Playground Pioneers (continued)

I was of two minds about my isolation. On one hand, I accepted it with a sense of stoic and rebellious male pride. Only in retrospect am I able to say that I was, in fact, lonely—and more than a little depressed about it. And so on the other hand, I secretly craved the companionship of other parents. Most caregivers are still moms, but the simple fact is that dads who take daily care of kids need support and friendship, too. When University of Texas researcher Aaron Rochlen and his team studied 213 stay–at–home fathers, they found that social support was the most important factor that predicted the psychological well–being and relationship satisfaction of these dads.

"Social support seemed important in several different contexts—with their partner, friends, and family," writes Rochlen. "Conversely, those who had low social support in these areas seemed to be struggling more in their relationships and in life."

Many of us new parents—moms and dads alike—learned this the hard way. Eventually, sometimes out of desperation, many of us awkwardly sought out the kind of social support Rochlen describes. Some of these efforts were more successful than others. For instance, in an effort to build a community of parents, Jackie and Jessica joined a parenting group—which disintegrated after one of the couples broke up. "They weren't the only couple struggling," says Jackie. "And I think their breakup scared people. We felt more vulnerable."

For Viru and Beth, the turning point came while Beth was sick. Beth describes herself as shy and reluctant to reach out to other parents, but Viru had been raised in a cooperative and tightly knit urban community in India. Thrust into the role of stay–at–home caregiver for Beth and Anna Priya, Viru applied his sociable instincts to his new environment—and consciously set about building a community that could provide help and support.

"You have to work very hard to have a community here," he says. "It requires planning."

On playgrounds and at the neighborhood farmer's market, Viru gathered phone numbers and emails, and he organized family hikes and all–dad museum trips. Their circle grew—just as my own family's was expanding. Though at first my son seemed to cut me and my wife off from any wider community (as well as each other), at around 14 months he started to show an interest in playing with other kids.

It was Liko's growing sociability—not my own loneliness, which I denied right up until the moment it vanished—that pushed me to meet other parents. And so I plucked up my courage and started to recruit moms and toddlers into a playgroup of our own. Later my wife and I organized monthly family brunches at our house—an idea we conceived explicitly as a community–building activity. Jackie, Jessica, and Ezra came, and so did Beth, Viru, and Anna Priya; they were joined by a half dozen other families.

"The brunches are so warm and so nice, it's something that we're all looking forward to now," says Viru. "They really structured things in our community."

We belong here

As a result of all these regular, planned activities—monthly brunches, weekly play– groups, and the weekly rendezvous at the farmer's market—our bonds tightened and we started helping each other out in various ways. We set up weekly kid swaps so that the parents could take turns going out on dates, and we all developed genuine affection for each other's children. One day on a beach outing, reports Jackie, a woman next to our little gang said she "couldn't tell which kids were connected to which parents because all of the adults gave equal amounts of attention to each kid, and each kid seemed familiar and comfortable with each of us."

Scientists have a name for this kind of behavior: alloparenting, where individuals in addition to the actual parents take on responsibility for children. "Among humans living in foraging societies," writes the anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy in her 1999 book Mother Nature, "a helpful mate and/or alloparents were usually essential for a mother to rear any infant at all." In recent American history, childcare fell exclusively to mothers and their female relatives—but perhaps economic and social changes are rendering that arrangement obsolete. In a time when biological families are scattered across the world, we might once again be seeing a need for dads and other adults to form voluntary tribes that can share in the care and rearing of children.