Baby happy hours, communal living: how to make parenting less lonely

A few toddlers and their parents walk into a bar.

By about 5pm, it’s popping off; thirty-odd children play on the floor while parents, many with babies in arms, mingle, sip cocktails and order tacos from a food truck outside.

This is baby happy hour. This monthly pop-up event in Vancouver, British Columbia, hosted by local magazine editor Stacey McLachlan, 36, has briskly sold out a 50-ticket capacity since its October inception. “Demand is there – you could do one of these every night of the week,” she says.

Perhaps that’s because, unlike in Germany or Spain, where gated playgrounds often feature bars or cafes, or Australia, where restaurants frequently have play areas, parents in North America don’t have that many kid-friendly third spaces they enjoy hanging out in, too.

McLachlan launched baby happy hour because she wanted to have fun and be normal. “You can have a civilized drink and socialize and network and your kid can have a good time. All those things can exist together,” she says. Yet opportunities to do so are scant. “There is this perception of a dichotomy between being a parent and being a person,” she says. But events like hers demonstrate how that gap can be bridged, and how early parenthood can be re-conceived as a more socially connected, communal and joyful time.

New parents often talk of feeling like they only socialize with other new parents, for better or for worse. Conversely, the child-free people around them can feel like all their friends joined a new club, one where you need to have reproduced to get past the bouncer.

On top of it all, the world that recently seemed so enamored by families now treats your baby like a bit of a criminal.

“I wanted to be part of society again!” says Brittany Hopkins, 35, of why she brought her two small children to baby happy hour. “I thought a lot about how hard parenthood would be, but I didn’t fully internalize how isolating it would be. There are places you go and feel like everyone is staring at you and you’re like: ‘Shhh – be quiet, sit nicely.’” Often, it’s less stressful to just stay home. “Here, you walk in and feel like you belong,” she says.

Hopkins’ predictably challenging but unexpectedly lonely experience with early parenthood is far from unique. A survey by Action for Children involving 2,000 parents revealed 68% felt increasingly isolated from their social circles post-childbirth, citing financial constraints and childcare responsibilities. A 2018 study by the British Red Cross found that 43% of mothers under 30 are lonely “often” or “always”, with more than 80% saying they see their friends less after having a child. And while biological mothers’ friendships tend to improve after their children turn five, one study found fathers run a higher risk of never recovering socially.

Yet isolation doesn’t have to be a fixed component of early parenthood; we can create new scripts for how to be more socially connected and happier.

While the idea of organizing our lives so that we live close to friends is not yet mainstream, some people are making it happen. Behavioral scientist Kristen Berman and her partner, Phil Levin, both 39, plus 17 of their friends and five babies under the age of two, are part of a co-living community called Radish, in Oakland, California.

While a few members of Radish choose to live as roommates in one larger house, most live separately as their own family units within a radius members describe as “baby monitor distance” – basically a 1,500-sq-ft block.

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Central to this concept is “designing a life in which it’s very easy to hang out together”, says Berman. “One core, fundamental principle of human behavior is that we do things that are easy. We want to drive quality relationships. To make that easier, we wanted friends within walkable distance. If you have to drive 15 minutes to see your friend, you’re less likely to do that.”

Radish was founded five years ago, when no members had children. Yet even then, the founders envisioned an early parenthood experience full of connection: where friends are always around to chat, entertain each other’s babies while someone cooks dinner, or pop over with odds and ends. It’s now a reality. Levin has also launched a platform called Live Near Friends to help those with the option of moving find housing closer to their friends.

New parents know that taking a night off to socialize can be a logistical burden, requiring planning, negotiation and the hiring of expensive childcare. But when Levin and Berman were recently invited to a spontaneous party, they simply asked their friend Misha Safyan and his wife, Diana, also Radish parents, to hang on to their baby monitor while their 19-month-old slept at home.

“It was no imposition on us because we were at home anyway,” Safyan tells me. “We have each other’s keys. We’ve been around each other’s babies their whole lives so there’s a lot of familiarity there. And if there was an issue, we would be there in under a few minutes.”

This easeful dynamic contrasts starkly with a particular example of some of Safyan’s other friends: two couples he tells me rarely saw each other despite both having babies around the same time and living 15 minutes apart in San Francisco. Eventually, loneliness drove each couple to move closer to their families in different states.

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Becoming a parent can be strange – especially for those tasked with full-time care. Firstly, people expect you to be delighted, and that delight is really all you’re supposed to feel – anything darker is suspect. Then, your identity reduces to the fact of your parenthood, all of your relationships get thrown in the wash, and you’re not quite sure which will mysteriously disappear, which will shrink and which will soften into cozy staples you reach for over and over.

