Forum from the Archives: What It’s Like to Parent With Your Friends
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From KQED in San Francisco, this is Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Would you raise your kids with your friends to break the isolation of modern parenthood and just get the childcare help or the emotional or even financial support you need? Journalist Raina Cohen has reported on and lived the experience of parents choosing to live with or next door to their friends.

And she's written about what they've all gained, as well as the hurdles of communal living they've been willing to overcome. Her recent Atlantic piece is called A Grand Experiment in Parenthood and Friendship. We listen back to our conversation from last month, right after this news.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Nina Kim. It's no secret that becoming a parent these days can strain friendships. It's hard to spend time with friends when you're navigating the demands of parenthood or needing to find and pay babysitters. And on the flip side, it's hard for a non-parent friend to lose the attention and closeness you once shared.

Yet parenthood is probably the stage in life when we need the support of our friends the most, says Raina Cohen, who has looked into and experienced what happens when parents decide to live with or next door to their friends and raise kids together. Raina is a producer and editor for the NPR podcast Embedded, and her recent piece for The Atlantic is called A Grand Experiment in Parenthood and Friendship.

and friendship. Welcome, Raina. So happy to talk to you. Yeah, happy to talk to you too. So tell us first about the couple you wrote about in your Atlantic piece, Charlotte and Raffi Grinberg, who uprooted their lives in Boston and moved with their kids to D.C. to live next door to their best friends, who also have kids, as I understand. It sounds like before the move, both couples

really tried to prioritize their friendship as much as they possibly could from eight hours away. But it just wasn't enough. It has its limits when you're that far away. Charlotte, for instance, drove hours and hours to be in the delivery room as the doula for her best friend when she gave birth. But, you know, that's an eight-hour drive, and this was the

in the middle of the pandemic, it was quite the sacrifice. And the couples also tried to have a movie night when they were in the same town together. And that involved, you know, booking a place to stay, booking babysitters, kind of coordinating all these things together. And then they didn't even make it to the end of the movie because they had to relieve the babysitters. So,

They really did try, but everything required a kind of mountain of logistics. And they decided that there was a real disconnect between how much they valued the friendship and then how much time they were actually spending with their friends in their day-to-day lives.

Yeah. And so Charlotte found a new job, got a new professional license. They found new schools for the kids. And it was all worth it, it sounds like, for the socialization of being together as friends during this time, during this parenting time. Yeah.

Well, I'll tell you the way this story came about was that I ended up talking to Charlotte at a friend's birthday party. I didn't know her. And she had four kids running around and said that she... And she'd just moved to D.C. about a week ago next to her best friends. And she said that she was...

basically without stress now. And I was looking at her like, man, I would be stressed if I were in your position. Like that's, that's a lot of like, you know, she had a bag full of snacks and was feeding the, like the kids as they're running around. But, but compared to what it was before when she didn't have people next door to her, who she was close to, it was much more overwhelming. And, and her comment that she, um, she didn't have the stress anymore and she was so enjoying this new life made me really interested. And well, you know, what, like what,

what does it take to build this kind of life with friends and what are the benefits of it? And yeah, it absolutely seems like the drudgery of parenthood has gone away by having friends who can be a backstop. And also all of those moments when maybe you're available at like 7 a.m., but nobody else is or you wouldn't schedule any activities then, you actually can hang out with your friends if they are next door to you. Right.

So I want to talk about your own experience. You lived with two friends with kids, though you and your husband did not have kids yourselves. What made you want to do that? Well, the friends who my husband and I ended up talking to about this are close to us. One of them officiated our wedding. And

I mean, they were people we wanted to live with in general. My husband loves children. There's, you know, sort of endless joking about how much he loves being around kids. So for him especially, it was a big plus that our friend had one kid at the time. And...

And then, you know, we knew that they might have more children. But I think you get to have a different level of intimacy when you are sharing space with people. And there's a lot of vulnerability, too, to somebody exposing you to their parenting. So, you know, I'm less like kid obsessed than my husband is. But I also found it really special to be able to effortlessly

effortlessly build relationships with these small children who just become attached to you because you're around. I mean, they had nicknames for me and my husband. And still, you know, we're seeing them this weekend, even though they live in a different city, we're traveling out. And yeah, it was just sort of a beautiful way to become part of their lives more intimately.

Yeah. And what impact do you think it had on their kids or do you know? I have gotten little glimpses here and there. So the kids call my husband Coco and they eventually called me by my full name, Raina. And I heard just earlier this week that the four-year-old said that he was like he really wanted to see Coco and Raina, which is convenient because we're going to see him soon.

And also my friend sent me this story that she was reading her kids by the same author as Pippi Longstocking. And it's a family that lives on a farm and they have people who are unrelated to them living with them. And she was trying to explain to her four-year-old, like, who are these people to the rest of the family?

