blood and chosen families. A bit eccentric, she’s a darling of social media (and parents and kids). Now, we don’t like this term so much because we’d love to live in a society where cool uncle is as much a thing. Everyone would benefit if men did as much childcare as women. But you’d be surprised by how many people would love to spend more time with children and for a variety of reasons don’t have children themselves.
We have friends who decided they wanted to be part of our children’s lives. They take them on fun outings, hang out at the playground, or drop by for brunch and dinner or to play for a bit. They’re dear friends we know we can count on in case of emergency. And bonus: for children, having supportive adults in their life who are not family is a protective factor and fosters emotional health. It gives them someone else to talk to, more support when they need it. It also makes for happier parents, likely strengthening family relationships. And our friends expose our kids to so many languages! We’re so lucky to have them as part of our kids' village, and… all it took was asking.
Flats are Great: the Building Childcare
Living in a multi-units house and an apartment complex afforded us to live very near other families and casually get help, for 10 minutes or a day, share dinner duties once or twice a week, and find baby ibuprofen in the middle of the night. Kids also get to run in the corridor, drop by for play time by themselves. One of our babies started knocking all by himself on his friend’s door at 17 months! Whenever he wants to go play, he points at the door, goes down the stairs, knocks and even opens the door himself if invited in. Seeing your baby’s friendships blossom is a true blessing.
Even if friends live next door, it gets more complicated. Navigating the sidewalk autonomously is dangerous. This is why we love this architectural project by Open Workshop suggesting ways to build cooperative housing within traditional San Francisco single homes. But in the meantime, finding and fostering your neighborhood parents' community is incredibly helpful. First, you could join your online parents groups, and see if anyone is organizing regular playdates. You could check family events at your local recreation center, community garden and library. We suggested some events to join at the top of this newsletter! And if you’re not finding events, how about starting one? It only requires posting on the mailing list and suggesting a time and a place. Parks and playgrounds, or cafes and beer gardens, make great meeting points.
You Need Time to Hang Out: Infrastructure for a Parent-Friendly Society
Infrastructure has a huge role to play in supporting a parent-friendly city. Building Joyful Parenting SF helped us a ton. It takes running into people regularly for these relationships to develop. We recently chatted with the founder of Recess Collective, a community play space that unfortunately closed during the pandemic - though they are still hosting wonderful events at Black Bird bookstore. It was inspiring to see how they supported parents by enabling children to play autonomously. On the other side of the Bay (but just a BART ride away), Parents’ Nook offers facilitated play spaces at OMCA. Elsewhere, family cafes (Eltern-kind cafes in Germany, Café des Enfants in France) and beer gardens with play structures completely change the equation.
While San Francisco has some amazing infrastructure for families, it still lacks intergenerational spaces. We’ve also heard many times that cooperative childcare is hard to build, because it’s much easier to rely on paid help - even though it doesn’t bring the same friendships and sense of community. We can do better! It’s a big reason we’re helping to build Sequoia Fabrica: we want a space that meets both parents and kids needs, where they can drop in, that is part of the local community (because everyone benefits to be near kids!) and builds the ties that help us thrive.
How about you? How do you find and sustain your community? Tell us, and let us know how we can help.
Going Further
Hunt, Gather, Parent is a book about ways of parenting in collaboration with your kids. It makes it sounds a little easier than it can be, but is still a great resource with lots of strategies.
Cooperative childcare is nothing new and is a cornerstone of materialist feminism. From the 1800s, there has been experiments to include cooperative childcare in housing projects, like the French Familistère. The Grand Domestic Revolution discusses how a community approach to care has been implemented in the past, and how it helped women thrive.
Speaking of cooperative housing, Saint Francis is a fascinating example of permanently affordable, cooperative housing built by a union.