Parent Near Friends: How to have kids on easy mode
The parenting payoffs of Living Near Friends
A typical life trajectory is to live among friends during college and into your 20s, then gradually go separate ways as you progress in your career, find a partner, and think about starting a family. But it only takes a few days of taking care of a newborn for many parents to come to the same startling realization: this is way too big of a job for two people. Most of us give up on our community years before we stand to benefit the most from it.
Raising children without a network of nearby relatives and neighbors to share the load is really hard (it’s also an unprecedented modern experiment—the norm throughout most of human history has been communal child-rearing). On top of this isolation, costs of living and childcare are skyrocketing (daycare costs more than in-state college tuition in some states), dual-earner households have become the norm, and expectations of parental involvement are greater than they were when most mothers stayed home. The result is parents who feel overstretched, burnt out, and exhausted.
With high cultural expectations for parents coupled with a lack of material support, it’s no wonder that fewer people want to have kids at all: US birth rates have plummeted below replacement levels, prompting fears of a coming “demographic crisis”. Antinatalism, a philosophy that opposes procreation, is becoming increasingly en vogue among young people.
New York Times podcast host Ezra Klein says he wants to “move to a future of utopian co-parenting communities—that’s my actual solution to all of this.” But there’s a practical approach to the problem of modern parenting that doesn’t require moving back to your hometown or uprooting everything to join a kibbutz: simply choose to live walking distance from your friends.
It sounds almost frivolous. Who makes big, adult decisions like where to live based on what their friends are doing? Choosing to prioritize proximity to friends might mean compromising on some other factor that’s important to you, or taking longer to find what you’re looking for. Doing things this way certainly isn’t the norm. But it should be, because solving this one-time logistical challenge comes with massive, ongoing payoffs for parents that can last for years.
The parenting payoffs of Living Near Friends
Shared meals
Living near friends allows you to spend less time cooking and more time enjoying the meal. You can lighten each other’s load by switching off hosting, or both cooking a big batch of something and trading half.
When you live close enough to do this all the time, you don’t feel obligated to plan an impressive, labor intensive menu any time you want to have someone over. You can pool together whatever random leftovers you both have lying around and call it a meal. Your nearby friends likely even feel comfortable going into your fridge to make themselves a snack or grab a string cheese for the kids. Put the kids at their own table and they’ll delightedly throw food at each other while you carry on an adult conversation.
Shared childcare
If you and your friend have similar schedules, you can go in on a nanny share. You’ll cut the cost of a nanny almost in half (it’s usually about $5 more per hour to care for each additional child).
Even if your work schedules don’t align, there are still plenty of opportunities to help each other out. When your kids get sick at the same time, as they almost certainly will, you can split childcare duties between four parents instead of two, making everyone feel less frazzled. You can go in on the occasional babysitter if you all want to go out together.
Or forego the babysitter entirely by handing the baby monitor to your friend on your way out the door. This is the magic of living within “baby monitor distance”: you can continue to enjoy impromptu evenings out like you did before having kids. All your friend has to do is carry around a device in their own home, doing whatever they might have been doing anyway. If the baby wakes up, they can be over in two minutes. You’ll save a ton of money (the average rate for babysitters in San Francisco is $25 per hour, and if you have a weekly date night, that’s at least $5 - $6K per year). And you’ll avoid the hassle of planning ahead and finding an available sitter every time you want to go out.
Car or bike-pooling
Living near friends makes it easier to carpool or bike-pool if your kids attend the same (or nearby) daycare or schools, cutting the time you spend on pick-ups and drop-offs in half.
More time to yourself
When you don’t live near friends, anytime you want to do something on your own, it means leaving your partner on solo parenting duty. This can lead to tension and resentment, and cause you to evaluate every social opportunity by the standard of “is this worth subjecting my partner to a whole evening of solo parenting—and owing them the same in return?”
It’s an entirely different proposition when you know that either of you can easily pop over to your friends’ house and parent together for the night. Even though you still have to go through the same dinner, bath, bedtime rigamarole, it doesn’t feel hard in the same way when you’re doing it with someone else.
If leaving your partner for the evening to do your own thing doesn’t mean leaving them on their own for the night, it lowers the cost of keeping up your own interests—making you a happier and more relaxed parent.
Other trusted adults in your kids’ life
Babies and kids are prone to anxiety around people they don’t know. If they don’t get much exposure to adults besides their parents, they might be fearful around everyone but you. Getting a babysitter so you can go out for the evening is way less fun when you have to leave your kid sobbing and clinging to you at the door.
Parenting near friends means that your kid is pretty much guaranteed to feel comfortable around at least one other adult. That adult doesn’t even have to do actual babysitting for you to benefit from the dynamic: Your kid can sit on someone else’s lap while you cook dinner, or hold hands with someone else at the farmer’s market while you buy your strawberries.
The little bit of space this extra relationship opens up in your life can make a surprisingly big difference in your sanity.
As your kid gets older, they’ll benefit from relationships with trusted adults who aren’t their parents, but who’ve been pre-vetted by their parents—especially helpful during the teenage years.
More free play
Kids today get far less unstructured, unsupervised time than they did in the past, and there’s evidence that this is contributing to the childhood mental health crisis.
This is, at least in part, a problem of coordination: it’s a lot harder to send your kid to roam the neighborhood if all the other kids are enrolled in structured after-school programs or occupied by their devices. And while you might not be able to change norms in your city, you can change norms with a few buds on your block.
When you live near friends with kids, you’re ensuring that your kid will grow up with at least one playmate whose parents you trust within walking distance. You can send your kid out the door on their own to play at your friend/neighbor’s house, or let both kids walk to the playground together. Giving them the freedom to explore together helps instill confidence as they learn to navigate the world on their own.
Adult conversation
Kids are deranged, high-energy creatures, and they need to be around other deranged high-energy creatures to get their needs met. Otherwise, they direct all that energy towards their parents, who go slightly insane in response. It’s exhausting to have to relate on a child’s level all the time, and probably unsatisfying for the child, too.
But when two families with kids get together, something magic often happens: the kids entertain each other, and the adults get to talk to each other. If you live close enough to friends with kids to hang out all the time, your life with kids could involve a lot less whining and a lot more adult conversation.
Be social without making plans
When you have kids, you desperately want to get out of the house and see other people, but the act of making plans can be a huge drag. People are so busy that you have to plan weeks in advance, only for someone to cancel day-of because of yet another virus.
The great thing about living near your friends is that you don’t need to make plans in order to be social. Getting together is as easy as popping by to see what they’re up to right now.
Hand me downs
If your kids are different ages or sizes, you can easily share cribs, strollers, clothes, and other baby gear, allowing you to reduce waste and save money. If you plan to have multiple kids, you can swap items back and forth between households as the need arises.
Do you have to live near friends with kids the same age for all this to work?
While that would be nice, it’s a lot to coordinate, and certainly not required to realize many of these benefits. If your kids are different ages an older kid could eventually babysit a younger one. Kids with big age gaps can play together and learn from one another.
Even living near a friend who doesn’t have kids can be mutually beneficial, provided that your friend likes spending time with children. They get the joy of a tiny human’s company with only as much responsibility as they opt into. And you get someone to occasionally watch your baby monitor, or babysit, or serve as confidant to the teenager who won’t talk to her parents anymore. Plus, you’re living near someone you like spending time with, which is of course a benefit in itself.
In sum: go for what’s logistically feasible, knowing that choosing to live near any friend is going to make your life as a parent easier and better in a major way.