And then, you know, the kid got it when he was like, oh, like Coco and Raina, like they're friends. So I think it's also normalized for these kids, the idea that you're going to have, you know, this more extended household. But, you know, I think he's

he's had more like the both children have had these additional loving figures in their life that I hope that we can continue to be that presence for them, even if we're not as physically proximate. Yeah, that experience is something that I think gets to the heart of one of the things you want to emphasize, which seems obvious, yet it's so hard to recognize that we can choose a different norm, we can shape what parenting looks like for us.

Absolutely. I mean, one of my reactions to this sort of anecdote about the kid's reaction to the book was like, once you explained it to him, I was like, oh, friends living in the house. Yeah, yeah, whatever. That's normal. Like that there he is freed from these layers of social norms that maybe make us more narrow our imagination really about what is OK and what's possible. And yeah, I really do think that it does.

that you can construct a different way to live your lives. We can talk about some of the obstacles. It's not always easy because pushing against the tide is not always easy. But there is not just one way to raise kids, one way to live your life as an adult.

Right. Well, I do want to get into the challenges, but let me invite listeners into the conversation. We're talking about friend groups who've chosen to live with or next door to each other and help raise each other's kids and how it helps to overcome the isolation and other challenges that often come with modern parenthood. We're talking about it with Raina Cohen, who has written the book The Other Significant Others, Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center and a recent piece for The Atlantic called A Grand Experiment in Parenthood and Friendship.

Have you raised kids, listeners, in a household you've shared with friends? What did you gain from the experience? What were the challenges? Or maybe you've shared parenting duties with friends without cohabiting. What questions do you have about building a shared living setup with friends? Maybe you have felt isolated in your parenting journey, as Reina was talking about.

Or as your friends have become parents, feel free to share that too. The email address is forum at kqed.org. Find us on Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, or Threads at KQED Forum, or call us at 866-733-6786. 866-733-6786. Okay, Reena, so what were some of the biggest challenges you, as well as the friend-powered parenting households that you reported on, that they shared with you?

Well, there are social challenges to start with that we don't have a norm that you're going to live with your friends. So how do you even open the conversation about that if you have that kind of desire? Not having a sort of conversational template is an issue.

There are also a lot of practical challenges. And I can say also from firsthand experience, I'm in the middle of trying to find a house long term to live in with some friends and we want to raise kids and that's part of the motivation. And we are seeing that how the housing stock is really built for single family households or couples or single people, but not multifamily units.

So one, it's just hard to find the right space. And then you come up against confusion or skepticism. Like the couple that I the main couple that I wrote about in my piece, you know, told their real estate agent what they wanted. And the real estate agent laughed because she said it was it was basically impossible for them to find a place.

adjacent houses in the neighborhoods that they were interested in, which they ultimately did. It just took a little while. But I've, you know, I've had friends that I'm searching for a house with recently dissuaded pretty actively by someone toward like showing us around because she, when she found out about our arrangement was not, you know, was not happy with it.

and told us that we would have to register as a boarding house because of the number of unrelated people living together, which is, as far as I can tell, is not actually accurate. But, you know, gives you a sense of some of the...

rigidity in how people think about, you know, what you do, what your house should look like. And then on top of that, let's see if you want to buy a house with people you're not related to, there are the kind of financing is not set up for that. And you have to do creative workarounds, which can have tax disadvantages. And there are, you know, you have it.

there are legal complexities. So, you know, the people who end up doing this, particularly if they're all living in the same home or they're trying to own some shared space together, there are definitely some practical things that come in the way. Yeah. And then there's also just

As you say, some of the other things that you pointed out, the circumstances of people's lives, you say there are a lot of parents who are in the sandwich generation who may have to prioritize caring for a parent or relative or divorced parents who don't have as much free reign to move around with their kids.

What about if your friends have different budgets and you're trying to buy something together? How do you navigate that? Yeah, I mean, that also is a challenge. You know, the way that I've seen people do this is that sometimes someone who has more money will buy a property and the friends will rent or they'll have different sized units for, you know, to accommodate different sized families. People, you know, you can have conversations about...

you're never going to get everything you want. So what are the sacrifices you're willing to make? And are people willing to make sacrifices to live in a place that's, you know, maybe more affordable but less desirable for them? I mean, ultimately what this comes down to is a lot of coordination and a lot of compromising. You have more people who's kind of

and things that they want to be convenient all have to be factored in and everyone's not going to get what they want. But the ultimate idea is that the benefits outweigh the costs. But that's not necessarily how people think about this. They might just see the costs first and not think about how it's possible to get most of what they want.

Well, listener Jean writes, in the late 40s, I was a child living in a community of garden apartments in Queens, New York. I was co-parented by my aunt and uncle, grandparents and neighbors. If I skinned my knee or needed a snack and my parents weren't available, I knew I could knock on one of many doors and get what I needed. We moved across the country when I was still a child, but this warm, supportive, caring environment in my early years has sustained me throughout my life. We all need more aunties.

