In this VIP article for The Baby Decision email newsletter readers, you’ll find an all-new, self-exploration exercise that will help you discover and build your ideal social support network or “village” to empower you in your parenthood or childfree decision-making journey.
This is an exclusive preview from my forthcoming new book, due out in 2025. The new book’s working title is Baby or Childfree? Deciding in the Face of Climate Change, Fear of Missing Out, Regret, Pregnancy, Fair Role Sharing, and other Concerns.
Does lack of a support village prevent you from acting on your baby or childfree decision?
You know the old saying—“it takes a village”—meaning that it’s easier to be productive, thrive and make decisions when surrounded by friends, family, community, etc?
Although you may not live in a tight-knit community or neighborhood, you can still create a village with people whom you trust, like family, good friends, or close colleagues.
Still, I hear from many people who feel they either don’t have much of a “village,” or that their village is less robust than they’d like.
This exercise is about building a more comforting or stronger village than you may have right now, before you decide whether or not to have a child. The exercise will help you brainstorm your current and future village needs—no matter if you decide to have a child or stay childfree.
In my upcoming book, Baby or Childfree, I devote an entire chapter to the creation of villages—because having a strong social support network is crucial to parenthood decision-making, and our lives as a whole.
Maybe you are attracted to parenthood but, whether single or partnered, you doubt that you could enjoy or even manage parenthood if you have no close friends or family nearby. Or maybe you have some local family members but you aren’t close to them, or they aren’t very supportive.
If you are leaning childfree or have already made that decision, then your village concerns will be different. Maybe the part of the village that you’ve always counted on is dissolving before your very eyes if your close friends are having children and are often unavailable. Or even if your childfree life is filled with people you love and count on, you may worry about losing them as you get older.
The “alone in old age” scare
If you are choosing or have chosen to be childfree, then you have almost certainly heard—not only from pronatalist critics in the media but even from pronatalist people in your life—that old age will be lonely.
This prediction that you’ll be sorry later when it’s too late, often sounds cruel—even if those close to you are supposedly trying to help you. But even beloved family and friends who support your childfree decision can scare you when bringing up the village question. They assume that if you are single, childfree, or have just one child, at some point you’re going to wind up alone and abandoned.
Potential parents also worry about old age. Although your future adult children may help you later on, there’s no guarantee. Even loving children might live far away, or be incapacitated themselves, or be preoccupied by their own family problems.
So regardless of the parenthood or childfree choice that you are making, it’s a good idea to build more close relationships and a bigger safety net than you currently have. If you already have a good “village” but everyone lives far away, then you may want to find more local people and resources for support and community.
How creating “villages” benefits you
But the assumption that the nuclear family is the best haven or the only haven for support and connection is not true for everyone. For both childfree people and parents, your family of origin can be a large part, a small part, or have no part, in your villages.
For example, your own village may also or solely consist of close friends, neighbors, colleagues, spiritual or community groups, and volunteer organizations.
If you do have good relationships with family members, you might consider becoming part of the current trend of multigenerational housing. While economic necessity often leads to this living situation, another benefit is that living with relatives overcomes isolation. These family members whom you live with can be part of your wider village that you create with non-relatives.
The increasing prevalence of one-child families, childfree couples, and single people invite all of us to be creative at the individual, community, national, and global levels to create new living situations and new definitions of family. Our goal should be to embrace intergenerational sharing for support and security, rather than look at these forms of family as aberrations or as deficient.
I also believe that our desire for intergenerational connection, our desire for social connection, and our desire to live in less isolated situations like co-housing—are helpful in motivating all of us to create better connections and more safety nets.
Get inspired by experts
As a village builder, you can benefit from the work of futurologists, child development and gerontology experts, city planners, and public health experts. Their writing, research, and pilot living experiments offer a lot of valuable information.
If you are thinking about a support village for a current or future young family, you can gain more insights from medical and mental health experts, including podcasters who specialize in pregnancy, postpartum, and young families.
And if you are planning for later life—regardless of parenthood status—you will benefit from advice from attorneys, financial advisors, retirement and life coaching experts, and geriatric social workers, who all specialize in information, referrals, and decision-making.
