It wasn’t until I had a child that I understood some very important things about how our society works.  Even small things can make parenting hard – somebody was going to mind your child for a couple of hours but did not turn up.  But for a long time, powerful forces have lined up in a way that would make parenting difficult for most of us, no matter what our circumstances are…

Where is the village???

Before becoming a parent, I had heard the saying “it takes a village to raise a child”. Who could disagree? But I didn’t have any lived experience of raising a child, or, for that matter, having a village.

Becoming a parent, I was shocked at the isolation. Unless we are very lucky, we raise our children in isolated, private homes walled off from neighbours. I was puzzled that people who looked like they had plenty of time didn’t seem to want to spend any of it with my child. Of course, not that long before I too had no idea of how much support parents need. I had been childless, mostly focussed on the world of work. I was largely unaware of the work many of my colleagues were doing, before and after their paid-work day, organising their families and managing their households.

And back then, I didn’t have a strong sense of how interconnected we are.  Before child, what I did (or did not do) didn’t have huge-or-non-negotiable consequences for me.  If something happened, I could generally reorganise myself to manage it.  If I affected or inconvenienced others, it was usually something that could be worked around.

Once I became a parent, it was sobering to understand the knock-on effects of everything. If my friend, another mother, couldn’t turn up, then the time I was planning to do some work while she played with the kids, was gone.  If someone was late, it might mean that we missed my child’s nap time, and weren’t able to do what we planned.  Gone was the assumption that, if things got really tough, I could always pick up a second job – because now someone needed to look after the baby.

Until having a child, I had no idea what a good park really meant.  In principle, I would have agreed it would be good to have a playground nearby.   After all, kids enjoy them so much.

Once I was a parent and living in a suburb that had not-one-single-good playground, let alone one within walking distance of my house, I quickly understood.  A playground is somewhere you can go without necessarily having to organise an outing.  A place where there will be other kids to play with, and other grownups to talk to.  Hanging out, getting to know one another, playing together.  My mother made her best friend over the sandpit at the local park.  But where I lived when I became a parent, there was no public sandpit anywhere nearby over which to connect.

How did it get this way?

I was recently listening to an interview with Hugh MacKay, a social psychologist who has been researching Australian society for over 60 years. ^[1]   He’s written a new  book “The Way We Are – Lessons from a Lifetime of Listening”^[2], which I’m looking forward to reading, and he’s been on a speaking tour.

Here we are in 202[4], members of a social species, living in a society where our No.1 public health issue is social isolation. How did that happen?^[3]

MacKay proposes a thought experiment: Assuming supreme power, starting about 1975 when he first started researching Australian life, what would have happened if we had run a decades-long experiment on the Australian population? By now, in 2024, we should be able to see the results of that experiment – how people and communities are faring.

It occurred to me that his list of experiments would also explain much of what makes parenting so hard.

What if we…

In general, MacKay says, we are not faring well. To get this way, over the last 50 years, MacKay imagines we might:

• Shrink households. Have people live in smaller and smaller households until we reach the point where as many as 25% of households contain just one person, and more than 50% of our households contain one or two people;
• Break up long term relationships and marriages. Have somewhere between 35 and 40% of marriages end in divorce and separation.  Connected with this, make it that up to one million dependent children live with only one of their parents. ^[4] And half of these children are involved in a mass migration, once a week or once a fortnight, from the home of the custodial parent to the home of the non-custodial parent. This will disrupt and fragment not just the families that have found themselves in this situation but the micro-communities they’re moving in and out of.^[3]
• Lower the birth rate. It’s too high. Make people have fewer kids, because they are a kind of social lubricant, and we don’t want that.
• Get everyone to move house more often, say every six years on average.
• Give them all cars. Everyone will become more mobile, and instead of  stopping and chatting to each other on footpaths, they wave to their neighbour’s car.
• Increase secularization. Remove those faith communities that people used to congregate in.
• Make everyone run faster than ever. Make them busier than ever so they haven’t got time for social connections.
• Invent some technology that is so seductive, so attractive, that people will sacrifice face-to-face time in favour of screen-based contact.
• Make it possible to know too much. Offer too much data and overwhelming amounts of information not relevant to either the way we lead our lives or the way we build our personal relationships.
• Have everyone jump, very fast, to opinions – about everything – taking away from us the time for reflecting, interpreting, trying to make sense of what we are hearing. And let’s make it very easy to share those opinions, far and wide, instantly.
• Create information bubbles, so that what you understand about what is happening in the world is fundamentally different from what I understand.
• Generate and spread reams of mis-and dis-information, so that we can no longer tell the difference between fact and fiction.

