Don't Blame the Villagers
Is everyone just too flaky and selfish these days to show up for each other? Or is something else going on?
“Everybody wants a village, but nobody wants to be a villager.” I’ll admit that the first time I heard that sentiment, I was persuaded. Looking at my parenting peers, it’s clear that while we could all use more community, very few of us consistently provide it. Between sports practice, school events, work dinners, client calls across time zones, and the quarterly round of norovirus the kids bring home, it’s easy for inertia to overtake our best intentions. I’m certainly not immune. Although I try to show up for my own village, most of what I do in a given week is decidedly inward-focused. I can scarcely keep up with everything our family of four (plus pets, seniors, and extended family) needs. In the rare event I have any free time, not only is it likely to be at 4AM (not peak hangout time), I’m often guilty of spending it trying to reclaim a little sanity - alone. While at least once a month I will aspire to make an extra lasagna for the family at our preschool with a new baby or organize a neighborhood cookout, these ideas rarely exit the brainstorming phase. My past attempts to organize a group effort have admittedly been pretty feeble. When the inevitable flurry of “I’m sorry, we wanted to come, but we have a sick kid” or “Ugh, stuck at the soccer field, we won’t make it” texts arrive, I’ve generally given up.
It’s easy to conclude that everyone is simply too flaky and selfish these days to show up for each other, or that modern parents are too particular about their precious babies to accept help from others who might do things differently. While I know blaming parents for their own overwhelm is everyone’s favorite sport in 2025, I think that’s a lazy read. It’s true that our culture of individualism certainly doesn’t help matters, but I don’t think we’ve all morphed from kindly church ladies into Ayn Rands (Ayns Rand?) with iPhones since 1995. The reality is that families have less and less of two specific and precious resources: time and proximity.
Let’s start with time. Many families have two working parents and need childcare until 5:30pm or so. The after-care schedule significantly limits or at least complicates our weeknight options when kids are 8:30-bedtime-small. Even families with a parent who doesn’t work full-time will find a much thinner herd of folks who can make something work on a random Tuesday against this backdrop. The handful of times I’ve taken my kids on a weekday outing, I’ve found the usual spots basically empty. Work has also changed significantly in the last five years. The rise of remote work has been a mixed blessing for parents, enabling them to be more present at work when life intrudes, but it also lets a dangerous genie out of the bottle. Proving we could work from anywhere resulted, in real monkey’s paw fashion, in everyone always being at work. It’s a familiar situation sight at our house to put the kids to bed and commence “work day 2.0” at 8pm. It’s far from surprising for one of us to get a ping and need to step away to address something time sensitive. Whether we want to be or not, most of us are closer to the Evil Big City Boyfriend who answers a work call at the Tree Lighting than the kindly carpenter (is he a carpenter? He’s never working!) in the proverbial Hallmark movie of our lives.
The work day bleeding into the evening hours not only limits our availability but also, crucially, our imagination. Over time, I’ve started to consider weeknights as mostly off-limits for socializing, at least without a lot of planning. Like Charlie Brown missing the football every time, I still sincerely believe that, even if it’s never worked before, I will find the perfect day, invite the right mix of people, everything will fall into place. It pains my very Type A heart to admit this, but planning a specific day and time has a success rate near zero. If you don’t believe me, try to identify a night in the fall or winter to hang out with another family with two or more young kids and let me know how many times you reschedule before you all give up.
Community needs spontaneity to thrive. So much of creating and nurturing friendships with other parents depends on habitual proximity. That is, you have to hang out with someone in person on a fairly regular basis to have the kind of relationship where you wouldn’t feel awkward calling them to come watch your kids while you rush to the ER or offering to bring them dinner while they recovers from surgery. You can’t have sustained trust and intimacy on the strength of seeing each other once or twice a year, and without spontaneity that’s really tough to pull off. Planned hang-outs are just too vulnerable to a sick kid emergency, a work emergency, exhaustion, or other life stuff to form the foundation of a consistent friendship. You need to be able to simply drop by on short notice, which for most families who are dealing with the work and daycare squeeze, is an overwhelming proposition.
I’ve mentioned one type of proximity - the short-term kind, where you see one another at predictable intervals. There’s another, though, and that’s long-term proximity. Gen Z and Millennial parents are less likely than Gen X or Boomer parents to live where they grew up. Even if they do, it’s likely that a lot of the people they went to elementary school, high school, or even college with have scattered. This isn’t really anyone’s fault - most of us have gone where the opportunities are, and oftentimes that isn’t the same town where we lost our first tooth. That said, a shared history can paper over a lot of the issues “time poverty” causes. With people who’ve known you a long time, it can feel easier to “pick up where you left off” even if you don’t see each other often. If you move somewhere after becoming a parent, especially if you’re really in the thick of it, the effort to build and sustain a network that looks like the one you might have had if you’d simply stayed put is considerable, and nearly impossible.
