Parenting Without a Net: Why Families Need Collective Care

Where Did the Village Go?

A reckoning with the myth of communal care in modern parenting - and what we’ve lost in its absence.

What happened to “it takes a village to raise a child?” Thank you to African wisdom for this proverb, which is often quoted but rarely embodied in Western society.

Today, the so-called village is more of an illusion than a reality. Shemewé Collective recognises this gap and has reimagined the village - not as something lost to the past, but as something we can rebuild, starting with the places where parents already are: the workplace.

Many of the parents I work with are hanging on by their fingernails - isolated, overwhelmed, and juggling a ridiculous amount of responsibility on their own. The work of raising children - emotional, logistical, financial - has been pushed almost entirely onto the shoulders of individual households.

Parents in modern Western societies accept they are alone - without extended family or community support. They cough up the expensive private childcare fees and get on with being worker, cook, cleaner, educator, driver, nurse, emotional anchor, and minister for house affairs - all while holding the family together under growing emotional and financial strain.

Time is not the only problem here. It's a systemic one: care work is undervalued, support services are inaccessible or increasingly privatised, and parents are expected to carry the load of providing the future members of our society without sufficient backing.

Add to this the layers carried by many First Nations families, and by migrant parents: the responsibility to support family across distance, the emotional toll of navigating government systems or complex bureaucracies like migration visas, caring for elders with trauma-related health issues, and bearing witness - from within or from afar - to dispossession, conflict, or ongoing harm in one’s Country, community, or homeland. These responsibilities exist alongside parenting and employment yet remain almost invisible in mainstream conversations.

Many essential services - from childcare to healthcare - have been corporatised, making them prohibitively expensive and difficult to access. Families who earn just enough to disqualify them from subsidies are often left stranded: not poor enough to qualify for support, but not wealthy enough to cope alone.

And where prevention once existed, it’s now largely disappeared. Most government or philanthropic funding for community services is targeted at families experiencing violence, separation, or acute risk. These programs are essential but are also reactive.

What’s missing are the relational, educational, and preventive spaces that once helped families find footing before things fell apart.

Gone are the days where groups for parents and couples provided tools to navigate conflict, reflect on values, or build emotional resilience before crisis point. Now, families must reach a threshold of dysfunction to access help. This is not just inefficient - it’s inhumane.

The more couples and parents go unsupported, the more arrive at crisis points - burned out, disconnected, and separated. Preventive support is not a luxury; it’s an essential ingredient in public health, mental wellbeing, and social cohesion.

“It takes a village” - Quantified

A 2021 UK study by My Nametags surveyed parents and found that, on average, 6.5 adults are involved in raising a single child. These include:

• 42% reporting help from grandmothers

• 37% from teachers

• 30% from grandfathers

• And notable roles played by aunts (23%) and older siblings (23%)

The survey even noted that a quarter of respondents believed it takes 10 or more people to help raise a child. This provides direct evidence that far more than just parents are typically involved.

But for many modern families, those extra hands are nowhere to be found. Aunties live interstate or overseas, grandparents are ageing or still working, teachers are underpaid and overburdened. What once steadied parents has fallen away - it’s no wonder so many parents are doing it tough.

Where could the village be rebuilt? At Shemewé Collective, we think the answer starts with reimagining workplaces as spaces of collective care and responsibility.

Parenthood on a Tightrope

The impossible juggle of modern family life, where relationships, income, and self-care all compete for scraps of energy.

Couple relationships often take a backseat as parents respond to life in order of priority - work, mortgage and income, children, domestic tasks, caring for an unwell parent or managing a visa application. There is rarely enough time, energy, or capacity to tend to the relational space between two adults - the very space from which a family grows. Communication becomes transactional. Intimacy is replaced by logistics. The load is heavy, and connection frays under pressure.

Sleep deprivation, little to no support from extended family, the loss of one income after the birth of a child, and the rising cost of living - all of it compounds. If a child has additional needs or sensitivities, the demands intensify even further.

Many parents live in a state of quiet overwhelm, managing crises before breakfast and showing up to work like everything is fine. It’s a precarious dance - and one misstep (an illness, a bill, a disagreement) can tip the whole balance.

And beneath the surface of all this juggling lies another weight entirely - one that doesn’t show up on a schedule or spreadsheet, but shapes everything.

