"It Takes A Village..."
It Takes a Village... But We're All On Our Own Islands
The image my husband created captures a powerful truth about modern parenting: a single family stranded on a tiny island with the ironic caption "It takes a village." This visual metaphor struck a chord so deeply that we couldn't help but imagine expanding it to reflect the fuller reality of today's parenting landscape.
The Archipelago of Modern Families
Imagine this scene expanded: not just one family-island, but dozens scattered across the water. On each, you'd find remarkably similar situations—parents juggling remote work on laptops while tending to children's needs, families reinventing the wheel of childcare solutions, each household independently managing their own education systems, meal planning, emotional support, and career demands.
Every island has the same basic needs: food, shelter, education, healthcare, emotional support. Yet instead of shared resources and support systems, we've created a world where each family unit must somehow provide all these things independently. The modern nuclear family isn't just isolated—it's overburdened by design.
The Cruise Ship of Retirement
Perhaps the most poignant addition to this metaphor would be the cruise ship sailing past these struggling islands. On board are the grandparents and elders of our society—a generation who in previous eras might have been deeply integrated into the childcare system. Instead, they're enjoying well-earned retirement, taking selfies, sipping martinis, and living lives entirely separate from the daily struggles of young families.
This isn't to blame them—they worked hard and saved for this independence. Many would actually love more connection with younger generations. But our social structures have created this separation, where the wisdom, time, and energy of older adults is structurally disconnected from families who desperately need support.
Meanwhile, there's a bittersweet irony that today's island-bound parents are funding these retirement benefits through their taxes and Social Security contributions, while facing the increasingly likely prospect that similar benefits won't exist when their turn comes. We're paying into a system that we're told will be insolvent by the time we reach retirement age.
The Impossible Mental Gymnastics
What makes these islands particularly treacherous is the constant cognitive switching required of parents. We leap from focused work tasks to immediate childcare needs, from professional emails to emotional meltdowns, from strategic planning to building block towers—often within minutes.
We were promised that technology would make this easier. Email, smartphones, and remote work were supposed to increase productivity and flexibility. Instead, they've often created a never-ending blend of responsibilities without clear boundaries. The mental load of constant context-switching doesn't just make us less effective at work—it makes us less present as parents.
Men Are Rowing Harder, But Women's Boats Are Still Sinking
Another island in this metaphor might show the reality of gender dynamics in modern parenting. Today's fathers are generally doing more childcare and housework than any previous generation. They're rowing furiously to keep their islands afloat, taking on tasks their own fathers never contemplated.
Yet research consistently shows that women still shoulder a disproportionate share of both childcare and the invisible mental load of family management. Even as men step up, the overall burden has grown so large that women remain overwhelmed despite increased male participation. Both parents are working harder than ever, but the distribution remains uneven, and the total load has become unsustainable for anyone.
The Institutional Barriers Paradox
The irony of our disconnected islands extends beyond family structures to the very institutions meant to support families. When I approached a local public school principal about creating more after-school programs, I was immediately redirected to either the PTA (volunteers) or the fundraising team (donations). The assumption was clear: community support must come either from free labor or charitable giving.
But I wasn't proposing charity. I was suggesting something more sustainable—businesses that operate with slightly reduced profit margins to better serve families, creating opportunities for parents to work in environments aligned with their children's schedules and needs. Enterprises that build autonomy, income, and community simultaneously. The binary thinking—either full-profit exploitation or unpaid volunteerism—leaves no room for this middle path where community needs and business sustainability can coexist.
This institutional rigidity extends to other organizations as well. In the women's clubs I sometimes attend as a working mother, I've encountered a striking disconnect: 3-hour lunch meetings and 9AM club gatherings scheduled with seemingly no awareness that these times are impossible for working parents. When they added a Zoom option, they considered it sufficient accommodation—not recognizing that the timing itself remains the fundamental barrier.
