Building community through and for parents: my reflections as a mother and grandmother
Summary
We need community for resilience and peace, as recent events have shown.
We recently hosted an online discussion, with a panel of experts, exploring a long-term solution for building stronger community ties: by supporting parents to build the social support networks they ‘biologically’ need, we can strengthen community ties now and for the next generation whilst at the same time improving perinatal health and child outcomes.
Grassroots organisations are best placed to build the communities of support that parents need. For example, The Lantern Initiative supports muslim mothers, Apples and Honey Nightingale is the first intergenerational nursery based inside a care home, and Proud 2 B Parents supports LGBT+ parents from across Greater Manchester.
We need to get this message through to Politicians, as highlighted by Cllr Anya Sizer.
My name is Helen Jones, I am a Senior Associate at Civil Society Consulting CIC (CSC). We recently hosted an online ‘coffee club’ discussion: ‘Building community through and for parents’. I was intrigued to learn that our evolutionary history means that parents need community to thrive and rear the next generation, and they’re also an incredible ‘entry point’ for building the sense of community that we’re all missing. This assertion was made by Natasha Ereira-Guyer, Founder Director of Civil Society Consulting, who planned and facilitated the online event based on her PhD research question. Here are my reflections from this informative and important discussion.
First of all, we explored the idea that parents need community.
As a daughter, parent, and now grandparent, I have experienced my fair share of single parenting. I’ve also glimpsed, albeit too briefly, a more hands-on, multi-generational, community experience of raising children. It was enriching to learn about our evolutionary backstory as humans and the communities of support that our parents children need because we spent most of our evolutionary history living in communities; it all resonated with my intuitive ‘lived experience’, and validated much of what I have felt as a child, parent and grandparent.
Here in the UK, most of us bring up our children under conditions that are vastly different to those we evolved in. In recent years, our extended family groups have drifted geographically further from one another. The idea of ‘nuclear’ families has become more and more entrenched (evident from the design of new houses); parents, and especially mothers, suffer from the belief that they should be able to achieve optimised parenting alone and intuitively. Local opportunities for practical support have diminished, on top of which, there has been a decade of austerity that has left many families on the brink.
Natasha explained that it is not just plain cruel to allow parents to suffer like this, it’s also plain stupid, given everything we know about how important the ‘first 1000 days’ of a child’s life are and how important parents are to their children! Natasha then outlined an evolutionary perspective on parenting and introduced the premise of her PhD research, which will focus on parents’ need for community. In a nutshell:
Humans are ‘cooperative child rearers’; we have spent most of our history as a species living not just in groups, like many animals, but in communities specifically. Therefore, mothers have evolved to depend on/need the social support afforded by a community in order to thrive during the perinatal period.
Fast forward to the UK in 2024, and we’re not living in communities in the same way we did for most of our evolutionary past.
Money can buy things that fill the gaps left by the loss of a supportive community - such as babysitters, therapists, and NCT classes. But, if you don't have the money, you have much to gain from having a community around you that actively supports your parenting.
So, what can we do to ensure that mothers and parents with fewer resources receive the social support they need? While we can’t simply go back to the hunter-gatherer lifestyles of our evolutionary past, Natasha advocates for identifying what it is that communities provided to our perinatal ancestors. In other words, what are the ‘active ingredients’ of a ‘good’ social support network?
Natasha is researching this question with Dr Nikhil Chaudhary, Assistant Professor at Cambridge University, who was the first panellist at the online discussion. Their research will map the social support networks of mothers in the UK and contemporary hunter-gatherers in Congo; they will compare the two to identify what ‘happy mums’ in both settings have in common. Originally inspired by those we have worked with at Civil Society Consulting, the goal of the research is to create a toolkit for grassroots organisations supporting marginalised mothers and parents.
The panellists demonstrated how parents and children are a natural and powerful way to build stronger community ties for everyone.
Having established that parents need community, we went on to establish that grassroots organisations are best-placed to build communities of parents. The speakers provided up-to-date examples of grassroots initiatives supporting parents, demonstrating how parents and children are natural entry point for community building.
We heard an outstanding example of an intergenerational service that thinks outside the box. Apples and Honey Nightingale is the first UK nursery located within a care home setting, founded by Judith. It’s hard to encapsulate how much this initiative represents a ‘win/win/win’ - delivering immense value for the older residents, for the staff team like Roshni who need childcare, and for the children to benefit from hanging out with older people. It was truly touching to hear about the impact and value of these intergenerational bonds.
Zainab, from the Lantern Initiative, explained how important it had been for their community of mums to feel trust and safety within a faith based environment. She highlighted the significant impact this had in alleviating isolation for them.
Matt, from Proud2bParents, also emphasises the importance of feeling trust and safety, describing how one-to-one support, WhatsApp groups, and over 90 meet-ups every year significantly benefit their LGBT+ community of parents and grandparents.
Parents and families are made up of extraordinary individuals managing everyday challenges. Everyday challenges are likely to grow more intense during the current period of uncertainty and instability we’re experiencing as a country and world, which places even greater pressure on us to act.
My main takeaway
While parenting isn’t ever easy, the rewards of doing it as part of a community are truly joyous - with endless positive multiplier effects.
My main takeaway from the online discussion, having heard the premise of Natasha’s PhD and the stories of grassroots organisations supporting parents across the UK, is that we need to get this message through to Politicians, decision-makers and funders. It takes courage and conviction to do something new for parents - because it would take longer than an election cycle for the positive outcomes to materialise. Therefore we need to spread the message far and wide in order to get through to decision-makers.
Natasha’s PhD will identify the ‘active ingredients’ of a ‘good’ community of support by comparing the social networks of UK mothers with contemporary hunter-gatherer mothers. ‘By-and-for’ organisations would benefit immensely from knowing these ‘active ingredients’, but more importantly, having these elements formalised in a toolkit would help validate the work they’re already doing to Politicians, decision-makers and funders.
I came away thinking about my parents, children, and grandchildren, as well as the other families that I love. I feel strongly that, throughout our lives, the care we all need is fundamentally about being loving and being together. Children need us to bring differing knowledge, perspectives and experiences. You can be a fantastic single parent, but you shouldn’t have to do it alone; our children need us all. Parents and children play a pivotal role in bringing meaning and joy to our communities and in building strong communities for the future. Creating options for collective care will lead to a more cohesive, safer ‘togetherness’ society, especially in light of recent events.
Background Information
This panel discussion event was part of 32 Steps to Togetherness. This CSC-led initiative (supported by the National Lottery Community Fund) is all about building connections within and between communities. The programme seeks to address loneliness and counter social fragmentation.
If you’re interested in learning more: