I used to be a huge booster of mutual aid, especially during the pandemic when all our systems were shuttered or collapsing under the pressure of serving so many people who were so much worse of than me. But now I really see how the idea of mutual aid exists because — as you say — we don’t have adequate supports in the first place. I’m writing from England where the beloved NHS (national health service) has served wealthy and poor for a few generations — everyone uses it and everyone believes in it (even though it’s been defunded by the conservative movement led by Thatcher 40 years ago). In the U.S. we’ve been brainwashed about how sinister public support for health care is. But it doesn’t have to be this way! Systems are designed. They can be re-designed.
Agree with you re the mythical village - massive eye rolls when people talk about this bc it’s so far from our current reality. Re mutual aid though - I think this is different. The village & mutual aid are two distinct things as far as I can tell. Mutual aid is about building non-hierarchical networks outside of institutions and I think we need this now more than ever. It’s not limited to exchanging childcare, in fact it’s not even about exchanging childcare (although caring for children can sometimes be part of it.) I’m a big fan of mutual aid and not sure it should be conflated with the village - they are not the same.
Thanks for making this distinction. Some readers on our weekly chat also spoke to these concepts as chosen family and communities that have been life saving, esp for queer communities and anyone looking for something outside the narrow concept of the traditional “nuclear family.”
I’ve stayed home with my kids for the last seven years in part because of high childcare costs. I’ve taken on some summer gap help for a neighbor occasionally, sometimes paid, sometimes not. I also feel the lack of the village. With everyone else at camps or with nannys, there’s no one around to watch my kids for a few hours so I can go to the dentist or, ya know, do something fun. My partner rearranges his schedule for doctor appointments, but that can’t be done for consistent “self care” time. It is even difficult to arrange a communal play date with all the various kid schedules. In many ways my household is so lucky that I can afford to stay home, but it still doesn’t feel idyllic and I often bristle feeling like I’m making my life smaller to fill this gap.
Fantastic article and really thoughtful comments here too. The only time I've really heard of anything approaching a proper village in the 2020s is in churches. Some people who I know attend, and when someone has a baby they organise meal, laundry and visit rotas to try and share as much of the other labour as possible. Makes me very envious! I think it only works because there are enough older parents (if we're honest, mums) who know what it's like but no longer have their own small children occupying all of their resources.
Beverley I also think about this exact thing! I was raised in a high demand religion that did provide support but was conditional on a belief system that was oppressive and exploitative to women, so it felt like a catch 22. How to build this outside of religion is something I’m fascinated by.
Thanks for naming how hard it is to actually follow the "it takes a village" approach. A village is so hard to build, and once again this "advice" is individualizing something that used to be much more culturally and systemically valued than it is now.
While the systemic realities need changing, I also have thought a lot about this on the individual level lately because I have such a hard time asking for help - for similar reasons that you name here - the people I'm closest to are also the busiest and I know some intricate details about their overwhelm... so how could I possibly ask them to also catch some of mine? But then I think about when I've been on the other side and it feels different. I'm so much more comfortable figuring out how to support others than how to ask for support when I need it. For anyone else also untangling some of these ideas around asking and receiving help, I wrote a bit more about this recently here: https://meredythpcooper.substack.com/p/how-can-i-help-you
Thanks as always for your post! I read every week and don't always have time to comment, but I was motivated to reply this week - so much to think about in this one.
Thanks so much Meredyth!! This whole convo here has me thinking about how we define terms and what a true community looks like and how to overcome the obstacles to move toward it.
10000000%. The idea of the village only works in very specific contexts. This hit me like a ton of bricks when I was a young mother living 2000 miles from my hometown with a partner working 80 hour work weeks. I had joined a babysitting coop, smugly applauding myself for proactively building my own village. Life quickly smacked down my hubris. What I saw working for so many of the moms in the coop just didn’t work for me or my kids. I badly needed childcare, but my children were very anxious and fussy even as babies/toddlers (we now know they’re all neurodivergent!) I simply could not, in real-time, “put in” nearly as much as I took out because the care of my own children was so intensive. I missed the six week postpartum well check after having my youngest two children, which says a lot about the level of care we provide mothers. 🫠
Yesssss this is so true! I can remember so many times being in a pinch and needing child care thinking “I could call Jenny…no she’s so busy. I could call Lisa… Lisa would say yes but only bc she can’t say no! Is that ethical of me to take advantage of someone who can’t say no?!?!?” And on the flip side - one of the reasons I’m hesitant to jump into PTA is bc I’m bad at saying no under pressure but then I resent saying yes so I avoid community altogether to avoid being put in those situations. All that to say - all of it is lose lose. It’s lose lose to take advantage of women like my friend Lisa, like the mother of the infant in your article- free unpaid female labor. It’s lose lose to need to pay the price of free unpaid female labor in order to have friends . All of it sucks and why haven’t we learned from our European friends?!?!?!?!?
