Hacker News Reader

Comment by codekilla | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone worked on creating a 'village' in the bay? Is there any thing like a network where people can watch each other's kids, or take them to activities, to take any pressure off? Like to be a member, you would of course need to have a kid, but instead of payment it's basically a time bartering system. I imagine the kids would benefit from interacting with other kids. I'm sure liability would be a nightmare, but perhaps it could be informal. I myself suffer from this as I have 6 kids, and am thinking about a move to the bay area.

View on HN

You get this through informal channels - basically this is just a group of friends where someone offers to babysit the kids free-of-charge one day when their friend really needs it, and then the friend reciprocates, and they each bring in a few more friends that they know are trustworthy, and so on. I'd imagine thousands of such groups of friends exist (I suspect this is the primary form of support in many immigrant communities), but you wouldn't really hear about them, because it's all word-of-mouth through social connections. My wife and I have certainly done this for our friends, though, and it's come back to us.

For more institutionalized settings, there's co-op daycares, but we looked into this and they're largely incompatible with having two working parents since the schedule usually requires volunteering in the middle of the workday.

Such villages exist, but honestly probably won't work if you have 6 kids. Every adult who can work works in the Bay Area to get by so there is very little slack time in the system to barter with each other.

What little there is can usually be extended to 1 or maybe 2 kids. We routinely have 4 kids at our house (2 ours), but nobody will be able or want to manage more than that, and not very frequently. Even that sort of arrangement only happens via trusting friendships that are built over time. Distributing the load across multiple arrangements would be logistically daunting.

Perhaps a religious or cultural group would extend their resources in this way, but you would have to belong to those groups, and even there, nothing is free.

And one more thing: any place in the Bay area where you can find a house large enough to comfortably house 6 kids in a relatively safe area is going to be unbelievably expensive. I'd you live in such an area your neighbors will either have many fewer children or be wealthy enough that they hire full time childcare, so they won't have the same needs for village style arrangements as you.

This is very hard to pull off, IME. Even when you have a group of friend who all have children (as opposed to 'we all have children who are friends, so now we are de factor friends') it takes a lot of coordination to keep something like that up. And then someone gets sick and days have to be switched and everyone gets grumpy, or someone's mother moves to the area and now doesn't want to be part of the 'informal daycare' group any more (leading to resentment, because the others are left hanging), etc.

So the problem is a bit of a prisoners dilemma: you need to be able to rely on this group (having to scramble to find another solution is OK a few times a year, but not 3 times a month), but you also don't want to be 'tied down'.

So the alternative is to have lots of rules and required 'volunteering'. Which basically turns into the same as 'real' daycare, except that you have to take the day off to do your 'volunteering' (in the case of 2 working parents). So it's just scrambling to solve all the problems that money is supposed to solve (be a fungible store of value), but while at all costs keeping 'money' out of it.

Having been involved with attempts at systems like this, and having observed the problems in a few others, I no longer think it's feasible, at least not for dual income career oriented people. The places where I've seen it (more or less - it wouldn't work as a lifestyle for me) work are of the type of the mommy group of stay-at-home-parents, but those are hardly comparable to real daycare.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com