What's particularly poignant is that the president, proudly representing members who have belonged for over 50 years, often reminds us that the original club was founded by mothers who needed community support. Yet as these founding members aged, the organization calcified around their evolving needs and schedules. The very women who once benefited from flexibility and support now inadvertently gatekeep access through rigid structures and time commitments that reflect their current life stage rather than the needs of today's mothers.
This pattern repeats across countless community organizations. The founding generation, now in their 70s and 80s, can stand for hours greeting at events or attend midday meetings, but they lack the physical stamina for many hands-on volunteer activities. Meanwhile, younger members who could provide that energy can't access the leadership positions because committee meetings happen when they're at work or handling childcare.
The contrast becomes even more vivid in educational settings. In Spanish classes I attend for travelers—populated primarily by retirees—the teacher openly expresses her preference: "I love teaching seniors! They actually do the homework!" Of course they do—they have the time, mental bandwidth, and absence of competing demands that allow for this dedicated focus. Meanwhile, working parents like myself struggle to find even moments of mental clarity between professional responsibilities and childcare demands. There's simply no space left for homework, practice, or the kind of consistent engagement that instructors expect and reward. This isn't about commitment or intelligence—it's about the fundamental resource inequality of time and mental bandwidth across different life stages. When programs and communities are designed around expectations of "homework completion" and consistent attendance, they automatically favor those with time abundance while excluding those in the resource-scarce years of active parenting and career building.
For these societies to continue, they desperately need "young blood"—new members who bring fresh perspectives and energy. Yet the very structures that served yesterday's mothers have become barriers to today's. The resistance to change isn't malicious; it's simply the natural tendency of established systems to preserve what worked in the past. But when preservation becomes more important than purpose, organizations originally designed to support families end up reinforcing their isolation instead.
This generational gatekeeping represents another broken bridge in our village metaphor—places where connection could happen but doesn't because we've forgotten how to adapt our institutions to serve evolving needs rather than established preferences.
The Overburdened Partnership
As renowned relationship therapist Esther Perel points out, we've also placed an unprecedented strain on our romantic relationships. In the absence of the village, we now expect our partners to fulfill roles that historically would have been distributed across an entire community.
Our partners are expected to be our best friends, passionate lovers, co-parents, financial partners, intellectual equals, emotional supporters, spiritual companions, and practical problem-solvers—all at once. As Perel notes, we ask one person to provide what an entire village once did: stability, meaning, identity, continuity, transcendence, mystery, and awe.
This expectation creates an impossible burden on the very relationship that is most crucial to successfully raising children. The partnership that should be a source of strength and resilience in the challenging work of parenting instead becomes another source of stress as it buckles under these unrealistic expectations.
Our island metaphor captures this perfectly: two people alone, trying to be everything to each other and their children with no relief, no support, and no models beyond themselves. Is it any wonder that relationships strain under this pressure?
The Evolutionary Purpose of "Many Paws"
There's another layer to this metaphor worth exploring: the biological significance of menopause and its modern manifestation. What many women jokingly call entering the "many paws" phase—redirecting maternal nurturing instincts toward pet ownership—actually has deep evolutionary roots.
Scientific research suggests that menopause itself—a relatively uncommon phenomenon among mammals—evolved specifically to benefit human family structures. The "grandmother hypothesis" proposes that women live well past their fertile years precisely because post-reproductive grandmothers played a crucial role in the survival of their grandchildren. Studies show that historically, the presence of grandmothers significantly increased the survival rates of toddlers, especially in families with multiple children.
This is a remarkable evolutionary adaptation: humans evolved so that elders live longer and toddlers survive better as a result. Our species thrived not through isolated nuclear families but through intergenerational support systems where post-menopausal women contributed vital childcare, knowledge transfer, and resource gathering that allowed their adult children to continue reproducing successfully.
Today, many older women joke about redirecting these caregiving instincts toward pets, saying they've "put in their time" raising children. And in many ways, they have—but they also benefited from supports that no longer exist. They raised children in an era with more extended family involvement and often in single-income households where one parent could focus primarily on childrearing.
