In 2021, in a moment of morbid curiosity, Charlotte and Raffi Grinberg decided to calculate how much they would see their best friends for the rest of their lives if they continued visits at their current rate. The math was bleak: They’d spent more days with their friends in the years when they were ages 13 to 30 than they would spend from ages 30 to 100.
Charlotte and Raffi, who’d been married for six years, each had been inseparable from their respective best friends in adolescence. The couple realized that a lifestyle change was in order. For years, they’d sworn a commitment to their friendships—which had come with so much shared history. First, Charlotte met Raffi’s best friend on a pre-college trip. Through that best friend, Charlotte met Raffi. Years later, Charlotte’s own best friend and Raffi’s best friend planned Charlotte and Raffi’s engagement party—where they had their first kiss, the start of a romance that eventually led to marriage. But despite how intertwined their lives were, they’d never all lived in the same place.
Charlotte and Raffi lived in Boston. Their friends—who, full disclosure, are also friends of mine—lived hundreds of miles away, in Washington, D.C. Still, the four of them made sure to be together for important moments. During Charlotte’s first two births, her best friend was her doula, and Charlotte filled the same role when her friend was pregnant, driving eight hours to be in the delivery room in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. They all tried to connect for less momentous occasions too, but the effort could feel fruitless. To be in the same location, at least one pair would have to travel and pay for a place to stay, because neither of their apartments could fit everyone. If they wanted adults-only time, they’d need to arrange child care as well; at that point, they had four children between them. Before the day in 2021 when Charlotte and Raffi made that unforgiving calculation, they’d schemed for months to plan a movie night; they didn’t even make it to the end of the film before having to relieve the babysitters.
Obstacles such as these are likely familiar to many American parents. In a 2015 Pew Research report, more than half of parents surveyed said they didn’t have enough time away from their children to hang out with their friends. When New York magazine published an article about how parenthood strains friendship—referring to children as “adorable little detonators”—it went viral. And yet, as hard as it can be for people to see their friends when they have kids, parenthood might actually be the stage of life when they need their friends the most—especially in a country that lacks structural support for families. As Heath Schechinger, a co-founder of the Modern Family Institute, put it to me, it takes “a village, not just to raise the child but to sustain the adults raising them too.”
Intimately familiar with these challenges, Charlotte and Raffi decided to create a village of their own. In August 2023, they moved with their children from Boston into a D.C. townhouse, uprooting their lives—Charlotte had to get a new job and apply for a new professional license, and she and Raffi had to find new schools for their kids. Their friends moved from across the city into the house next door, and a third couple, the brother and sister-in-law of Raffi’s best friend, bought another home in the row. They planned for each couple to be responsible for their own children but to keep the boundaries among them porous: They could lean on one another for child-care backup, and their kids could roam among houses.
On move-in night, Raffi, Charlotte, and the other two couples put their kids to bed—in total, seven children under 5 years old. Then the adults walked upstairs, stepped out on their adjoining balconies, and screamed with joy.
Although the nuclear family is described by many Americans as “traditional,” most children throughout human history have grown up in setups more like Raffi and Charlotte’s, with help from adults who aren’t their biological parents. Researchers call those people “alloparents,” and without them, “there never would have been a human species,” the anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy argued in her book Mothers and Others. Today, across the world, extended families remain the most common household type.
By contrast, when Americans have kids, the norm is to “isolate ourselves so profoundly,” Kristen Ghodsee, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Everyday Utopia, told me. Kids bring chaos—often more than parents can handle on their own. Some parents turn to family for help, but for many, that’s not an option. Their job may be far from relatives, or their familial relationships may be strained, or their relatives may be unable to care for their kids—or they simply might not want to. Building family life around friends offers an alternative that “remixes tradition,” as Raffi told me: You get the support of an extended family but through chosen connections.
It’s unclear exactly how common this choice is, but some data indicate that it may be more common than people think. For instance, a 2023 Zillow survey of people who’d purchased homes in the previous two years found that 14 percent had co-bought with friends. Of course, plenty of people pursuing arrangements like these don’t have kids. But Phil Levin, the founder of the company Live Near Friends, which helps people buy homes close to their loved ones, shared a revealing statistic: Of the nearly 2,000 people who had completed a survey seeking his site’s services, close to half had named raising kids as one of the reasons they wanted to live near friends.