I fantasize about Nordic country-level support, don’t we all? How we ended up without it is a culture study unto itself but it doesn’t reflect well on the US 🙃
I have many thoughts on this. The "village" feels weaponized because Americans really don't know how to build community, and often don't think about it until they are facing a small or large crisis. Asking someone for an occasional favor isn't true community. Also, the things we need to change about our society about the social safety ney I don't think can change until we build up our personal communities more. No one in power is going to gift them to us: we have to have the time and bandwidth to demand political change.
Thanks for this Katherine, I love to hear your thoughts on this and I’ve been thinking about what you said here since I saw it. I’m intrigued by Americans not knowing how to build community and that seems to be the source of so many problems. I also find that community in my experience as an American was tied to high demand religion that oppressed and exploited women too, so it felt like a catch 22. But outside that context it has been harder to create community at times. Fascinated by all this and how it pertains to our current crises in the US.
Also this: “the things we need to change about our society about the social safety net I don't think can change until we build up our personal communities more.” Has me thinking about how we do not have a safety net *bc we don’t have community.
I just helped win a union at my workplace which is a perfect example of creating community *in order to create structural change.
Looking forward to hearing/reading anything you write about this!!
Yep. Very wary of “the village” when people raving about it seem to assume dads aren’t involved. The GoFundMe comparison is apt, with almost no structural support for caregiving and a prevailing societal attitude of “go figure it out for yourself, and if you’re stressed, that’s a you problem.”
When my kids were very little, a friend and I arranged our teaching schedules one semester so we could watch each other’s kids while the other taught. (She taught law school; I taught university undergrads.) That was a very idealistic and incredibly exhausting experiment — but it was also the only option that semester that allowed both of us to accept classes we were offered last minute, as we were both working our way back into the teaching rotation after having babies. Things are better now where I teach in terms of parents getting leave and not losing their place in the system, but wow was it not good in 1999.
My friend and I both underestimated the cost of caregiving in so many ways. The cost of paid childcare and the underlying assumption that it was somehow up to us as the female partners in our marriages to take care of all caregiving arrangements were issues we both were just starting to grapple with back then. There’s a reason I think of my friends who went through those years with me, sharing and trading childcare, as something akin to war comrades. We were fighting a really bad system just to keep working and taking care of our kids. We survived, but as one of my friends from back then says, “maybe not intact.” My goal is to do what I can to make it better for the younger generations of parents in whatever small way I can, by advocating for caregivers’ needs in my workplace for one thing.
Yes yes yes thank you for sharing this. This exactly! If you can piece it together it doesn’t mean it was okay and didn’t have a cost. For parents and kids!
My partner and I are still in shock a bit from the birth of our child 5 years ago and just slogging through w no help and no sleep and then a pandemic on top of it.
Most of all thank you for advocating for the rest of us!! So many people are like, I did it so can you.
Why would we want others to go through a terrible experience rather than improving it?!!
I have SO MANY thoughts about your last question above! The generation of feminists at my work who came before me, now in their 70s and 80s, were incredibly kind and also strongly encouraged me to pretend I didn’t have kids, essentially, telling me to hire my own subs during the “few weeks” I might need off when giving birth, etc.
They were all so understandably traumatized from many of their experiences as the first few women to be tenured in our department that I found I needed to disregard their advice at times. I know they meant to protect me, and I’m glad the work they had done meant my department chair at the time, a married father of four, took it for granted that of course the department would pay for my subs when I went on leave. Our union just negotiated much longer paid parental leaves this past year, and I’m thrilled for my younger colleagues. Next up, figuring out that people need time off to give care as parents age, etc!
My childfree friends repeat this often! Of course I would like for women to be able to comfortably have no kids or as many kids as they want. We have neither!
“Mutual aid is a beautiful idea, but I worry that in reality without structural support “the village” in the U.S. often—sometimes too often—comes down to exploiting free female labor.”