The cruise ship in our metaphor isn't just about retirement—it's about the disruption of a biological system that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. What we're experiencing as isolated family islands isn't just a social inconvenience—it's a mismatch with our evolutionary design. Babies and children thrive best with both parents (especially mothers in early development) plus grandparents, who not only directly support the children but also make it easier for parents to parent while maintaining their own well-being and relationships.
Rebuilding the Village (Without Moving Back Home)
To be clear, rebuilding the village doesn't mean returning to live with our birth parents or recreating patriarchal family structures. The goal isn't regression but thoughtful progression toward new models of community support.
Modern families need the freedom to build lives based on opportunity and compatibility rather than being tethered to the zipcode of their birth family. We need social structures that allow for both mobility and connection—chosen families and communities rather than obligatory ones.
The Safety Paradox
Perhaps the most challenging aspect of rebuilding intergenerational connections is the safety paradox. We've created important safeguards to protect children from abuse—background checks for childcare workers, protocols in schools, awareness about inappropriate touch. These protections are vital.
Yet in establishing these boundaries, we've also created environments where elementary school teachers can't hug distressed children or help with basic needs like bathroom assistance. We've eroded casual community supervision of children in neighborhood spaces. We've made it harder for non-parental adults to form meaningful relationships with children.
The institutions once considered safest for children have proven otherwise. Churches, long believed to be sanctuaries where children could be safely left in the care of trusted community members, have been exposed as sites of widespread abuse in many cases. This betrayal of trust has further complicated our ability to rebuild community connections, leaving parents rightfully wary of entrusting their children to any institution or individual outside the immediate family.
The question becomes: How do we create environments where children are both safe AND nurtured by a broader community? How do we balance protection with the human need for physical comfort and diverse relationships? How do we rebuild trust in community care when so many traditional institutions have failed to protect the most vulnerable?
Practical Bridges Between Islands
What might rebuilding the village look like today, with these considerations in mind?
Intergenerational community centers where interactions happen in open, transparent spaces
Mentorship programs with appropriate training and oversight
Neighborhood-based childcare cooperatives among carefully vetted families
"Chosen grandparent" programs connecting older adults with young families
Workplaces that accommodate family life through flexibility and childcare support
Public spaces designed for community supervision rather than isolation
Trust-building community rituals that develop relationships over time
Education about healthy vs. unhealthy interactions for both children and adults
Economic recognition of care work regardless of who provides it
The physical design of our communities plays a crucial role in either fostering or preventing connection. Front patio spaces that face the street rather than private backyards, open doorways in dormitory settings, and intentionally designed shared spaces can naturally facilitate the casual interactions that build community. Costa Rica's model of green common spaces between properties offers a powerful alternative to the high fences and privacy hedges common in American suburbs. These architectural choices aren't just aesthetic—they're social infrastructure that determines whether we interact with neighbors or remain isolated on our islands.
A Vision for Connection With Autonomy
My ideal world isn't about returning to some mythical past where we lose our independence. It's about creating spaces where I can work on something individually while others nearby collectively watch several children. Places where we're not isolated fully, but can be when we need to. Where we're not reinventing the wheel and duplicating efforts in isolation, but sharing resources intelligently.
This reimagined community allows for flexibility and provides support during those challenging transitions between roles. I don't need to separate completely from my professional self to be present with my children, but I have the space to do so when necessary. The help comes in those transition moments—having someone else step in briefly while I shift mental gears, or having a communal space where both work and childcare happen simultaneously but separately.
This flattened, more enlightened world recognizes that none of us has to be everything individually. We can lean into our natural instincts, the roles we evolved into for important evolutionary reasons—adaptations that will take ten generations to change genetically even as our social structures have transformed overnight.