More people seem to want this kind of setup than are able to make it work, however. “It requires coordination and foresight and going to someone and saying, I want to design my life around you,” Levin told me. “That’s not a conversation that has a template.” Even if those discussions go smoothly, most housing isn’t designed for families to share, Levin explained, and few real-estate agents have experience helping unrelated people navigate the finances of buying a home together. When Raffi told his real-estate agent what they wanted, she laughed; it seemed impossible to her that adjacent houses would go on sale in the neighborhoods the couples were interested in. Personal constraints can stand in the way too. Friends with different budgets may not be able to find homes near one another that all of them can afford. Divorced parents seeking their friends’ support may not have free rein to move with their kids. Parents stuck in the sandwich generation may have to prioritize helping their relatives over their friends.
That said, in reporting this article, I spoke with 15 people who had managed to make the logistics work, and I saw how the architecture of family life changed for parents when they had friends by their side; their families weren’t stand-alone bricks but stones embedded in a larger structure. Some saw a friend as a full-on co-parent; others were happy to have their friends as a regular presence. Some parents and their friends shared a home; others lived close to one another; several resided in co-housing communities. The friends included fellow parents and the child-free, couples and single people. These relationships didn’t work seamlessly. Many parents said they struggled with ceding some degree of control over their kids, and some ran into conflict with their friends. But every parent I spoke with said they had gained much-needed support and, in most cases, deeper friendships.
The first time Kim Seashore and Jeff Hobson met, they fell into a conversation about co-housing—a model in which residents have both private living areas and shared spaces with their neighbors. Jeff had fond memories of living in one such community, where, as a recent college grad, he had served as the human jungle gym for a 9-year-old resident. Kim had cherished her time as a kid in a small town and thought co-housing might offer a similar experience within a big city. So Kim and Jeff helped create a new co-housing community in Berkeley, California. About a month after they moved there in 2000, Kim got pregnant with their first child.
Eventually, Kim and Jeff had two sons, and they found that having other adults around took the pressure off their relationship with the kids. Their children had people other than their parents to lean on, such as their neighbor, Deb Goldberg. But, as the couple learned, that backstop could also prove humbling.
Take the day their then-2-year-old son jumped on their bed and blurted out the word fuck. Embarrassed and worried about how his mom would react to him swearing, he rushed to Deb’s house. “Jeff and I just looked at each other like, What just happened?” Kim told me. She gave it a few minutes, then went over and asked to talk with him. He started screaming for her to get out, and because Deb’s child was sleeping, Deb matter-of-factly told Kim to go. “What do you mean I have to leave?” Kim recalled thinking. “That’s my kid!”
If you want other adults to drive your kids to school in an emergency or watch them so you can rest after a rough night, this is the bargain: In exchange for more support, you get less control. Sometimes, your kid might seek comfort from another adult instead of you. Other times, another adult’s authority might trump yours. Kim told me that the trade-offs are worth it. On the day that her son ran to Deb’s house, she felt a pang of sadness that he wasn’t turning to her—but mostly, she felt grateful. Deb was handling it. “I can go back and have breakfast,” Kim recalled thinking, “and we’ll figure it out later.”
Versions of this emotional arc recurred for Kim and Jeff. Sometimes gratitude came easily, such as when Deb helped their kids, who were picky eaters, become more adventurous. She hosted an event she called “Tot Café” and invited children in the community to come over, don costumes, and pick out healthy foods to try from what she described as a “very kid-friendly yet fancy menu,” featuring options such as banana, avocado, and tofu. Her playfulness was different from Kim and Jeff’s “This is dinner; you need to eat it” approach, but, for some parents, that’s the appeal of raising your kids alongside a wider range of people. “You don’t have to be everything,” Jeff told me.
This is not to say that Deb’s style didn’t influence Kim and Jeff’s parenting. When their other son was a teenager, he started having sex—and Deb learned about it before they did. After Deb told them, Jeff said that he felt embarrassed but also appreciative. Deb’s heads-up not only nudged them to initiate a conversation they’d been avoiding but also gave them the time to think through how they wanted to handle it, which set a precedent for future discussions about sex. “I don’t think I would have gotten there on my own,” Kim told me.
