Parenting during the summer can be a challenge without a wider family support network close by, says Sophie Morris
Last Friday I stayed at a friend’s, slept in until 9am and came downstairs to a breakfast of fresh mango and watermelon, coffee from a fancy machine and a plate of bacon, egg and avocado. In my world, this felt like J-Lo levels of pampering. The feeling of being looked after, when you are usually looking after others, is exquisite.
To access this rare night off, I had driven to my parents - a 600-mile round trip - and my sister had spent over an hour to drive and meet me there and look after my eightyear-old with her own teenager. This gave me one afternoon to work, and another to see my friend, which felt like a golden ticket. It gave my daughter rare time with her wider family.
Apart from my husband and daughter, I live hundreds of miles from any relatives and have never had any childcare or support that hasn’t been well organised in advance, carefully solicited and, 99 per cent of the time, paid for.
Although my parents were working and couldn’t offer my older sisters regular childcare, they were fit enough to help out in the holidays. And yes, I did it all myself in the early months, too, apart from a postpartum visit from last week’s breakfast maker.
No need to get out your miniature violin, I have a husband who does 50 per cent. But it infuriates me when people trot out the tired line “it takes a village” as they pack their children off to the grandparents and spend the summer watching sport.
Do they realise not everyone has a village, or anything resembling one? It’s also assumed that selfish working mothers such as myself, if they haven’t stayed in their home town, will earn enough for high-quality childcare year-round. Excuse me while I’m deafened by my own hollow laughter.
The phrase comes from African folklore and means that the job of raising a child falls to the whole village, not only the parents. The oft-repeated trope is triggering all year round when I see grandparents and aunts and uncles doing pick-up and childcare.
Even attending school meetings is tricky for us, with no one on hand for short-term help. But it’s most painful during the summer holidays, when my non-existent village leaves my daughter furious that instead of a day of telly and treats on Granny’s sofa, she’s packed off to holiday camp.
Many of us live far from family, or have children when our parents are too old to offer support. Does the idea of needing a village to raise a child mean anything in 2024?
“We are far more solitary in our modern world,” says Zoë Aston, psychotherapist and author of Your Mental Health Workout. “Historically ‘villages’ were made up of people who knew each other really well and spent a lot of in-person time together.
“They could nurture, parent and baby in away that relieved some of the responsibility and dependency needs that are so heightened in infants and new parents. While it’s a lovely image and sentiment, it’s a difficult one to realise in the 21st century.”
Annabel Dearing, 50, has two children on her own by donor conception. While she found it relatively easy to build her own village in Brighton before Covid, lockdown was incredibly tough.
“Post-lockdown I became a more liberal parent,” she says. “I stopped caring if my son’s friends were allowed too much screen time or too many Haribos, or too many Nerf guns. I was just glad he was out of the house and socialising.
“Despite all the difficulties I had as a solo parent, I decided to use one of my frozen embryos to have a second child. This decision was driven in large part by my experience during lockdown, and by this desire for a larger family, for my son to have more than just me. To create my own village, in a sense.
“When I was pregnant, we had left Brighton and were living in a new area. I found the other parents in this part of Sussex were more socially conservative, and more likely to have grandparents living around the corner.
“But they extended that network to me and my son, and were perhaps more welcoming and generous than my long-standing friends back in London. They would drive my son back from football practice, or take him for the afternoon so I could rest.”
The pre-school years were the hardest, for me. When people spoke of other-worldly experiences such as going to the gym or getting to sleep on time rather than by accident while making dinner, I wondered where I’d gone wrong in life. I’d spent only a few hours here and there away from my daughter before we found our “village” at 15 months. Wonderful Mandy, our childminder from autumn 2017 until Covid, had raised three children on her own and seemed to have all the information no one else was around to share with us.
“Some people say that in today’s society, we pay for our village, for example childcare or cleaning support,” says Sanjeet Ghataore, a consultant clinical psychologist at the healthcare company Spectrum.Life.
She suggests ways of connecting with other parents, but this also feels like work. If it’s so hard won, I may as well pay for it.
I feel shamefully seen when she suggests “unmuting and finally engaging with parents in the school WhatsApp group”, which I left last year. Thankfully, Percy is very social and her village includes friends who invite her to sleepovers and on play dates, while kind neighbours took her in when I had a medical appointment last week. Will my daughter miss out, I worry, without these close family connections? “Our kids don’t miss out when we keep them close,” Aston assures me. “They have decades ahead of them to socialise and be around other people.”
I’ve spent plenty of time navelgazing on this topic. What’s more, a village can come with baggage, too - friends tell me that free grandparent care often has strings attached. Maybe all I need is someone to make breakfast for me more often.