And there is an additional layer of “who gets to ask?”. Long-time leftists and community activists (like me!) love that the idea of mutual aid is becoming more mainstream, but you quickly find that concept of “peers” coming back to bite you. There is an old adage about “community can only be built amongst peers, but you don’t know who TF those people are”. This is where perceptions of class come into play. You ask someone with even slightly more than you for help and they say no, fearing you will continue to ask. You ask someone with less for help, even if you have helped them in the past, and they resent you for even asking since you have “more”. There is resentment for having bandwidth to help, for not “having” to work. Year after year I find myself learning new lessons around this.
I don’t work in a traditional way and have a lot of flexibility over my schedule, so I help out a LOT. I don’t mind, it made me feel useful during a period when I struggled with being pushed out of the job market by childcare costs and a husband whose work took him away for weeks at a time, but I tell everyone do it because you can NOT because you are banking karma for future help when you need it. You will be bitter and disappointed when you realize how many people expected you to provide free labor as if you owed them in some way.
Mutual aid can be beautiful, but it is so, SO hard to do long term. Social workers know all of this and smile with pity at us all. In Denver, we have this amazing Buddhist nun, Virya, and when she asks for money I fork it over. She is the only mutual aid worker I have met in 20 years who is consistent and honest. Prepare to be heartbroken over and over if you are looking for a Virya, or to incorporate a system that gives to a Virya and takes to give back to you. The first step is just really finding people you trust with your money. Once you sort of master that, or feel comfortable, your peers will pop out at you. I envy those who just sort of have these two-way networks, I’ve never had or been able to join one!!!
Patriarchy and corporate greed junkies can appropriate and exploit anything, can’t they?
Being part of a community or tribe where there’s enough time and resources to maintain social ties and care for each other strikes me as the most natural way to live, the best way to raise children, to grow old.
Our mobile and individualist culture means we have to find, join, or build those our communities from scratch - very time and labor intensive! - at the same moment we are stretched to the breaking point by a financialized economy and venture-capital extractors, who then have the nerve - the fucking NERVE!!! - to tell us to ask for help from each other if we need childcare or support as a new mom.
I think we need a standard, shaming response that pushes back publicly to any “lean on your village” message: what is your institution, its investors, and owners doing to ensure that within our community, that help is widely available?
I used to be a huge booster of mutual aid, especially during the pandemic when all our systems were shuttered or collapsing under the pressure of serving so many people who were so much worse of than me. But now I really see how the idea of mutual aid exists because — as you say — we don’t have adequate supports in the first place. I’m writing from England where the beloved NHS (national health service) has served wealthy and poor for a few generations — everyone uses it and everyone believes in it (even though it’s been defunded by the conservative movement led by Thatcher 40 years ago). In the U.S. we’ve been brainwashed about how sinister public support for health care is. But it doesn’t have to be this way! Systems are designed. They can be re-designed.
Amen and amen!!
Mutual aid is lovely when people have enough resources to give. When they do t it does feel like a “sinister” solution kind of!
Agree with you re the mythical village - massive eye rolls when people talk about this bc it’s so far from our current reality. Re mutual aid though - I think this is different. The village & mutual aid are two distinct things as far as I can tell. Mutual aid is about building non-hierarchical networks outside of institutions and I think we need this now more than ever. It’s not limited to exchanging childcare, in fact it’s not even about exchanging childcare (although caring for children can sometimes be part of it.) I’m a big fan of mutual aid and not sure it should be conflated with the village - they are not the same.
Thanks for making this distinction. Some readers on our weekly chat also spoke to these concepts as chosen family and communities that have been life saving, esp for queer communities and anyone looking for something outside the narrow concept of the traditional “nuclear family.”
I’ve stayed home with my kids for the last seven years in part because of high childcare costs. I’ve taken on some summer gap help for a neighbor occasionally, sometimes paid, sometimes not. I also feel the lack of the village. With everyone else at camps or with nannys, there’s no one around to watch my kids for a few hours so I can go to the dentist or, ya know, do something fun. My partner rearranges his schedule for doctor appointments, but that can’t be done for consistent “self care” time. It is even difficult to arrange a communal play date with all the various kid schedules. In many ways my household is so lucky that I can afford to stay home, but it still doesn’t feel idyllic and I often bristle feeling like I’m making my life smaller to fill this gap.
Fantastic article and really thoughtful comments here too. The only time I've really heard of anything approaching a proper village in the 2020s is in churches. Some people who I know attend, and when someone has a baby they organise meal, laundry and visit rotas to try and share as much of the other labour as possible. Makes me very envious! I think it only works because there are enough older parents (if we're honest, mums) who know what it's like but no longer have their own small children occupying all of their resources.