Try this exercise to create an ideal village
Before you can create a description of your ideal village—the people, pets, resources, and organizations that would make you feel loved, secure, and supported—we will temporarily suspend reality. I promise that you will not be wasting your time by starting out with your “fantasy village.”
After you complete your ideal village exercise, you will be able to select from your ideal fantasy the actual people and resources that are potentially possible in the village you hope to create.
If, on the other hand, you start too soon with practical details of your current village, you will probably miss some creative possibilities that you can only discover by starting with your fantasy.
1. Who matters most?
Start by making a list of the people who matter most to you.
For example: who do you call in a crisis? Who do you call to share exciting news? Who in your life do you want to be like? Who depends on you that is a joy to help? With whom do you feel so comfortable that you never have to pretend or wear a mask or a shield? With whom do you want to celebrate your birthday? With whom do you want to cook and share a glorious meal and celebration? And to whom do you turn for inspiration or as a role model?
Don’t restrict yourself to people you know, or even who are currently alive. A beloved grandparent or an older deceased friend may come to mind. Or what about an inspiring person from history like Confucius, Buddha, Virgnia Woolf, Eleanor Roosevelt or Gloria Steinem, Martin Luther King, or Winston Churchill?
In your ideal world, who would be your nearby neighbors and friends? Would you live in separate houses but near each other, or live in co-housing, where everyone has separate homes, but shares some meals and activities in a central building?
2. What would your village look like?
Now think about where and how your ideal home and village would look. Would it be in a city, a forest, a desert, or by the ocean? Is there a favorite park, sports arena, museum, or vacation spot where you all might come together?
In those ideal places, are you sitting around telling stories, reading, and eating? Are you climbing a mountain together? Are you bringing multiple generations together? Are there lots of children around, or is yours a childfree community?
Do you picture someone as an elder or a leader, or people with shared power and responsibility? What is there about this community that makes you feel energized, loved, safe, playful? What joys do you anticipate when you wake up in the morning and which people will you share them with? If anyone is sick, depressed, or in need of physical or financial help, how does your village help them?
What do you picture for the style of your home? Scandinavian or Japanese simplicity, or Victorian with floral- patterned sofas? Cozy farm or craftsman bungalow, spacious ranch home, or waterfront cottage? Imagine that you have enough money to create the environment and the collection of people that would please you most.
3. Review and get real
Now put down your notebook or exit your screen. Take a 20-minute walk, or sit quietly with a cup of tea.
After that, you’re ready to look at what you’ve written, or to listen to what you’ve dictated. Circle or highlight all the people, organizations, and possibilities that you think might be realistic and available.
Among deceased famous or imaginary people, what characteristics do they have that also exist in some family or friends or others who you would like to reach out to in building your village? What resources and possibilities that appeared in your fantasies might you be able to replicate?
4. Draw and ask for input
Consider using some colored pencils to draw a picture of your village with a combination of nature scenes, your home, your other favorite buildings, and your beloved people. If you like, draw a few different pictures of different possible villages.
If you have a partner, and if you have both done this exercise separately, this would be a good time to share your exercises. You can show each other your pictures or read some of the notes you have taken. What combination of the different villages that you imagined might come together in a new vision that appeals to both of you?
To create a village, don’t start from scratch! Consider asking some of the people who are already part of your current village for their input. You could arrange a live meeting, even if some people will attend remotely, to brainstorm village building. At this meeting, ask for their ideas, some of which will not have occurred to you to make this village possible. What needs and desires do they have for the village? How might you meet these needs for them and find pleasure in doing so?
You’ll soon be able to expand this support network village-building exercise for not only parenthood decisions, but also for other important choices at different times in your life. I’ll be sharing more tips and details about it in my forthcoming book Baby or Childfree, due out in 2025.
I encourage you to try the exercise and let me know how it worked for you—were any aspects challenging for your situation? You can send me feedback anytime by email, or on related posts on my social media pages.
Keep this conversation going!
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What questions or uncertainties do you have that I might address? How can I help you make the right choice for you? Reach out to me via this website’s contact form, or in our private Facebook group The Decision Café, or on any of my social media pages: on Facebook, or Twitter/X, or on Instagram, where I often post other fun bonus content.
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– Merle Bombardieri
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