We're talking about raising kids with your friends, emerging parenthood and friendship, the benefits and the challenges. Stay with us for more after the break. You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Change is always happening. It's part of life. Here at Xfinity, we want to do our part to keep one thing the same with a five-year price guarantee on our internet. So no matter how your other costs change, you get five years of the most reliable Wi-Fi with our best equipment included.

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Everything is getting more expensive. Rent, groceries, insurance. And because California's excessive ride share insurance laws attract litigation abused by billboard lawyers, costs are going up for everyone. Bogus claims and inflated settlements drive up state required insurance costs, which make up nearly a third of your Uber ride fare. Join our fight to protect your access to affordable rides. Go to uber.com forward slash fare dash insurance to learn more.

Welcome back to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking this hour about friend groups who've chosen to live with or next door to each other and help raise each other's kids. We're talking about with Raina Cohen, a producer and editor for the NPR documentary podcast Embedded, author of the book The Other Significant Others, Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center.

And a recent piece for The Atlantic is called A Grand Experiment in Parenthood and Friendship. And we're talking with you, our listeners. Have you raised kids in a household you've shared with friends? What did you gain from the experience and what were the challenges? Or maybe you've shared parenting duties with friends without cohabiting that you want to tell us about.

What questions do you have about building a shared living setup with friends? The email address is forum at kqed.org. Find us on our social channels at KQED Forum, Blue Sky Facebook, Threads, Instagram. Call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.

Before the break, Raina, we were talking about some of the practical challenges. I was also struck by something you wrote about, which is the challenge of ceding control of parenting, that it can feel scary. Talk about that.

Well, I think a lot of parents would like to be able to control the influences on their kids. And they, you know, spend a lot of time thinking about, you know, how much screen time is OK and what kind of food am I going to feed my kid? And, you know, you can do that within a contained household if there is just, you know, one or two parents. But if you suddenly have a bunch of other adults around, well, they are going to demonstrate their

different ways of life, different rules. I saw this with one woman I spoke to who lived in a household along with her husband, kids, and then another couple and their kids. And the couples had different rules around how, you know, kind of processed food and sweets and how much time the kids could have on iPads and television. And it was difficult for her kids who had more stringent rules to, you know,

be okay with abiding by them because they could see in their own living room that there were kids who had different rules. So that can be tricky, I think, especially if it's in your own household. But, you know, I also talked to larger communities that were, that kids were, you know, sort of roaming around. And so I'm saying roaming around because it's not like everybody's

exactly co-parenting, but they're involved in each other's kids' lives. But again, like different rules led to conflicts. Like, is it okay to use for the kids to play with BB guns or Nerf guns? And there were differences there. So that was, that is definitely a challenge. And it can be humbling also when kids run to another adult that is not you. But, you know, on that,

Sometimes this sort of swung in the direction of too much for a lot of parents, but most of the people I spoke to really found that those kind of difficulties were worth the benefits. Well, let me go to caller Jeff in Berkeley. Hi, Jeff. You're on.

Hi, thanks very much. Well, I'm one of the people Raina interviewed for her article in The Atlantic. And she relayed a story about our two-year-old who, in the story she wrote, he did something embarrassing in our house. As a two-year-old, he swore using a word that I think I can't say on your radio station today.

And he was so embarrassed by it that he ran over to the neighbors and did not want to talk to either of us about it. And we live in a co-housing community.

got like 14 households around a central green with people of kind of all decades from through the 90s. So that 21, that two year old just graduated from college this spring and he was home for a day or two. And

he made sure during that time to have dinner with our 30-something neighbors, made a point of inviting the 90-something neighbor over for dinner, and said hello to Deb, the woman whose house he ran over to 20 years ago. So I definitely felt great value. I mean, I'm proud of my kid for being a good young man, but I'm also really happy that our co-housing community gave him a life where he's got friends from lots of different decades.

Yeah. And so how was it hard for you initially when your kid ran to Deb for comfort?

A little, but not that much. You know, Renna's talking about you have to cede some control to other people. And I think that is true. And it's also true that if you trust the people that you are ceding control to, then at least I believe that I was giving my kid control

by giving him access to other people and other people's perspectives. And, you know, in that particular case, that was, you know, that was where he learned to eat a lot more variety of food than he was willing to eat from his parents. So there were lots of benefits. Oh, Jeff, thanks so much for calling in. I appreciate that.

And I also love reading about Jeff and Kim's story. Raina, do you have a sense of how widespread friend-based parenting is these days? Like, is the idea taking hold?