To a certain extent, in welcoming Deb’s involvement, Kim and Jeff were accepting the inevitable: No matter your parenting setup, other people—day-care workers, teachers, peers—will shape your kids. They’ll discipline them, sway their opinions, and know more about them (or different things about them) than you do. And the outside forces will multiply as kids get older. For some parents, such as Raffi, parenting alongside friends gives kids crucial exposure to other perspectives, allowing them to see that there are different, valid ways to be a grown-up.
Others aren’t as eager to embrace external influences, especially not so close to home. Parents raising kids alongside friends told me about tense debates—such as whether to let kids play with toy guns and whether adults should leave alcohol out in common spaces—as well as routine disagreements about how to share caregiving duties and household space.
One parent, Kristin, along with her husband, her daughter, and a baby on the way, moved in with their close friends and their two kids right before the pandemic. She told me that although she was grateful for the easy socializing, shared chores, and mutual support early on, learning to live together has come with compromises. (Kristin asked that I use only her first name so she could speak candidly about her living situation.) She has stricter rules about processed food and screen time than her friends do, and her children just don’t understand why the other couple’s kids are allowed to eat chocolate or keep watching Octonauts and they aren’t. Nearly any child will notice at playdates or at school that other kids live by different rules, but these differences strike her children as more unjust when they’re visible in their own living room.
For Kristin, the difficulty of sharing a house isn’t just that she has different rules; it’s also that her kids have different needs. Kristin’s elder daughter, for example, has sensory processing disorder and struggles with transitioning between activities. She does best when she can get ready for school at her own pace, which sometimes means being late. But when the other couple handles drop-offs, they insist that everyone be ready on schedule so the other children don’t miss class time. If Kristin and her husband were on their own, although they’d lose support, they would have the freedom to choose how to balance their elder daughter’s needs with their younger daughter’s. In a joint household, they don’t have that flexibility.
Late last year, all three mothers in Charlotte and Raffi’s townhouse trio gave birth—two of them just a week apart. Days after her delivery, Charlotte, who was the second to go into labor, was admitted to the hospital, and her best friend spent more than 30 hours there with her, rocking, swaddling, and burping the newborn while Charlotte was recovering. A couple of months later, Charlotte was again her best friend’s doula, but this time, she didn’t have to drive eight hours to be in the delivery room; she just went next door at 3:30 a.m. to head to the hospital with her friend.
Since moving next door to their best friends, Charlotte and Raffi have found that friendship and parenthood easily mesh—in both extraordinary circumstances and in so many other, more ordinary ways. The parents regularly pass children’s Tylenol, cereal, and milk to one another across their balconies. If one parent looks worn out, another might offer to watch the kids for the morning. Half a year into their living arrangement, Charlotte told me, “we’ve socialized more in the last six months than in the last six years of parenting.” Pockets of time when most parents are homebound are now ripe for spontaneous hangouts, especially because their kids can entertain one another. When the children are asleep, Charlotte and Raffi can grab the baby monitor and hop the balcony wall to their friends’ house. Movie nights are a breeze.
I saw a similar dynamic in action at Kim and Jeff’s house. While we were all talking, a friend from the community dropped by to chat. Later on, another neighbor, before entering the house, pressed her nose up against the glass on the door and used her finger to draw a heart in the condensation. I felt like I was in the middle of a sitcom.
But cycling between one another’s homes can also breed friction. Once, Charlotte’s best friend, who was then in her third trimester of pregnancy, brought her two kids over to Raffi and Charlotte’s house and fell asleep on the couch, inadvertently violating a rule the couples had established: Each family is responsible for their own children, and if they want a friend to help with child care, they should explicitly ask. Charlotte and Raffi were frustrated, but they couldn’t bring themselves to wake their exhausted friend. They wanted her to rest, and the truth was, they had, at times, unintentionally saddled their friends with watching their kids too.
Charlotte and Raffi see these minor challenges—and their ability to work through them—as proof of how close all of the friends have become. When they visit friends who live farther away for the rare play date or dinner, there’s a degree of “polite distance,” Raffi said. Allowing imperfection to show—rather than keeping up appearances—is both a sign of intimacy and a precondition for it. Charlotte told me that when she imagined what living next to her friends would be like, she pictured “constant companionship in the journey of parenting and life.” But surrounded by friends at everyone’s best and worst, sharing the mundane and the momentous, she has gotten more than this. To Charlotte, her friends aren’t just companions; they feel like family.
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