The Surprising Reason We Should All Hold More Babies
Kampus Production | Pexels"Tell us about a memorable experience you’ve had with a baby."
This was the ice breaker at a recent staff meeting, inspired by the birth of a team member’s new baby. As we made the rounds on Zoom, a notable theme emerged. Every other team member, it seemed, said some iteration of: “I can’t even remember the last time I interacted with a baby.”
Our team consists mostly of childfree adults, ranging from their 20s to 50s, and parents of older children. My own memorable experiences with babies were 10 and 14 years ago, not uncoincidentally coinciding with the years my children were born.
The surprising reason we should all hold more babies
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I tried to remember the last time I’d actually held a baby in the intervening years, and I came up short.
My house is regularly witness to a ragtag procession of sometimes fragrant pre-teen boys, trailing crumbs and shoes and jackets in their wake. My daughter’s teenage friends mostly stick to her room, intermittently emerging for snacks. I have lots of 10- and 14-year-olds in my life. But not a single baby
For a few years, my life was brimming with babies. So. Many. Babies! Cooing babies, smiling babies, howling babies, whimpering babies. Then my life was seething with toddlers and preschoolers, a period I not-so-fondly refer to as The Snot Years. So. Much. Snot. Streaming from noses, streaked across sleeves, glistening on hands.
Now I live a largely baby- and snot-free existence, and while it’s undoubtedly more peaceful, my rare interactions with younger children remind me of everything I’m missing out on. When I sat down on a blanket last August and played “train” with a friend’s three-year-old, I was reminded of the stunning breadth of a child’s imagination, how easy it is to make them laugh, and how much laughter they succeeded in eliciting from me.
The fact that so few of us engage with babies on a semi-regular basis — or, for that matter, with toddlers, or even preschoolers — is profoundly depressing.
And yet it’s something most of us rarely talk about, or even think about, much at all.
It’s widely accepted as “normal” that my kids almost exclusively interact with kids of similar ages, just as it’s “normal” that my coworkers without children lead largely childfree lives.
It’s “normal” that our elders are siphoned off in nursing homes and retirement communities, and it’s “normal” that those of us who do have babies find ourselves almost exclusively responsible for holding them. When compared to the vast majority of human history, none of this is in any way normal.
Age segregation is a relatively recent phenomenon — yet another deeply unfortunate byproduct of industrialization. It’s a “dangerous experiment,” according to family sociologist and Cornell University professor Karl Pillemer, who told The Huffington Post, “This is the most age-segregated society that’s ever been.”
In his book, How Old Are You?, historian Howard Chudacoff points out that for most of the 19th century, “The country’s institutions were not structured according to age-defined divisions, and its cultural norms did not strongly prescribe age-related behavior.” But as our country became obsessed with standardization and efficiency, we began to segregate people by age. Kids in school, adults in workplaces, older adults in care facilities, and age-restricted communities.
These emerging institutional patterns also coincided with and accelerated the decline of multigenerational living arrangements as the nuclear family took center stage and parents no longer lived in proximity to grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.
To the extent that we decry age segregation, which is very little, it’s often focused on the benefits that older adults and younger adults can gain from interacting with one another. Some nursing homes have attracted media attention for allowing college students to live rent-free in exchange for active contributions to the community. According to the AARP, “Studies show there are physical and emotional health benefits for older adults who interact with younger people. That benefit works both ways.”
There are also documented benefits for “mixed-age play” amongst children, even though our children find themselves increasingly confined to their peer groups. Age segregation amongst children started in school but has since evolved as kids spend more and more of their time outside of school in age-segregated extracurriculars. In his Substack story, The Special Value of Age-Mixed Play, Professor and play expert Peter Gray says:
"There is reason to think that throughout the 99% of our biological history, when we were all hunter-gatherers — the period in which the human drive to play was shaped by natural selection — essentially all play was age-mixed. The play drive evolved to serve its developmental magic best when the players differ from one another in age."
I’m glad there is some, if not nearly enough, attention being paid to these issues.
But what’s entirely missing from most of our conversations about age segregation is the extent to which adults are losing opportunities to interact with children.
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“I don’t like kids.”
This blatantly discriminatory proclamation has, in recent years, become socially acceptable, almost en vogue. It’s commonly offered as the reason why adults should not only have the right to a childfree home, but also to a largely childfree existence.
I say YES to the former, and a hard NO to the latter. To claim that you simply “don’t like” 22% of the U.S. population is as ridiculous as unilaterally dismissing newborns, six-year-olds, and 16-year-olds in one fell swoop.
Children represent one of society’s most marginalized and vulnerable groups, and it’s a group that we treat with increasing contempt. Your child, your problem, seems to be our mantra these days. Children are burdens on all of us. They cost money, lots of it. They need to be cared for… All. The. Time. And no one wants to pay anyone to do that shit. What’s the elevator pitch? The core revenue stream? The profit motive?
In an economy designed around the extraction of labor, children are important only in their capacity as future workers. Until then, well, they’re pretty much useless. Best to siphon them off in playgrounds and daycares, and leave their care to unpaid and underpaid women.
Not only that, but kids are obnoxious! They cry too much on airplanes. They ruin meals out. They are no longer welcome at weddings.