I think that there's a growing interest to the, you know, there aren't clear stats on this, but one person who I think we're going to talk to later named Phil Levin has a newsletter that's got, that has, I think, you know, 10,000 followers at this point and was much smaller even a few years ago and runs an organization where he helps people live near their friends and sees that a lot of the desire is stemming from people not wanting to

be in isolation while they have kids. And certainly as I talk to people about this topic, I think that people

who are, you know, millennials of the age where they're raising kids are kind of calling bluff on the idea that you have to be so far away from your friends that you have to sacrifice a social life and are looking for alternatives. Yeah. Well, let's bring Phil Levin in. Phil Levin is founder of Live Near Friends, which helps people live right next door to friends and family. Phil, welcome to Forum. Hi, Mina. Hi. So you've built...

The Radish, which I love that name. Ten homes in Oakland that houses 20 adults, I think, and seven kids. Help me picture it for us. What does the physical space look like? Yeah, so it's sort of ten normal homes that, you know, a mix of single-family homes, apartments. And we have 20 of our friends and seven, soon to be eight kids.

sort of all living together. And all the homes are sort of clustered together in a courtyard. There's a building called the Blueberry, which is actually like sort of a shared clubhouse amongst everyone who lives there. We have dinner there available every night. And then there's two yards. One yard has all the kids' toys. One yard has all the adult toys like a hot tub and a sauna.

And who are the people who live with you? And how did you come to this arrangement? Meaning like, you know, not all of them have kids, I imagine, or...

Yeah, that's right. So it sort of started, my wife and I, my wife's a behavioral scientist, and I'm a real estate developer. So when those two people get together, you start to do experiments in housing very naturally. And we were sort of like, you know, looking ahead to, oh, man, like, we're gonna have kids. We heard kids ruin your life. And we don't want that. We don't think it has to be that way. So we sort of built a compound sort of in anticipation of

of sort of the moment when us and our kids started having friends. And so we bought this property that at the time was two buildings, and we moved six of our friends in with us. And then over time, it's grown. And so now we're up to six buildings, 10 homes, and there's 20 people living there. And there's another, I think, dozen people who've sort of rented or bought homes nearby.

So you have characterized sort of the radish philosophy around parenting as parallel parenting. What does that look like? Yeah. So Raina talked about the challenges of, you know, when, when parents sort of disagree on fundamental philosophy. And so I, what we have sort of staked out as we've said, like, Hey, you know, that's your kid. You're raising your kid. We're all just living next to each other, making each other's lives easier. We're not going to have like some conversation where we all align on exactly what kind of food the kids are going to eat. You know,

You know, we're going to choose what kind of food our own kids eat. But, you know, where we can and when we can, we're going to try to make our lives easier by living next door and sharing responsibility. And then for your kids, I appreciated the description of sort of a day in the life where basically your daughter when, you know, gets greeted by five people on the way to school. And then what happens when you all get back home? Yeah.

So there's sort of two things now that I am a parent. I realize that there's two features of living next to my friends that have really made my life with a young kid much easier. The first is when we get home, we have something called baby happy hour.

And baby happy hour is 530 to 730 p.m. every day. And basically, it's just an invitation to stick your kid out on the lawn. Someone makes cocktails and we sort of all like zone defense, watch the kids together, which means you can sort of take your eye off them more or less. And so that sort of is a presumption of a thing that happens every day. And then after seven, what comes into play is what we call baby monitor distance, which

where you can essentially hand your baby monitor to any of your neighbors and go do whatever you want. So my wife and I could literally leave and go have dinner in San Francisco every single night without a babysitter, without...

pre-planning by just like tossing her baby monitor to her friend who knows her kid and her kid knows them. And so it's like this one thing of like living within baby monitor distance of a single person who can do that is I think a radical difference in your experience as a parent. Wow. Are there ever any issues with things feeling fair, like someone doing more of the grunt work or someone doing more childcare than someone else? Yeah.

Yeah, I think both in relationships and in community, scorekeeping is the great enemy of happiness. And so we have a—I mentioned my wife's a behavioral scientist, so she does a lot of research on this. But we employ something called a brag sheet, which is we give people the opportunity to brag about what they're contributing to the community. So when you take out the trash, you go in and you say, I took out the trash.

And so you sort of have this like record of everyone's contributions. And I think, you know, when you see this, you're like, oh, man, everyone around me is trying to make my life much better. I should probably go and do the same. And so it becomes additive and positive some rather than like, you know, you did the dishes three times and I did them four times. And that's unfair.

That's very cool. Let me go to caller Sharon in Lafayette. Hi, Sharon. You're on. Hi. Thank you. Yeah, I just wanted to share my experience as a kid growing up in that situation. And

My mom and her sister are best friends, and so they bought, they decided to buy houses six stores down from each other in the East Bay. And my mom had four kids, my mom and dad had four kids, and my aunt and uncle had four kids. So we were raised all together, the eight of us, and our entire lives. And...