Beverley I also think about this exact thing! I was raised in a high demand religion that did provide support but was conditional on a belief system that was oppressive and exploitative to women, so it felt like a catch 22. How to build this outside of religion is something I’m fascinated by.
Yes I definitely recognise that catch 22 from my own experience! I've heard of some humanist and atheist churches, I wonder how they navigate this
I would love a community of support like this *without a belief system attached (or dues, ie tithes).
Thanks for naming how hard it is to actually follow the "it takes a village" approach. A village is so hard to build, and once again this "advice" is individualizing something that used to be much more culturally and systemically valued than it is now.
While the systemic realities need changing, I also have thought a lot about this on the individual level lately because I have such a hard time asking for help - for similar reasons that you name here - the people I'm closest to are also the busiest and I know some intricate details about their overwhelm... so how could I possibly ask them to also catch some of mine? But then I think about when I've been on the other side and it feels different. I'm so much more comfortable figuring out how to support others than how to ask for support when I need it. For anyone else also untangling some of these ideas around asking and receiving help, I wrote a bit more about this recently here: https://meredythpcooper.substack.com/p/how-can-i-help-you
Thanks as always for your post! I read every week and don't always have time to comment, but I was motivated to reply this week - so much to think about in this one.
Thanks so much Meredyth!! This whole convo here has me thinking about how we define terms and what a true community looks like and how to overcome the obstacles to move toward it.
10000000%. The idea of the village only works in very specific contexts. This hit me like a ton of bricks when I was a young mother living 2000 miles from my hometown with a partner working 80 hour work weeks. I had joined a babysitting coop, smugly applauding myself for proactively building my own village. Life quickly smacked down my hubris. What I saw working for so many of the moms in the coop just didn’t work for me or my kids. I badly needed childcare, but my children were very anxious and fussy even as babies/toddlers (we now know they’re all neurodivergent!) I simply could not, in real-time, “put in” nearly as much as I took out because the care of my own children was so intensive. I missed the six week postpartum well check after having my youngest two children, which says a lot about the level of care we provide mothers. 🫠
Yesssss this is so true! I can remember so many times being in a pinch and needing child care thinking “I could call Jenny…no she’s so busy. I could call Lisa… Lisa would say yes but only bc she can’t say no! Is that ethical of me to take advantage of someone who can’t say no?!?!?” And on the flip side - one of the reasons I’m hesitant to jump into PTA is bc I’m bad at saying no under pressure but then I resent saying yes so I avoid community altogether to avoid being put in those situations. All that to say - all of it is lose lose. It’s lose lose to take advantage of women like my friend Lisa, like the mother of the infant in your article- free unpaid female labor. It’s lose lose to need to pay the price of free unpaid female labor in order to have friends . All of it sucks and why haven’t we learned from our European friends?!?!?!?!?
I fantasize about Nordic country-level support, don’t we all? How we ended up without it is a culture study unto itself but it doesn’t reflect well on the US 🙃
I have many thoughts on this. The "village" feels weaponized because Americans really don't know how to build community, and often don't think about it until they are facing a small or large crisis. Asking someone for an occasional favor isn't true community. Also, the things we need to change about our society about the social safety ney I don't think can change until we build up our personal communities more. No one in power is going to gift them to us: we have to have the time and bandwidth to demand political change.
Thanks for this Katherine, I love to hear your thoughts on this and I’ve been thinking about what you said here since I saw it. I’m intrigued by Americans not knowing how to build community and that seems to be the source of so many problems. I also find that community in my experience as an American was tied to high demand religion that oppressed and exploited women too, so it felt like a catch 22. But outside that context it has been harder to create community at times. Fascinated by all this and how it pertains to our current crises in the US.
Also this: “the things we need to change about our society about the social safety net I don't think can change until we build up our personal communities more.” Has me thinking about how we do not have a safety net *bc we don’t have community.
I just helped win a union at my workplace which is a perfect example of creating community *in order to create structural change.
Looking forward to hearing/reading anything you write about this!!
You are in luck… I’m writing a whole book about it!
I figured (and hoped!) that was the case! 👏
Yep. Very wary of “the village” when people raving about it seem to assume dads aren’t involved. The GoFundMe comparison is apt, with almost no structural support for caregiving and a prevailing societal attitude of “go figure it out for yourself, and if you’re stressed, that’s a you problem.”
When my kids were very little, a friend and I arranged our teaching schedules one semester so we could watch each other’s kids while the other taught. (She taught law school; I taught university undergrads.) That was a very idealistic and incredibly exhausting experiment — but it was also the only option that semester that allowed both of us to accept classes we were offered last minute, as we were both working our way back into the teaching rotation after having babies. Things are better now where I teach in terms of parents getting leave and not losing their place in the system, but wow was it not good in 1999.