Finally, and crucially, early parenthood is a time of situational selfishness. I say this not to excuse parents of small children who behave badly but rather to explain that, over the course of a lifetime, there will be times when you have a lot of time and energy to give and times when you don’t. I have a lot more time and energy with a 3- and 5-year-old than I did with a 1- and 3-year-old, and every small bit of independence my kids have gained has given me greater bandwidth for things beyond survival. That said, by insisting that parents of small children be each other’s village rather than the recipients of community care, we are simply asking an overwhelmed, dispersed, and time-poor group of people at the most critical time in their careers to also, by the way, start a bowling league and supper club in their spare time. It’s no wonder the success rate here is so low.
As for what we do about this, I wish I had a silver bullet. A lot of this interlocking inertia is really tough to crack, but it’s important to first correctly identify the root causes (time and proximity) before we get to work. At minimum, I 100% guarantee what won’t solve it is throwing up our hands and declaring that modern families are a bunch of snobby, selfish takers who are living in an individualist prison of their own making. Empathy always illuminates possibility more readily than judgment. Village-building is a compassion business, not a bean counting one. As such, it’s important not to mistake deferral for disinterest. I have declined so many invitations to things I wanted to attend simply because my children couldn’t handle it (yet!) or we were sick, yes, again. The few solid friendships that survived the gauntlet of our first five years of parenting are the folks who never gave up on us. I try to pay that forward and also to lengthen my expectations of reciprocity considerably. If we’re lucky, life is long, and the person whose meal train you organized may get their opportunity to help you many years later if you don’t write them off before that.
While we’re talking about solutions, I also have a few other ideas. First, to the extent we can, it’s important to be broadly supportive of clear delineation between work and home time. If you are in a position of authority at work, creating genuine balance on your team will likely skyrocket their productivity as they are able to build and sustain a better village. It also has the benefit of being the right thing to do. Additionally, instead of finding a sole social outlet texting people you rarely see in-person, consider what it would look like to make even one friendly overture a week to someone you could see often without much effort (a neighborhood mom that goes for walks around the same time you do, maybe?). Be consistent and, as I’ve alluded to above, don’t take it personally if they’re busy. Don’t get discouraged; if this was easy it wouldn’t be a problem for so many people. With persistence, it will work eventually. My one ride-or-die neighborhood mom friend and I tried for a solid four months after they moved in to get our kids together, and when it finally worked out I could scarcely imagine living here without knowing her. The village is on life support, but it isn’t dead, and finger pointing has no chance of reviving it. Together, we can take small steps to grow where we’re planted, and the first one is just believing it’s possible.
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You Do You, Mama!
If you’ve ever spent one day on the Mom internet, you’ve likely encountered permission culture, a cheerleader assuring you that it’s okay, you know best, you’re doing great. This is the very specific tone of so much of the mom-focused content I see both on social media and in real life. The “you do you, mama!” shouted in every comment section, the “give yourself so much grace,” chorus of reassurance from our mom friends, even the borderline-bullying “leave the dishes, they’re only little once!” from our elders who’ve been there.
Was having a conversation about this with my wife today. We dont have kids, but hope we can be in a situation someday where we do. We have several couples in our circle who have young kids and I try to have grace for them knowing one day ill be in their position. I think so many social contracts have been dissolved and destroyed that calling anything a village is pure manifestation. We are at best in schizophrenic groupings too beset by our own tailor-made personal circumstances to be able to unite for common pushes. everyones working at different jobs. Starting and stopping at different times, not sharing meals, not sharing hobbies or cultural backgrounds etc. Im not saying these are the only mechanisms for village making, but they are the innate and unhurried tools weve relied on for millenia, so if they are gone we need to find ways back. As a man, I am often not trusted with important village duties like looking after children, yet whenever we were at parties I was one of the only adults engaging with the kids, always having to bear in the back of my mind, would people be uncomfortable with my behavior? Most women ive met see others' kids as a personal choice by someone else, and they fight hard not to be saddled with someone's responsibility when they live their life everyday avoiding it. The cult of the individual makes caring for another person, let alone a child, a burden.
Lots of good points in this post. My favorite is "empathy always illuminates possibility more readily than judgment." As a parent whose children are much older now, I remember the challenges of building friendships--both individually and as a couple--during the harried early parenthood years. But there is hope--just keep trying and reaching out and maybe focus on fewer, deeper relationships when possible. I'm happy to report that several of those friendships have survived, and one even resurfaced after years of unintentional drifting that neither couple took personally. We now go out to dinner about once a month and laugh about the "old" days.