It's really impacted our lives. They kept those houses for over 50 years. We actually still have both houses in the family with family members living in them. And it's really affected all our relationships, just our priorities, our grandchildren, you know, see how family is just so important.

and taking care of each other. And it's something, if you asked any one of the eight of us, we would just say it has had a profound impact on our lives. Oh, wow. Well, Sharon, thanks. That's so lovely. Let me go next to Irene in Cupertino. Hi, Irene, you're on. Hi, Mina. Great to talk to you. I see you at one of the KQED events. Oh, great.

I want to mention that coming from Shanghai, China, I also grew up in a cohabiting environment, which I didn't realize until today when I hear Raina talking about it. We had relatives purchasing different properties in the same type of alley in Shanghai where I had cousins that I grew up with and uncles and aunts. So,

Historically, the clan type of living or the extended family type of helping raising children is the norm before we had this mass integration and moving away from the family. The second point I want to make is that I had friends who are millennials going through, jumping through hoops to purchase food.

cohabiting house in Berkeley a few years ago before they had children. And they really had to do a lot of legal work, which they didn't explain to me, but I knew it was a lot of work in order to prove that they are able to do that. After that, many of them started to have children. And congratulations, Lucy. She had...

So and I could see she was helped by lots of friends around her as well as inside the house. So I think it's a great trend. And what she told me was it's like picking your own family.

So I want to put that out there. And I want to say hi to Raina. And I love this topic. And I'm encouraging Lucy to call in. Well, Irene, thank you so much. You brought up so many really good and important things here. And first of all, one of them being what she said at the very beginning, where sort of this type of family structure was more the norm. And we have another listener on Discord, Noel, who says this is something that's not really new.

If you think about how villages worked for centuries, the nuclear family is an aberration. And Reina, you've mentioned that too.

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. That's one of the things that stood out to me from Irene's comment. In fact, the main couple I wrote about in the article, Rafi and Charlotte, they're Jewish and very observant. And Rafi sort of described what he was doing is kind of recreating the shtetl, like recreating a, you know, sort of an old timey Jewish village, because you have all of these people around you who are you're living close to who you become.

who you have close social ties to and the kids can run to and described this new situation as remixing tradition. So yes, absolutely. There is longstanding history of humans raising children with many adults. They're called alloparents, any sort of parental figure who is not biologically the parent. And you see that across the world.

The other thing that Irene brought up was just how hard it was for this group of friends to get over some legal hurdles to be able to make this happen. So I definitely want to dig into what it takes if you want to put together this kind of arrangement. I would love to get the thoughts and advice of both you and Phil with regard to what that is. But let me go to Bert really quick, who is waiting. Bert in San Mateo, you're on. Go ahead. Yeah.

Hi. Thank you. My ex, the mother of my son, was married before she and I got together. She had a beautiful daughter that's 10 years older than my son. When my ex and I split, I really pressed her father to move in with me in San Francisco. He eventually did. What this meant was my son, with a 10-year-old sister, 10-year-old wife,

older sister, got to live with his sister 100% of the time because the custody arrangements worked out that they were together 100% with mom and then they were together 100% with the dads in the way that it worked out. My son, because of this, has a phenomenal relationship with his

his big sister. He has a phenomenal relationship with her father who became my son's godfather. And whenever she came back from college, the arrangement was still the same. She would spend time with the two dads at the same time. She would spend time when she was with her mom

and was always with her little brother. And so for me, I think the key thing was children are first and you got to trust in the other person. And the only downside of it was when the kids weren't with us, he got stuck with me 50% of the time. So,

Oh, Bert, thanks for sharing that. You know, Raina, listening to Bert, I'm kind of thinking about sort of the foundational values or attitude that you have that really helps make this kind of situation work. What have you come across?

Well, I think part of the attitude is one of generosity. I mean, it kind of aligns a little bit with what Phil was saying with the brag sheet that instead of, you know, keeping a ledger of who's doing what for whom, you're sort of going in and trying to make sure that...

that everybody is supported and not just kind of looking out for yourself. So I think that that's pretty fundamental. And the other thing I'll say from Bert's story is it just points to how varied families are and the many different ways that kids can grow up and feel supported with a variety of like adult figures in their lives.

Yeah. Also reminds me of Irene saying chosen family. We're talking this hour about raising kids with your friends to overcome the isolation and other challenges that often come with modern parenthood and what it takes to set up a shared living arrangement with friends. We'll dig more.

deeply into that right after the break. We're talking about merging parenthood and friendship with Raina Cohen, whose piece for The Atlantic that you might want to check out is called A Grand Experiment in Parenthood and Friendship. She's a producer and editor of the NPR documentary podcast Embedded and author of The Other Significant Others. We're also talking with Phil Levin, founder of Live Near Friends, which helps people live right next door to friends and family. Stay with us for more. I'm Mina Kim.

