My friend Elizabeth Oldfield has that rare and precious thing: a village. Hers is in the middle of London, contained within a generously sized family house that is now home to Elizabeth, her husband, their two children, a single female friend and another couple they befriended at church some years ago.
The five adults share the costs of running the house, as well as cooking and other domestic tasks. Elizabeth’s children are never without babysitters and, when or if another baby comes along, everyone will help out. The household regularly hosts dinner parties, many of which I’ve been lucky enough to attend. This being a Christian community — a mini monastery, almost — the evening usually ends with prayers in the makeshift chapel at the end of the garden. The atmosphere is friendly and busy. No one ever seems lonely at Elizabeth’s house.
We modern people often like to imagine ourselves as autonomous individuals, but in the natural human life cycle we spend a large proportion of our lives dependent on others: as babies, in old age and when sick, pregnant or caring for young children.
During those stretches of dependency, we often feel a longing for something like a village: a group of people who are physically present in our lives, and on whom we can depend. This is especially pronounced among the college educated, relatively affluent Americans who moved away from their extended families in pursuit of career opportunities, only to regret that distance when the illusion of autonomy becomes harder to maintain.
This longing finds modern shape in the real estate platform Live Near Friends, which invites users to purchase what is described as “multiplayer housing” — properties that can accommodate more than one family. It manifests in the fascination with “The Birds Nest”: a female-only community in Texas recalling the 1970s experiments with feminist community building, including lesbian separatist projects. Meanwhile, “mommune” has sprung up as a new word to describe an old thing: mothers raising their kids together.
And yet such experiments remain rare. Even though forming communities like Elizabeth’s would solve many of the economic and practical problems the exhausted and the lonely face, very few of us make the attempt. We claim to want a village, but I suspect that what we actually want is something closer to a paid service — a community that we can subscribe to when it’s convenient, and back out of when it no longer works for us.
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The post Five Adults. Two Kids. One London Townhouse. Is This How We Should Raise Children? appeared first on New York Times.