And then add war, dictators and climate change…

To this list, I would add that we might organise for a couple of countries to invade their neighbours, creating wars, famines and massive displacement of the civilian populations and infrastructure.

And let’s facilitate the rise to power of leaders with dictatorial tendencies, who proceed to dismantle the rule of law and the free press.

And despite decades of warnings about the dire consequences of taking no action, let’s fail to put in place the technologies and ways of living that would stop unsustainable climate change.  As a consequence, we’ll be increasingly regularly overwhelmed with catastrophic natural disasters.

And the end result?

But hang on! In large part, that is what we did.  It wasn’t a thought experiment – Hugh MacKay has watched all those things come to pass over the last 50 years. It’s not to say things were golden before that time. But the changes have been dramatic, and make it difficult to build and maintain cohesion and community.

The many different social forces explain, in part, why there are epidemics of mental illness, and the number-one public health issue, according to MacKay, is social isolation. What else would you expect? After all, as he says, we are members of the human species, people who need each other; people who are hopeless in isolation, who need groups and communities to give us the sense of belonging that’s completely fundamental to human health and happiness.

What parents need

And all those things have made it harder for parents.

Because:

• • • We need many adults around to build relationships with our children;
    • We need stable, respectful and loving communication between the adults who care for children and we need the emotional support that can bring;
    • We need somewhere safe and reasonably comfortable to live, and we need consistent and stable communities within which to build relationships; and
    • We need the time to do that, with routines that are slow enough that we bump into people and have time to interact.
    • And while there are some marvellous things about technology, we still do better when we can meet face to face.
    • We need time to think, and we need information presented in such a way as to be useful to us.
    • We need to be able to tell when we are being lied to and manipulated.
    • We need stable government that we are able to influence, and which ensures access to fundamental resources and services.
    • And we need a habitable planet.

How parents feel…

And as parents, when we aren’t supported enough, we are especially vulnerable – not just because of the way the world has increasingly been organised in the last 50 years.   We are vulnerable to ways of thinking and feeling about ourselves as parents, that are inaccurate and get in the way of our capacity to build connection with our families, and repair damage to relationships when it inevitably occurs. But what happens inside our heads is a story for next time…

Right now, it is enough to recognise that it is not our fault that things are hard. And that, as individuals, we may not be able to fix things, but working with others, we have a better chance of setting things right.

No need to go it alone!

Madeleine loves to help: why not book a Free 20 Minute Consultation, and she can help direct you to the best resources and support.

Endnhttps://madeleinewinter.com/courses-and-workshops/free-20-minute-consultation/otes:

[1] MacKay, Hugh, and Phillip Adams. “Hugh Mackay Has Been Watching Us for 60 Years” ABC Listen, Australian Broadcasting Commission, 9 May 2024 [back to article]
[2] Mackay, Hugh. The Way We Are: Lessons from a Lifetime of Listening. Allen & Unwin, 2024. [back to article]
[3] MacKay, Hugh. “Why we thrive on connection” Relationships Australia Victoria, 13 February 2024. Accessed 10 July 2024. [back to article]
[4] MacKay, Hugh. “Why social cohesion is our greatest challenge” Journal & Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, vol. 152, no. Part 1, 2019, pp. 34-39. Accessed 10 July 2024. [back to article]

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