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Everything is getting more expensive. Rent, groceries, insurance. And because California's excessive ride share insurance laws attract litigation abused by billboard lawyers, costs are going up for everyone. Bogus claims and inflated settlements drive up state required insurance costs, which make up nearly a third of your Uber ride fare. Join our fight to protect your access to affordable rides. Go to uber.com forward slash fare dash insurance to learn more.

You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking about friends who've chosen to live with or next door to each other and help raise each other's kids. And we're talking about it with Phil Levin, founder of Live Near Friends, and Raina Cohen, producer and editor for NPR. And we're talking about it with Phil Levin, founder of Live Near Friends, and Raina Cohen,

Author of The Other Significant Others, Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center. And we're talking about it with you, listeners, at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786. On Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, where you're posting at KQED Forum and at the email address forum at kqed.org.

Have you raised kids in a household you've shared with friends? What did you gain from the experience? What were the challenges? Or shared parenting duties with friends without cohabiting? What questions do you have about building a shared living setup with friends? Or what experiences have you had around the isolation of parenthood or as friends have become parents?

Casey on Discord writes, my wife and I are not planning on having kids, but I'm lucky enough to have become close friends with the couple next door and they often watch their niece and nephew and my wife and I will stop by to help out. It's a nice way of helping out their parents and spending time with some kiddos without having to take on the full responsibility of being a parent. Let me go to Brandy in San Francisco. Hi, Brandy, you're on.

Hi, I am calling because I have a kindergartner who attended Glen Ridge Co-op Nursery School in Glen Canyon in Glen Park. And while we don't all live together, all of our kids went to a nursery school that is a cooperative, and it was actually started in the 70s. So to speak to somebody else's comment that it's not really a new concept.

but what was so beautiful about it is that you not only learned how to parent your child because you were required to work in the school about on a weekly basis, but that

then helped you to get to know all the other kids, all the other parents. And so then when, you know, it fosters this idea of the village that I think, you know, is part of the bigger picture that we're all talking about. Yeah.

The beauty is that, you know, we have these summer play dates and we have alumni camping trips and picnics. And so we continue to cultivate the relationships. And I'm 52. When I grew up, we did get to run wild with all the neighbors. So we just happened to live next door to people with kids. And it turned into some of what the guest is talking about. And what's so nice is that, you know, you're confident in the village's parenting style. And it's just this beautiful...

ongoing, you know, trading of parenting. We even trade babysitting nights. Well, that's great, Brandy. Thank you so much for sharing that. So Phil, for people who are listening to this and they want to do something or maybe even go as far as what you did with the Radish, walk us through what it took to find, to finance and configure that cluster of homes at the Radish.

Yeah. So a few people have mentioned that this idea is not new. And I agree. I think what is challenging, though, is figuring out how you actually pull it off in the year 2025 in the Bay Area where housing is really challenging. And so what my company Live Near Friends does is help people basically figure out how to find housing that works for this, how to figure out how loans work for this and how legal structures work for this.

And so, you know, typically, you know, but the good news is, is laws are changing to allow this to be easier than it was in the past. So 10 years ago, the radish would not have been possible. It would have been illegal to build multiple units on the plot of land we had. But now that's changed. And so we were actually able to build new buildings to sort of house our growing community.

And so we took advantage of something called an ADU law, accessory dwelling units, which allow you essentially to build little homes in the back of bigger homes.

And we built a home sort of and co-designed it with two of our closest friends, Carmen and Osman. And now they live essentially in our backyard, in our garden. And I get to see my little girl run across the garden, walk up these little baby steps and knock on their window and demand a popsicle from them pretty much every day. And so that would not have been possible five years ago. It's really the change in regulation is now making this doable in the Bay Area.

And how do you pay the mortgage, if you don't mind my asking? Yeah. So Radish is a little complicated because it is a big community. It's a very maximalist version of this vision. We have 20 people living there. We actually have 23 co-owners of it. And so there's a mortgage. There's essentially a bunch of co-owners. But what we observe is that most people who are doing this are not doing these big grand versions of it. They're doing much simpler versions of it.

And so a very common configuration we see specifically in the Bay Area is two friends or families will buy a duplex and one will live in one and one will live in the other one. And you can actually get a loan on separate loan on each unit. So, you know, you have one unit, you have your own loan. I have my other loan. I'm in the second unit. We co-own this thing, the building together, but we sort of are not financially entangled in a complicated way.

And then sort of these, they're called tenancy and commons. And it's a very common way to do this here. What are some of the amenities that you were able to do at the Radish that you wouldn't have been able to do, but you were able to split the cost? Yeah. No single individual should ever own a hot tub, but a group of 20 can do it together.

So a hot tub. So, Serena, thinking about what Phil was saying with regard to sort of policy changes that would help make friend-powered parenting easier, you're in D.C. What do you see broadly on this issue that hasn't been brought up yet that could make, you know, communal housing an easier thing to do in the U.S.?

