Playground Pioneers (continued)

Indeed, I've discovered that today, as much as ever, parenting is a social activity that no human can do alone. As our community grew, my wife and I largely recovered from the anxiety and depression that shadowed our son's second year. "It's a chicken and egg thing," says my wife Olli, who is now Liko's primary caregiver. "Finding friends made me feel better, but feeling better helped me to get more friends. My friendships have given me a lot more confidence in what I'm doing as a parent—I guess because I see other people struggling with the same things, and I'm appreciating their solutions and they're appreciating my solutions."

These friendships also provide a combination of emotional and practical help. "I feel like I can call on friends for help when I need it, like watching Liko when I'm going to the dentist or just to be there when I feel like I'm going crazy," says Olli. "It's also helped me avoid falling into bad patterns. If Liko wants to go to the playground and I'm depressed and don't feel like going out, it helps to have someone to call and see if they also want to go to the playground."

Thus our growing circle of families helped repair our frayed emotional lives, as individuals and as a couple. Other things changed, too—for example, we carved out more time for ourselves as a couple and developed a saner, more flexible schedule—but finding our new community was critical to becoming happy parents. Indeed, Philip and Carolyn Cowan found that creating groups in which couples could talk with other couples, and individual spouses with other spouses, "can buffer men and women's dissatisfaction and keep their marital disenchantment from getting out of hand."

"Friends are the secret weapon," Bella DePaulo, a social psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told me. "When couples have kids, they tend to look inward and focus completely on each other and the baby. You can see the temptation of doing that, and yet that's not the only way to deal with that transition. Some couples do [build] connections to friends and extended family, and the couples who do that are less likely to experience the depression that sometimes happens when people transition to being parents."

Curiously, the families who now form our circle are very different from each other in certain ways—racially, culturally, and economically. But we apparently do not need to be homogenous in order to form a cooperative and caring community. "Respect plays the main role in my day–to–day existence," says Jackie. "When I see other parents respecting other parenting styles that are unlike their own, I take note and appreciate their ability to be open and accepting. I find myself instantly drawn to them, and I, who used to be an extremely shy person, am sparking up a conversation and making a new friend. Parenthood has definitely turned me into an open person—something I thought I would never be."

Today when I take Liko to the playground, I no longer feel like a spy. I feel like I belong there—and I know many of the parents around me now feel the same way.

"I remember this one day at the park when I looked around and realized that I knew all the parents and kids playing there," recalls Beth. "It was one of those moments when I thought, Wow, this is cool. We're part of this neighborhood. We belong here. This is our extended family.' It was a great feeling."

Jeremy Adam Smith is managing editor of Greater Good and author of Twenty-First-Century Dad, forthcoming from Beacon Press. He blogs about the politics of parenting at Daddy Dialectic (http://daddy-dialectic.blogspot.com).

Copyright UC Regents. Reprinted with permission from Greater Good magazine, Volume IV, Issue 2 (Fall 2007). For more information, please visit www.greatergoodmag.org.