Reasons to be Cheerful: How to make parenting fun again

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Crowdsourced babysitting for busy parents

A club scene for night owls who need to wake up early

Baby showers for all!

When Stef Arck-Baynes first moved her young family to Mt. Airy in northwestern Philadelphia, a friend suggested she join the local babysitting co-op.

“We’re older parents, and we were new to the area,” remembers Arck-Baynes. “We thought this would be a great way to build our community, to build our daughter’s community with like-minded people.”

The Mt. Airy Babysitting Co-op is a beloved local institution that has been running since 1974. The premise is simple: Families in the co-op provide each other with free childcare. A point system — once tracked in a pen-and-paper ledger, now in Google Sheets — ensures that everyone contributes their fair share. Every half an hour is worth one point, with extra points for things like looking after multiple children or sitting after midnight, explains Arck-Baynes, who now serves as the co-op’s membership chair. “If you do a sleepover, points are raining down on you!”

With rising living costs and a growing childcare crisis, communal arrangements like this can be a lifeline for parents living far from extended family or still looking to build their “village.” It goes beyond saving money, says Arck-Baynes. Knowing that the evening’s babysitter is a fellow parent can make for a more trusting relationship. “I can actually go out and enjoy myself and not be like, ‘Oh, I have to call the babysitter and see how things are going.'”

Communal childcare often also comes with a built-in playdate for the kids, making everyone’s life easier. “Babysitting helps me keep my sanity sometimes,” says Arck-Baynes, who often parents her six-year-old alone on weekends due to her husband’s work schedule. “I know that if it’s just the two of us, she’s going to be like, ‘So what are we doing and where are we going? And do you want to do handstands with me?'”

Instead, the two babysit younger children, whom her daughter loves to take care of. “Zoe has become one of their favorite people, and she loves them,” says Arck-Baynes. This way, children and their parents also get to connect across age groups in a way that often doesn’t happen organically.

There are currently 17 families in the co-op, which covers the neighborhoods of Mt. Airy, Chestnut Hill, Wyndmoor and Germantown, with three more in the process of joining. While the cap is at 30 and the co-op used to have a lengthy wait list, numbers dwindled during the pandemic and have yet to recover, says Arck-Baynes.

The logistics can seem overwhelming at first — there’s a vetting and voting process for new families, 16 pages of bylaws and a rotating secretarial role for coordinating sits and recording points. But it becomes second nature once you get a handle on it, says Arck-Baynes. “We’re constantly talking about how to make the process easier.”

Babysitting co-ops come in many different forms, so it’s worth asking around and seeing what kind of structure might work best. “Starting it with a good crew of people is important, too,” says Arck-Baynes. “People who are really committed to it, because it’s a lot of work to get it started.”

But the work you put in pays off in dividends, she says. “The community has been really beautiful. It has added so much to our social circle, so much to our daughter’s social and emotional growth. It’s helped me immensely in raising an only child.”

Find a babysitting co-op near you here.

In 2022, two moms from Wuppertal, Germany, got sick of spending their evenings at home. They wanted to go out like in the good old days, but local clubs didn’t get going until late at night, and toddlers famously don’t have empathy for tired or hungover parents. So they threw their own party, and three years later Mama geht tanzen (Mom’s going dancing) events have spread across cities in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France and the Netherlands.

Their “After-Care Parties” start at 8 p.m. and wrap up by 11, so moms can go clubbing without sacrificing their sleep (or their nerves) the next day. It’s an idea that’s been picking up steam ever since DJ Nikki Beatnik launched Mums that Rave in the U.K. after the birth of her child in 2019, with similar events organized by the Diva club in Paris and the Early Birds Club in cities across the U.S.

Pacifiers, bottles, wipes, onesies, diapers — the list of baby paraphernalia can feel overwhelming to expecting parents, especially if they lack the support and resources to ease the transition into parenthood.

Community baby showers, often organized by local grassroots organizations, city councils or maternity clinics, can help on all of those counts. Combining a fun day out with community outreach and education, such events connect expecting mothers, distribute donated baby supplies, and provide information about benefits and resources for pregnancy, birth and postpartum. To plan your own community shower, experts recommend considering the needs of your target community and your goals, connecting with local partners and sponsors, and planning fun activities like vision boarding, prenatal yoga or baby trivia.