Well, I think things like occupancy limits, as I mentioned, being told that more than six unrelated adults would be considered a boarding house, that's an obstacle. I think that having sort of templates for both the financing and legal side would be relevant across the country.

I also live in a place with expensive housing stocks. So I think that the challenges are quite similar and that the, you know, but the Bay has been really a hotspot for this kind of housing because I think both a mix of values and necessity being the mother of invention, that housing is so expensive that people end up,

realizing that they could afford properties if they team up and buy together. And I think, you know, D.C. hasn't quite hit the same that that same point in how common that is. So there's on top of the practical element, there's the the the ability to imagine that you can set up your life this way.

Yeah. The Discord writes, I learned about the radish community that Phil Levin and Kristen Berman developed with their friends when I saw a video. And as an extrovert who lives alone, I have been entranced by the idea ever since. Thank you for sharing info about this model of living. Let me go to caller Jeff and Gilroy. Hi, Jeff. You're on.

Hi, thanks for taking my call. I was looking to get some advice on your perspective. I am in a couple, a childless couple down in Gilroy and my brother has two kids living up in Pacifica. My best friend has three kids living up in Pacifica and it's,

gotten to the point that I don't get to see my family or my friends unless I'm willing to make that two-hour drive each way all the way up to see them because of the logistics of them navigating their kids. They can't get in the car to come down and see me. So if I don't make that drive, I don't get to see them.

So I want to be involved in their lives and I want to be able to make that conversation happen with them. So I was curious of your guest's advice in that regard. Raina, do you have some thoughts for Jeff? Well, I think one is sit down and tell the, you know, these family members that you want to spend more time with them. And I think that that alone is something that people don't necessarily articulate. And then say that you, you know, that,

you have this desire and there are practical challenges and maybe come to the table with a couple of ideas about what it could look like to overcome those challenges. Like, would either of your families be willing to move? Or are there rhythms that you could create where one family could spend the weekend every other weekend or something along those lines? So I think coming to the

to the table with some solutions that you can start to workshop might help as well. So Raina, you mentioned this at the top, but you are looking for a house to share with friends. And like right now in that process, can you just share with me, you know,

What has that process involved so far and where you are now? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we've we've there's a group of six of us now and there's a slightly larger group that's also interest interested. And we've had what we've called housemate dating for, I think, something like.

six, nine months at this point. And we've had a lot of conversations about things like values. Like we had, you know, our entire dining room wall covered in post-it notes from a values exercise that one person in the group facilitated. And we, you know, have had to deal with practical questions too. Like what are the neighborhoods we're willing to live in?

What are the criteria? We figured out at this point, what's the square footage of a house that we are willing to live in? So it's a lot of really open conversations about both what's possible and what's desirable, and also being really honest about what makes us a hard person to live with.

You know, a lot of us have lived with in group settings before. What do we get nitpicky about? People have different ideas about, you know, how much they want to cook versus eat out and how much, you know, do we want to spend time together versus do, you know, live lives in parallel and all of that. So in other words, it's a lot of communication and a lot of making time for each other to have these have these structured conversations with each other.

And Phil, I understand you're actually going to start another community. Is that right?

Yeah, that's right. Actually, I mean, if I could add something to what you just said, the you know, we've seen through the company, a lot of people that have succeeded in doing this. And we've also seen people that have failed in doing this. And the there's sort of a common thread amongst the successful groups and the unsuccessful ones, which is, you know, there has to be an instigator. There has to be a single sort of person who really wants to make this happen.

And they have to be sort of be a little bit aggressive. And I think the last caller, I think was interesting here, it's which is like, you know, there's usually one friend who is sort of setting the terms for the thing and saying, let's do it in this neighborhood. Here are some listings, come check out this house with me. And they're sort of it's like the personality that has to organize like the bachelor party. It's that personality is the person who tends to be the instigator in the group. Everyone knew who's that who that is in the friend group. And

And so, you know, it usually takes a person making efforts to make this happen to make it happen. And I think when you get six people around the table triangulating, it tends to sort of bog down the process. That's really interesting. So with this other community that you're trying to establish, tell me how it would be different from the radish to maybe better meet the stage you're in in your life now?

Yeah. So my wife and I sort of have this philosophy that we always want to design our life in close proximity to people. That is the underlying principle. But the form factor needs to change as the circumstances of our life changes. So the first time we did a community house, it was before we had kids. We all lived in a mansion together. It was a lot of fun. We were in our 20s and early 30s. And Radish was sort of designed for kids under five. And so it was like the form factor fit that.

Um, we're now sort of seeing that we're going to be entering a new life stage soon and people are gonna end up with multiple kids. Um, they're gonna need more space. Um, they're going to care a lot more about things like school districts. They're probably going to care a little less about things like how cool the bar is nearby. And, and so we're basically creating the container for our next stage of life. Um, and we want to be, we want that to be ready, um, before our friends are going to be in the moment when they need it.