My friend and I both underestimated the cost of caregiving in so many ways. The cost of paid childcare and the underlying assumption that it was somehow up to us as the female partners in our marriages to take care of all caregiving arrangements were issues we both were just starting to grapple with back then. There’s a reason I think of my friends who went through those years with me, sharing and trading childcare, as something akin to war comrades. We were fighting a really bad system just to keep working and taking care of our kids. We survived, but as one of my friends from back then says, “maybe not intact.” My goal is to do what I can to make it better for the younger generations of parents in whatever small way I can, by advocating for caregivers’ needs in my workplace for one thing.
Yes yes yes thank you for sharing this. This exactly! If you can piece it together it doesn’t mean it was okay and didn’t have a cost. For parents and kids!
My partner and I are still in shock a bit from the birth of our child 5 years ago and just slogging through w no help and no sleep and then a pandemic on top of it.
Most of all thank you for advocating for the rest of us!! So many people are like, I did it so can you.
Why would we want others to go through a terrible experience rather than improving it?!!
I have SO MANY thoughts about your last question above! The generation of feminists at my work who came before me, now in their 70s and 80s, were incredibly kind and also strongly encouraged me to pretend I didn’t have kids, essentially, telling me to hire my own subs during the “few weeks” I might need off when giving birth, etc.
They were all so understandably traumatized from many of their experiences as the first few women to be tenured in our department that I found I needed to disregard their advice at times. I know they meant to protect me, and I’m glad the work they had done meant my department chair at the time, a married father of four, took it for granted that of course the department would pay for my subs when I went on leave. Our union just negotiated much longer paid parental leaves this past year, and I’m thrilled for my younger colleagues. Next up, figuring out that people need time off to give care as parents age, etc!
I'm really glad I don't have kids.
My childfree friends repeat this often! Of course I would like for women to be able to comfortably have no kids or as many kids as they want. We have neither!
*exhales* so much of this…
“Mutual aid is a beautiful idea, but I worry that in reality without structural support “the village” in the U.S. often—sometimes too often—comes down to exploiting free female labor.”
And there is an additional layer of “who gets to ask?”. Long-time leftists and community activists (like me!) love that the idea of mutual aid is becoming more mainstream, but you quickly find that concept of “peers” coming back to bite you. There is an old adage about “community can only be built amongst peers, but you don’t know who TF those people are”. This is where perceptions of class come into play. You ask someone with even slightly more than you for help and they say no, fearing you will continue to ask. You ask someone with less for help, even if you have helped them in the past, and they resent you for even asking since you have “more”. There is resentment for having bandwidth to help, for not “having” to work. Year after year I find myself learning new lessons around this.
I don’t work in a traditional way and have a lot of flexibility over my schedule, so I help out a LOT. I don’t mind, it made me feel useful during a period when I struggled with being pushed out of the job market by childcare costs and a husband whose work took him away for weeks at a time, but I tell everyone do it because you can NOT because you are banking karma for future help when you need it. You will be bitter and disappointed when you realize how many people expected you to provide free labor as if you owed them in some way.
Mutual aid can be beautiful, but it is so, SO hard to do long term. Social workers know all of this and smile with pity at us all. In Denver, we have this amazing Buddhist nun, Virya, and when she asks for money I fork it over. She is the only mutual aid worker I have met in 20 years who is consistent and honest. Prepare to be heartbroken over and over if you are looking for a Virya, or to incorporate a system that gives to a Virya and takes to give back to you. The first step is just really finding people you trust with your money. Once you sort of master that, or feel comfortable, your peers will pop out at you. I envy those who just sort of have these two-way networks, I’ve never had or been able to join one!!!
Patriarchy and corporate greed junkies can appropriate and exploit anything, can’t they?
Being part of a community or tribe where there’s enough time and resources to maintain social ties and care for each other strikes me as the most natural way to live, the best way to raise children, to grow old.
Our mobile and individualist culture means we have to find, join, or build those our communities from scratch - very time and labor intensive! - at the same moment we are stretched to the breaking point by a financialized economy and venture-capital extractors, who then have the nerve - the fucking NERVE!!! - to tell us to ask for help from each other if we need childcare or support as a new mom.
I think we need a standard, shaming response that pushes back publicly to any “lean on your village” message: what is your institution, its investors, and owners doing to ensure that within our community, that help is widely available?