You know the idyllic story of your parent’s (or maybe grandparent’s) youth—a small neighborhood where all the children played together in a pack all day long while moms stayed at home to take care of the babies and have cookies and lemonade waiting when their children came home in the afternoon. While I know that idyllic stories tend to gloss over painful realities, the basic concept of mom staying home while children played together (and I mean played—they did not participate in group sports in faraway towns), was, in fact, the reality. I don’t know when that changed, exactly; I just know that by the time I had my first child, every mom I knew went back to work. This makes sense—I previously only knew working mothers, being a working person myself. But I looked it up: only 45 percent of women choose to stay home and raise their children, and that’s an improvement in the last ten years!
            The fact that the numbers are improving surprises me a bit, because the going-back-to-work trend has given rise to so many unintended consequences. I’ll use my own example—when I decided to stay home, I was the only woman on my block doing so. Each morning I’d walk around the neighborhood with my baby, and each morning was a completely solitary experience. No one was home. Even the families with under-fives were gone. Now what? You’re alone with your baby and without a community of adults to keep you company. Not only do you go nutsy from lack of adult contact, you have to single-handedly figure out this raising children thing.

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