A Little Help from Your Friends

By Sara Keiko Sarasohn

The same week my son started calling me mama, he started calling my sister-in-law Mimi. Mimi--or Mary, as others know her--is my partner's sister. She lives just two blocks from us, and in a typical week she's over at our place six or seven times. My son gets excited when he hears her coming up the stairs. When he wants to dance, he knows she's going to put De La Soul's hip-hop in the CD player. She lets him eat strawberries before he finishes his meat. She makes his stuffed animals talk like the cast of The Sopranos. Life is better with a Mimi in your life--for the parents as well as the child. When we need a baby sitter or just a break from chasing an active toddler, Mary is right there to take our son off our hands.

That kind of familial pitching in was once a regular feature of child rearing. But with 1 in 6 families moving in any given year this past decade and family members separated by greater and greater distances, we're increasingly putting ourselves out of reach of potentially helpful relatives. Noting that the isolated nuclear family is an aberration in history, Cornell anthropologist Meredith Small observes, "Across all cultures, all through time, mothers and fathers have always had help from other people. Parents today are stressed because they don't have that help."

Psychiatric social worker Sue Kutz agrees. She conducted a study of new mothers in Boston, expecting to find that moms who adjusted best were those in relationships in which husband and wife were well attuned to each other. She discovered to her surprise, though, that a better predictor was the number of nearby relatives the new mother could call on for assistance.

It may seem an obvious point, but Kutz finds in her clinical practice that couples don't automatically think of turning to relatives for help. "Modern, high-functioning adults are accustomed to solving their problems on their own or with money. Often they aren't used to thinking of relatives as entwined in their emotional well-being."

Bloodlines help, but even if you live far away from aunts and uncles and grandparents, you can still have a Mimi in your life. The key is proximity, notes Small, since kids quickly grow attached to people who drop in frequently. So how do you get trustworthy nearby adults involved with your child? Our strategy is just to ask. I'll say to friends, "So when can you baby-sit this weekend?" It's not subtle, but it works.

These relationships require effort on our part too. If our son has a friend whose parents aren't people we'd otherwise hang out with, we will still spend time with the family. Of course, we take special care of Mary. She often depends on us for dinner; my partner picks up her dry cleaning and helps with other errands. Mary is planning to adopt a child, and when she does, we're going to have to go back to diaper bags and bottles of formula long before we imagined. We're ready. It's a chance to return the favor of a lifetime.

Sarasohn is a producer for NPR's All Things Considered