In this generation, what can we do for one another? Perhaps it starts simply:
Communal food spaces where families share the labor of nourishment
Rotating meal systems where one family creates the main course, another prepares salad and vegetables, and a third handles dessert and drinks
More potlucks, more gathering places centered around sharing real food with real nutrition
Nutritional education and practice that recognizes food's central role in development and community
I truly believe food plays a major role in rebuilding our village—not just as sustenance but as a foundation for health across generations. The benefits begin immediately—better energy, mood, and focus for everyone who participates—while simultaneously creating lasting change. Educating ourselves and our children about better ways to nourish our bodies at crucial developmental milestones could transform our collective wellbeing. We all wish someone had taught us earlier about nutrition that supports better bone structure, stronger immunity, and healthier microbiomes. We can start now for our grandchildren's and great-grandchildren's benefit, creating the knowledge legacy we wish had been created for us.
Our Collective Responsibility and Potential
It's worth remembering that participation in raising the next generation isn't limited to biological parents. None of us rose in isolation, and none of us should be relegated to isolation simply because we don't have children of our own. Every adult has both the capacity and responsibility to contribute to the village that raises all children—because ultimately, these children will become the society we all live in.
This recognition of our interdependence isn't revolutionary—it's deeply historical. Humans didn't rise to dominance through individual strength or even individual intelligence. We were never the strongest species, nor necessarily the smartest in terms of raw processing power. Our true evolutionary advantage was always our ability to cooperate, to learn collectively, to build knowledge across generations, and to organize in ways that transcended individual limitations.
In groups, humans can manifest both our greatest potential and our worst tendencies. Anonymity within large groups can bring out cruelty that no individual would enact alone. Yet cooperation also enables us to solve problems far beyond our individual capacity—to create sustainable systems that benefit not just humanity but all living things. Our collective intelligence, when properly harnessed, can overcome the diminishing returns and unsustainability of our current isolated approaches.
Co-working spaces with childcare where parents can work while remaining physically close to their children
Skill-sharing arrangements where each person contributes what they're naturally good at, rather than everyone struggling to be competent at everything
Flexible community spaces that allow for both connection and privacy as needed
We might also reconsider how we allocate community resources and attention. In affluent communities like Danville, California, we often see a disproportionate focus on senior activities—with committee after committee organizing events for those who already have the time and resources to create community. Meanwhile, families with young children—who perhaps need community support most urgently—find fewer organized opportunities for connection. A truly intergenerational community would balance these priorities, recognizing that children's events serve not just the children but create natural meeting points for adults of all ages.
As Sebastian Junger explores in his book "Tribe," we've created societies where we can afford our isolation, but at tremendous psychological cost. The paradox is striking: research shows less depression during times of collective hardship when people must rely on each other. In military settings and disaster responses, we often see mental health improve as people find purpose in supporting others. Our need to be needed is fundamental to our wellbeing. The ability to afford isolation—to provision our islands with everything money can buy—doesn't mean we benefit from this arrangement. In fact, our most affluent communities often report the highest rates of loneliness and disconnection, suggesting that material self-sufficiency fails to satisfy our deeper need for interdependence.
These aren't revolutionary ideas—they're evolutionary ones, aligned with how humans have thrived for millennia. They allow us to lean into our unique strengths and passions if we can just see this vision of interdependence with autonomy.
The truth is, those islands aren't natural formations—they're structures we've built through policy, economics, and cultural values that prioritize independence over interdependence. We can choose to build bridges instead, ones that respect both our need for connection and our desire for autonomy.
My husband's simple drawing captures a profound truth: we know it takes a village, yet we've built a world of isolated islands. The challenge ahead is creating new forms of community that honor both our evolutionary design and our modern aspirations—places where we can be together, apart, and everything in between, exactly as we need to be.
How do we ensure children are hugged, loved, and guided by multiple caring adults while also keeping them safe? By remembering that isolation isn't protection—connection is. And by building systems that recognize we are strongest not when we stand alone, but when we stand together with the freedom to be ourselves.
The path forward isn't a return to the past but a thoughtful integration of our ancestral wisdom with our modern knowledge. Because at our core, we remain the same cooperative species that once gathered around communal fires to share food, stories, and the essential work of raising the next generation—together.
