Children Don't Need Quality Time, They Mostly Need Other Children

My mom turned 65 last year. Even though she gave birth to 5 children, she only has one granddaughter so far. Her own mom already had 12 grandkids at this age, with two more born a bit later. My husband and I would love our baby girl to have siblings, but it’s hard to tell if and when my younger brothers will follow.

I sometimes wonder how my daughter’s family life will look like as she grows up. Will she be the only child in a crowd of old people? That was pretty much my husband’s experience, and to this day he sees family meetings primarily as an obligation rather than something you might happily do just for fun. Will it be the same for my daughter? Will she even want to spend time with her family?

Being the only small child in the life of a dozen adults has its advantages. You can spend as much quality time with your grandparents as you want to and don’t need to share their attention with anyone else. You’ll get more beautiful clothes and toys than you’ll ever be able to appreciate. And each of these people can bring something new to your life, something that your parents might not be able to provide.

But even now at just two years old, whenever I ask my baby girl where she’d like to go, her answer is almost always the same: playground, or other children. Ideally a playground with children she knows well. I knew this would happen eventually, but I’m surprised it happened this soon. As she grows older, she’ll likely want to hang out with other kids even more and more.

Meeting childless people became quite a challenge since we had our daughter. Their idea of fun stuff to do together is usually vastly different than hers. In the past I’d often leave my house at 9pm and go to party, now it’s the time she’s hopefully in pajamas and tucked in bed reading books.

My brothers are wonderful uncles, and my baby girl is very lucky to have them. I love watching them play together, sing together and laugh. But their homes are hardly adapted for what a small girl might want. Without playground equipment or other kids to run around with she usually hangs out with them for a bit, then asks for the tablet. I can’t blame her for wanting some age-appropriate entertainment, especially when we’re busy talking about some grown-up stuff.

But meeting friends with kids is quite complicated too! Only now we finally visited the other kid from our daycare who lives in the exact same building. His parents and I were talking about it for almost 2 months now, but someone was always either sick or away. Coordinating with parents who live further from us is even harder, so hard that my daughter wouldn’t even recognize any of my college friends’ kids - even though we all still live in the same city.

One of my friends has a 5-year-old girl who’s out on English and ballet classes 4 evenings every week. On most days they come back home from kindergarten at around 7pm. She’d happily stay on the playground and hang out there with the other kids, but all of them have busy schedules. The only way to meet other children is to sign up for some evening class and spend your whole evenings driving back and forth. I don’t even want to know how this works like with more than one kid. It probably doesn’t, no parent could possibly have time for that.

Was meeting other children always this complicated? I grew up with many brothers, so we didn’t even need to go out to have someone to play with. And yet we’d usually go out anyway, building some kind of fortress in the bushes or organizing the playground Olympics with all the other kids. Now the playgrounds we visit have mostly toddlers with their parents or nannies, everyone else is too busy doing homework, going to their ballet class, or just playing on their computer, and meeting them requires scheduling a few weeks in advance, only to have it cancelled at the last minute anyway.

I couldn’t quite wrap my head around how my parents managed to raise 5 children, when just one can require so much attention. But paradoxically, she does require this much attention in a large part because she’s the only one. I don’t remember my parents playing much with us, and I didn’t really want to. Playing with other children was much more fun anyway.

Now there are few kids around at all times, and so parents have to be their everything. And even if there are more adults in the extended family, this isn’t quite the same. If there were kids around that my daughter knows well and can play with at any time she wants, she’d happily do that. But outside of her daycare it happens very rarely, and every Sunday she’s asking me when she is going to see all the other kids again. We’re lucky enough that we have this daycare, I can’t imagine how it’s going to look like when we travel for extended time this summer.

Will I too sign my daughter up for a bunch of extracurricular activities so that she can hang out with some other kids? I’d prefer us to live in a friendly neighborhood with children of all ages roaming freely between the playgrounds, backyards, and everyone’s houses. It feels like an impossible crazy dream now that we’re in a 300-family building where nobody knows anyone and meeting our own neighbors requires 2 months of scheduling. It will require rethinking everything, from work, to childcare, to education, to social norms. But even if I don’t figure it out by the time my own children grow up, hopefully it will at least help them raise their own children at some point.