The Hidden Cost of ‘Doing It All’

The emotional and relational toll of modern parenting expectations.

The mental load - the invisible burden of remembering, planning, troubleshooting, and caring - is relentless. It’s often accompanied by a quiet chorus of self-doubt: Am I doing it right? Could I be better? What if I make the wrong decision?

Layer this with the physical demands of caring for children - especially in the first three years of life - and it’s no wonder parents feel stretched thin. This isn’t just tiredness. It’s depletion - the kind that can take a serious toll on wellbeing, strain relationships, and make every day functioning harder at home and at work.

Navigating differences in values, parenting styles, and household responsibilities adds further pressure. Imbalances in labour - both emotional and practical - quietly build resentment, while unrealistic expectations leave couples with little room for error, rest, or repair.

All of this takes a toll not just on the individual, but on the relationship itself. Love doesn’t disappear, but it gets buried under survival mode.

When the System Offers No Shelter

How dominant systems fail to accommodate the diversity of parenting experiences.

As discussed earlier, many families encounter roadblocks - from cost-of-living pressures to limited services. But for others, the challenges run deeper, exposing longstanding gaps in how support systems recognise and respond to difference. These gaps sit within broader shifts in how we value caregiving and structure family life - issues that deserve deeper conversation beyond the scope of this piece.

The rising cost of living and housing has made it nearly impossible for one parent to remain at home. Most families now rely on two full-time incomes just to survive.

Australia offers few viable pathways for both parents to work part-time and share care more equally. Even when both parents want to stay in the workforce, the cost of childcare can leave them financially stripped - working full time but barely getting ahead.

Care is outsourced to early learning centres, and, with it, the everyday village of support continues to erode. The informal threads grow thinner, and families are left to manage more, with less.

Parents and caregivers who fall outside dominant cultural norms - including First Nations parents, migrant parents from the majority world, single parents, young parents, same-sex parents, grandparents raising children, and those living with disability or raising a child with additional needs - often carry added burdens through the invisibility of their circumstances, unmet needs, and exclusion from systems not designed with their realities in mind.

Australia’s First People use the term cultural load to describe the additional emotional, mental, and social burden that many First Nations people carry as they navigate systems and environments that are not designed for - and often hostile to - their cultural identity and lived experience.

For First Nations parents, the ongoing impacts of colonisation - including systemic injustice, cultural displacement, and intergenerational trauma - create unique and enduring pressures. For some migrant parents, particularly those from countries affected by colonisation, conflict, or political instability, the demands of resettlement, caregiving, and cross-cultural adaptation add further complexity to family life.

Parenting while maintaining cultural responsibilities and obligations not recognised by the dominant culture - or while navigating microaggressions, racism, intergenerational trauma, and the pressure to succeed - can significantly undermine wellbeing, mental health, and progress in one’s career

Outside the Frame

Who still gets overlooked - and what it takes to meet families where they are.

A midwife once shared an analogy with me: the mother is the wrapper, and the baby is the candy. In our culture, all the focus goes to the baby. The wrapper - the mother - is often discarded or forgotten, despite being essential to the whole. The baby wouldn’t exist without her.

At Shemewé Collective, we believe it’s time to reclaim what’s been overlooked - to bring parents and communities back into the centre of our attention, so that not only children can thrive, but those who raise them too.

Throughout this piece, we’ve uncovered the cracks and widening gaps in our systems and communities - the places where families fall through, despite doing all they can to hold things together.

Shemewé Collective works with forward-thinking organisations to remove barriers that often prevent parents from seeking support. Our innovative programs - We Belong EAP and the online Conscious Parenting group - bring relational care directly into the workplace, offering something rarely seen in conventional wellbeing models.

The online Conscious Parenting group is employer-funded, designed to take the pressure of parents - financially, emotionally, and logistically - by meeting them where they already are: at work.

Unlike most parenting programs that target specific life stages or crises, Conscious Parenting is open to all parents at any stage of their parenting journey. The group is confidential, culturally attuned, and flexible enough to fit within a busy life. It provides not only support, but offers working parents a space to feel seen, strengthened, and less alone.

For employers, this approach fosters greater staff retention, presenteeism, and loyalty by valuing care as part of workplace culture - not separate from it.

Let’s reimagine the village - and take steps to build it, together.