Parent groups make a good starting point for group formation. Raising kids is a consuming projecting for those who undertake it, and parents typically make new friends and acquaintances through parenting, so it’s not hard to imagine groups of strangers connecting and deciding to meet in person just on the basis of shared parenting ideas. But once groups begin to form on that basis, there are many other functions they can serve.
Some of these are the basic functions of any traditional community: sharing labor (child-care, cooking, etc.), bringing people together, helping out in a crisis. It is interesting to consider in some detail how these basic community functions would grow out of parent groups.
I also see the parent groups as a starting point for other experiments in response to particular aspects of the modern condition. I’ll consider those in a later crumb.
Labor Sharing
Once families are regularly spending time together, it becomes easy to, say, have a few parents look after a larger group of kids each afternoon, keeping each other company while giving other parents the afternoon off. Since there’s already a lot of agreement about child-rearing philosophy, the parents would be more likely to trust each other (than, say, a babysitter) to make decisions they’d approve of. This might even extend to dinner, with one family providing food each day. (With enough families, your turn would only come very couple weeks—and preparing one giant meal is less work than preparing many small ones.)
This would in turn lead to another good: as in a traditional village, kids would not always be under their own mom and dad’s authority when not in school. They’d get used to different parents, with their varying personalities and styles, freeing them from the loneliness and claustrophobia of the nuclear family. Without their parents around to cater to their individual demands, maybe they’d get used to eating what was put in front of them and overcome the immense pickiness about food that is characteristic of American children.
Now most people with kids develop circles of friends with kids around the same age, who could share these kinds of duties, but they usually don’t, except in occasional, ad-hoc ways, under special circumstances: say, a parent is sick and can’t pick up her kid and the babysitter’s unavailable, so she asks one of the other parents to do it. The sick parent would see herself as asking a favor of the other. She would be apologetic beforehand and thankful after. This shows that this kind of “mutual aid” is seen as out of the ordinary, a deviation from the self-contained nuclear-family organization of mainstream life. To suggest that labor exchanges of this kind become a regular thing (one parent pick up all the kids each day and serve them dinner, say) would feel like something weird, a crossing or blurring of boundaries. People might like the idea but never try it. But for a group that has come together and constituted itself in order to experiment with different values and different ways of living, it would be natural and easy to experiment with labor exchanges.
Age Desegregation
I believe that age segregation is a huge problem in contemporary child-rearing. There are many subtle effects of age segregation—this could be its own crumb—but the most obvious is that older kids cannot look after and help socialize younger ones, and this is a real loss for both the older and the younger. Schools of course explicitly group kids by age, but these groupings then propagate into other contexts. For example, parents often make friends with parents of other kids in their child’s class, so even parent social groupings end up segregated by children’s age.
But since our intentional parent groups are formed around shared ideas, the kids will tend to be of varying ages, making for the pack-of-kids-of-many-ages that is a standard feature of more traditional cultures and is still often seen in lower-income neighborhoods and other contexts, but is dying out in many places and is almost altogether gone in middle- and upper-class America.
Adults Socializing and Courtship
If the group “works”—if it becomes a warm environment where people know each other and kids have fun—people without children who share the values of the group will naturally begin to get drawn in. They’ll get invited to a gathering (a dinner, a cook-out) because they’re friends with one of the parents in the group; they’ll like the atmosphere, come to more events, start attending afterschool hangouts, enjoying hospitality and contributing labor of their own.
Because all these people are drawn by shared values (and especially shared ideas about child-rearing), gatherings of the group will be a good place for adults to make friends and for single people to find partners (offline!). But because the gatherings will be regular, it will be possible to meet the same people again and again without having to make dates with them. Under these circumstances, affections can grow more organically and without so much pressure. The presence of children and older people (see below) will make for a sweeter and more integrated social environment, where courtship will feel less like shopping and more like looking for family. And meanwhile friendships can form of a loose but pleasant kind often absent in the modern world, between people who don’t want to get together one on one but like seeing each other.
Extended Families
Clearly the intention is for these groups to function a bit like traditional extended families (in some ways—clearly, we don’t want to romanticize or reproduce the old hierarchies) and it seems likely that blood relatives, especially grandparents will tend to get drawn into them. Now, it’s usually recognized that there’s something very healthy about the traditional extended family: multiple generations living together, eating together, etc. A lot of people long for this in the abstract, but they can’t quite imagine living with (or even down the street from) their own parents and siblings. Those relations are too strained. They are strained primarily from the intense pressure of the nuclear family, where the core of life rests on too few relationships. When families gather, old dynamics and old quarrels reemerge. But the bigger the gathering, the less true this is. That’s partly just because a bigger group means less pressure on individual relationships: it’s easier to avoid anyone who’s getting on your nerves. But it’s also because we see one another so differently: old people who are cranky, maddening, selfish, or tyrannical in the eyes of their offspring are often funny, charming, quirky, or full of old-fashioned dignity in the eyes people who didn’t grow up with them.
In gatherings of our parent group, grandparents, aunts, and uncles will often find themselves able to fit in more comfortably than they can in the smaller family gatherings. Adults whose families are not around will be brought into contact with people far from their own age group. And the parents of young kids will be able to give their children time with the grandparents (meeting needs on both sides) without the usual tensions and aggravation. They may even become able to see their parents through their eyes of their friends, helping them to forgive old wrongs and hurts, which will mean in the end forgiving themselves for their faults.
What I hope emerges from all this is how a great many of the social benefits that we think or imagine existed in traditional community life, or in village life, can be got back in the midst of the modern city—not by suddenly enacting some elaborate plan, but by a gradual process of experimentation and evolution, aimed at meeting the everyday needs of real individuals. If the group can be formed, then all this may follow.
But my aim here is not to recreate community. My aim is to rediscover a principle of self-determination in modern life, whereby people can begin to make choices about how they live, instead of waiting on and feeling themselves at the mercy of a paralyzed and decaying government and a political process that, without radical rearrangement, can only produce more strife and unhappiness.
I describe the creation of (what I take to be) some aspects of traditional community as an instance of how the a self-determining process of group experimentation might work. That the community is formed in this manner (gradually, experimentally, in-process) is essential, because our notions of what traditional community was like are vague: a mixture of distant observation, hearsay, conjecture, and fantasy. Much has perhaps been romanticized, and the ugly parts of that old way of life are often painted out of our mental pictures (or inflated so as to occlude all else, depending on our disposition, or even on our mood). By trying one thing and another, by responding to immediate needs as well as abstract ideals, by watching and adapting, by talking and comparing notes, we may find our way back to some of the old forms or led away from into something quite different. Likely things will not go as I have described them. Perhaps they will go entirely differently. My point is not to predict but to sketch out possibilities, to try to show that many things are possible which now seem out of reach.
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