Aurélie Athan is a clinical psychologist specializing in maternal health at Columbia University. In her work, she refers to the transition into motherhood as “matrescence”, a developmental process in which one’s identity, values system and relationships all change.

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But unlike adolescence, which is much-studied and empathized with, the tribulations of matresence tend to be overlooked. As a result, it can come as a jarring, often lonely, surprise.

“When you underwent puberty, not only did your brain and body undergo physiological changes, but your friendships started to shift, who your peer group was, who is going to speak to you,” says Athan. How you were expected to contribute to your family changed, and you probably started realizing “‘life is unfair and the world’s not built the way I thought’. And that’s what I hear from mothers,” says Athan.

When parents try to find support for this experience, there’s a void. “The No 1 usual suspect in perinatal mood and anxiety disorders is the isolation itself,” says Athan.

Parental loneliness comes in many forms, across a wide spectrum of experiences. For some, it could be a product of globalism, migration and capitalism; at no other time have people so often lived far away from family. Feelings of isolation can take hold among members of the “sandwich generation”, a rapidly growing demographic of gen Zers to gen Xers who find themselves caring for both their young children and aging parents, rather than counting on their parents for support. It can be the experience of making do with whoever’s on the same playground schedule as you, but lacking people you really connect with; of having close friends, but not the energy and flexibility to see them; or having no events in your community where you feel comfortable and welcome.

Close relationships are the top predictor of both happiness and health; an eight-decade study from Harvard University found that people who have safe, emotionally connected friendships live longer and report greater life satisfaction. Some studies have found that close friendships are even more important to our well-being than family and spousal relationships.

Inspiration for how to re-center friendships in parenthood abounds; many cultures prioritize intergenerational living, community integration and “chosen families” that extend beyond nuclear units of biological relatives. The anthropologist Sarah B Hrdy calls “alloparenting”, an academic term for the once ubiquitous communal care among our ancestors, “the secret of human evolutionary success”.

Among some Black families in the US, there is a precedent for more communally integrated parenting called othermothering. In othermothering, community members adopt a caretaking role in the lives of children they may not be related to. This practice literalizes the idiom “it takes a village to raise a child”, says Mia Brantley, an assistant professor specializing in race and family sociology at North Carolina State University. Othermothering persists as a way for communities to support both mothers and children, mitigating the effects of systemic oppression while deepening social cohesion.

Lately, Brantley has been appreciating a newer analog for othermothering: social media’s “rich auntie” trend, in which often intentionally child-free women declare themselves “rich aunties”, ready to share time and resources with the little ones in their lives. “It’s cute and it’s funny,” says Brantley, “but what they’re really saying is: ‘I am child-free. But I am actively engaging and supporting someone who has a child.’”

Any parent can decide they want to center good friends as important figures in their children’s lives, achieving the double benefit of having other trusted adults on deck and prioritizing their friendships within a family structure. Doing so requires intentionality and upfront discussions about factors like expectations and boundaries. But if things work out, these dynamics can pay dividends in terms of closeness and joy.

Andrea Lowen, 39, a managing director at a theater, has lived with her best friend, her friend’s husband and their two children for the last two years. “I love being able to have this close relationship with these kids and experience seeing them grow up, and have our relationships evolve and change – it’s brought a lot of joy and a different kind of love and care into my life,” says Lowen, who is child-free.

But the experience of being a live-in BFF and auntie has given her the sense that we’re in “an odd development phase in human history of how we handle things like community and family and personal space”, she says. “Everything is kept so separate – you really have to try to invest in connection and make it happen because otherwise, everyone gets busy and you’re like: ‘Oh, your kid is eight now. I haven’t seen them in forever. I barely know what they look like.’”

Being able to build structured and unstructured time into relationships between parents, their friends and kids can deepen connections and reduce loneliness all around. Co-living might not be possible or even preferable for all, but a weekly dinner together, co-work-from-home days or regular planned outings can contribute to a feeling of interconnectedness in a way that is important, and not an afterthought.

Yet the fundamental lesson of Radish, non-nuclear living arrangements like Lowen’s and baby-friendly events is that parents and non-parents alike can choose to reorient our values around mutuality, and to prioritize friendship amid the lifestyle shifts that come with starting families. We can choose to evolve our familial structures and draft a new lexicon for early parenthood that speaks less of isolation and depression and more of shared growth and connection.

To do so would not be forging new ground, but simply remembering that deep, multifaceted support has always been the hallmark of human thriving. Such a movement comes with a gift for the next generation: a firsthand understanding of how good sharing life with others can be.

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