Because if we do it afterwards, we'll lose them. They will defect out to the suburbs alone. And we sort of want to have a net that we can catch them with. And so we try to do these communities and have them come into existence before people need them rather than after people need them. Wow. So what stage are you at right now? Have you found the land, I guess? We have. We have found the land. We're very excited about it. And we're...

We're going to start building some things pretty soon. Congratulations. Well, let me remind listeners first, you are listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking with Phil Levin, founder of Live Near Friends, and Raina Cohen, who has written a book called The Other Significant Others, Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center, and a recent piece for The Atlantic called A Grand Experiment in Parenthood and Friendship. We're talking about friend groups who've chosen to live with each other or next door to each other to help raise each other's kids, the kind of benefits it has for the types of challenges that can come from

with modern parenthood and also, you know, just what it means to merge parenthood and friendship. Chris writes,

I consider their kids as closer cousins than even my biological cousins. In childhood and adulthood, the concept of family is further reaching than just who we are related to. So, Raina, you sort of started to get to this with Jeff in terms of for parents feeling isolated right now or for maybe people feeling isolated from their parent friends, but they don't necessarily want to commit to shared housing. What do you think is sort of a step that people could take forward?

Including talking about it, that could help, you know, people contribute to becoming sort of bigger in raising children, right? Becoming a bigger person in children's lives.

Yeah. One thing I think about is the writer Anne Helen Peterson had a piece where she talked about significant adults in a kid's life. And so, you know, like the caller who spoke about not having kids of his own but wanting to be a presence in the lives of children, I mean, that is something that's very possible that is probably both good for the kids and for the friends who are parents.

So I think for people who are not parents themselves and have friends who are parents to express that interest. And also one thing that I have seen to be very helpful just to make it possible for parents to be able to sort of

bring their kids is like talk to the parents about what can make a space kid friendly and so that we can invite you more often and it sort of communicates a desire to have them around and not just sort of cut a

cut off relationships with parents because you think that they're so busy. And then I think on the reverse side for people who are parents and want their non-parent friends to be involved, you can tell them what your constraints are, but say that like you want to find solutions together.

For instance, I have a friend who has two children and every other Monday night I go to her house after she's put the kids to bed when she would be homebound anyway and her husband's out. And that becomes standing time to spend together. And I don't think it would have occurred to me that the particularities of the limitations on her life because she has kids. And then in terms of parents who are trying to become closer with their other parent friends, I think considering a move is part of it.

But I think also just doing a little bit of what Phil talked about where, you know, you're sort of in the same space together and having your kids around and you're watching each other's kids rather than feeling like it's only the responsibility of the parents for their own children rather than kind of pooling your resources together. And that can make it easier on everybody.

Yeah. This just came in, but I did want to ask you about it. Does this know, right? It's not all positive. I'm in this situation. It can create a click, which can lead to high school dynamics like ganging up. You've definitely talked with teens or people who grew up in this situation and are now adults. What are your thoughts on what Nancy's bringing up here? I'm so sorry. We're so close to the end of the show, but yeah. No problem. Yeah. I did speak to some kids and people who were raised in these environments. Mostly I heard very positive things, though I did hear teenagers. More positive

were sometimes frustrated by the number of adult eyes on them. They would rather sort of like fly under the radar, but I also think teenagers are always unhappy. So it's hard to know how much you should weigh that. And then they get to the other side, like Jeff's kids, who we heard about earlier, who were very content with it. But, you know, I think...

maybe what I would say to this listener is one that's, I'm sorry, and that's hard. And also, you know, you kind of have to pick your problems in life and there are risks involved to everything. The risk to not being close to the people that you love is that you won't have those connections. And then the risks to being close to them is that you have the problems of closeness, which means problems of communication, problems of cliquishness. So, you know, it is a...

I struggle to eventually work through that, but I see that as sort of part of the bargain.

Vicki on Blue Sky writes, I'm not polyamorous, but when I wrote an article about what all parents can learn from poly parents, my research found this. Parents benefited by having extra hands and more time to themselves, and the kids benefited from having other people they could talk to and who could serve as role models who may remain in their lives. Raina Cohen, thanks so much for talking with us. Thank you for having me. Check out Raina's piece in The Atlantic, A Grand Experiment in Parenthood and Friendship, and her book, The Other Significant Others. So, Levin, so glad to have you, too.

Thanks, Mina. Phil Levin is founder of Live Near Friends. Thank you so much, listeners. Thank you so much, Jesse Fisher, for producing this segment. And the forum team also includes Caroline Smith, Mark Nieto, Francesca Fenzi, Jennifer Eng, Susie Britton, Danny Bringer, Brendan Willard, Christopher Beal, Brian Vo, Jesse Fisher, Katie Springer, and Ethan Toved-Lindsey. I'm Mina Kim.

Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. ♪

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