Beyond designated “kid spaces,” we largely expect children to navigate a world built for adults. It’s a boring world — void of the rich sensory play opportunities freely available in nature. It’s filled with things they can’t reach and other things they aren’t supposed to touch. It’s a world in which adults are constantly telling them to sit still and be quiet. Even the chairs we ask them to sit still in are not designed to accommodate their legs and torsos.
Parents traverse this world with children by necessity, but rarely for fun. If “fun” with children is attempted in adult spaces, it is almost always regretted. Fun is saved for the kids' spaces, in which the high concentration of children can be too much even for the kids themselves. Parents hold them and scold them and blearily chase after them, occasionally exchanging snatches of small talk with other bleary-eyed parents.
Meanwhile, parents of older children sit alone in our cars in dark parking lots, scrolling on our phones and waiting for our children to be done with their age-segregated activities. We congregate in bleachers and auditoriums and the sidelines of soccer games, waving to So-and-So’s Mom and So-and-So’s Dad because we are only relevant to one another in relation to our children.
Outside of these spaces, the Big Important Adults do their Big Important Adult Things. Inside homes, one or two kids might regularly interact with one or two parents. The streets outside are largely empty, save for the cars that roll up and down them.
Young adults feel lonely, older adults feel undervalued, parents feel exhausted, teens feel angsty, and kids feel bored. And we have to wonder: Is our Grand Social Experiment in age segregation benefitting anyone?
Last week, two neighborhood friends helped me with childcare while I was at a work retreat.
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One is in her early 30s, the other in her early 70s. Neither of them has children.
I told them: “Thank you so much for stepping in to help.”
They said, “Thank you for allowing us to spend time with children.”
Their response totally blew my mind. Over the past decade plus, so much of my life has been consumed by the Quest for Childcare, and as a newly single mother, that quest has become even more pronounced. Yes, my kids are older now, but still not quite able to spend multiple nights on their own (my daughter vehemently disagrees), and I travel at least once a quarter for work. I am conditioned to think of asking for childcare as asking for “help,” and to treat any offer of “help” as an enormous favor.
Sometimes a problem can be elegantly solved simply by turning it on its head. We’ve all heard of puppy therapy. What if the answer to most of society’s woes lay in granting wider swaths of the population access to babies and children? Instead of asking (begging) for “childcare help,” what if we started offering people who aren’t actively parenting the opportunity to spend time with children? After all, engaging with kids is a proven way to release endorphins, decrease stress, and improve mental health.
It’s nothing groundbreaking, really. It’s how we’ve done it for most of human history.
Once we start viewing children as community assets, rather than obnoxious drains on society that are hell-bent on ruining adult fun, our entire perspective shifts. Last winter, during a rare Pacific Northwest snow day, my son and his friend delivered hot chocolate to neighbors and offered to shovel their driveways. They didn’t explicitly ask for money, but they eagerly accepted tips.
My neighbor, who had generously overtipped my son and his friend $20, told me afterward, “I just loved watching them out there. They were working so hard and trying to do such a good job. It made my day.”
So many of us have forgotten all that kids have to offer.
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When they are young and cute, they can simply bring us joy by being young and cute. When they are older, they can actually do things, like shovel driveways, dig holes, take care of other children, bake cookies… the list goes on and on. And when kids do these things, everybody benefits.
My neighbors not only get help with chores, but they also get a chance to interact with kids — and yes, even slightly rancid prepubescent boys can bring us joy. The kids learn about the value of labor and then get to reward themselves with Nerd Gummy Clusters, or whatever chemically manufactured sugar-drenched snack catches their fancy.
And yours truly gets a little break from the relentlessness of modern parenting, secure in the knowledge that my son is being useful, using his body, and interacting with people — not sitting alone inside staring listlessly into a screen.
Most of the families with kids have been tragically squeezed off our street, often squeezed out of the city, inevitably replaced by couples without children who have a little more money to spare. My initial reaction is often one of disappointment because these days, people with and without children tend to operate in parallel realities. But it’s my son, with his earnest door knocks and his constant quest for junk food money, that has helped us bridge the divides.
What if all those lonely men disappearing into the manosphere got to regularly hold some babies? What if our angsty, untethered young adults got to sit cross-legged on a picnic blanket and play “train” with some three-year-olds? What if our isolated elders had kids to tell their stories to? What if our tweens and teens got off their phones and shoveled driveways for their neighbors?
Of course, we can’t just start knocking on doors asking to hold other people’s babies; neither can parents of babies start knocking on doors to offer up theirs for holding. That would be supremely weird. But we can all take part in fostering intergenerational community and creating opportunities for intergenerational connection. It can start with something as simple (and fun!) as a block party.
Babies and kids across the age spectrum can offer us delight, wonder, and helping hands.
We do ourselves a huge disservice by denying them the opportunity to be integrated into our busy, adult worlds. Maybe these adult worlds have fewer screams and less snot, but they are also serious, self-important, and generally not much fun.
I, for one, would like to live in a world with fewer incels and more baby-carrying men. A world with fewer teenage influencers and more teenage babysitters. A world with fewer age-segregated nursing homes and more intergenerational bingo games. A world with fewer burnt-out moms and more age-diverse caretaking communities.
Let’s recognize our dangerous experiment in age-segregation for what it is — a failure of massive proportions. Our babies and kids can save us, if only we give them the chance.
Kerala Goodkin is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication, Mom, Interrupted.
