Communal Child-Rearing: An Exploration

Communal child-rearing or collective child-rearing refers to any system of childcare where 1. community caretakers raise children (in addition to or instead of their biological parents), usually with financial support from the state, or 2. numerous adults, often including some who are not biologically related to the children, take part in raising them.

Communal child-rearing, though not explored widely in Western academic or public discourse, may serve as a solution to gender inequality, parental discontent, and parenting-related psychological problems in children.

This collection of resources allows you to learn about communal child-rearing from a small number of authors who have directly addressed the subject. Click on the links to learn more about each topic, or pick a topic that interests you in the navigation bar.

Watch to learn why the gender pay gap is more about a devaluation of mothering than anything else.

After watching, do you see how communal child-rearing could be a significant step toward gender equality?

I originally began researching this project to find out how communal child-rearing might serve as a solution to the gender wage gap. However, in my research, I found many examples of communal child-rearing that was not instated for the purpose of gender equality, including some that take place under the same conditions of patriarchal and racial capitalism that created the gender wage gap. Nonetheless, these examples have a lot to teach us about communal child-rearing and how it connects to gender and other axes of power.

Anca Gheaus is a leading feminist scholar on the topic of communal child-rearing. In "Arguments for Nonparental Care for Children," she describes a long list of reasons why collective parenting may be better for women, parents, and children.

Bonus: Check out Gheaus' works on migration + care drain and overpopulation + coparenting, more issues that affect women and children which communal child-rearing may ameliorate.

The gender and family dynamics of communal child-rearing are very different in non-agricultural societies than they would be if collective parenting were used as a solution to the gender wage gap in large industrial societies. Nonetheless, hunter-gatherers and forager-horticulturists show us that communal child-rearing may be an essential element of the human family we evolved to be part of.

The Israeli Kibbutzim's childcare system was the largest attempt at state-supported communal child-rearing in history. However, it was deeply linked with Zionism and the theft of land from Palestinians, it dissolved over time in a return to the nuclear family, and its initial attempts at gender equality were largely unsuccessful. Despite its flaws, the history of the Kibbutz can inform future communal child-rearing projects to ensure they do not make the same mistakes.

Before colonization, kin-based communal child-rearing was the norm in what is now Kenya. However, postcolonial and post-industrial changes in economic and social life have largely replaced the communal child-rearing system. Read about the negative effects of these shifts in parenting and the measures Kenyans have taken to adapt to changing livelihoods.

Due to the United States slave economy's frequent forced separation of families and forced labor of mothers, enslaved African Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries developed a system of collective parenting out of necessity. Based on traditional West African kinship structures, the kin-based child-rearing of the antebellum period still influences African American families today.

Many alternative religious communities have raised children collectively. Some of these communities adopted communal child-rearing in attempts to reach gender equality; some had other motivations. Some of them, including Synanon and New Vrindaban, became hotbeds of violence and abuse. Including those religious communities that caused great suffering to members and non-members in this project may seem to undermine the integrity of communal child-rearing. However, their terrible failures were largely due to due to their authoritarian and hierarchical natures as opposed to their childcare system. Their failures make them all the more important to study so we can avoid their flaws.

Finally, here are a couple of short pieces on the advantages collective parenting might have for Western industrial societies, to read in addition to Anca Gheaus.

Communal child-rearing may serve as a solution to the gender wage gap, parental dissatisfaction, and psychological problems in children. However, it is not a widely-discussed topic in the Western cannon. On this page, I have gathered the work of a small group of scholars, working in very different contexts, who have discussed collective parenting directly or indirectly. In the future, we may reference their writing to help us build an effective system of communal child-rearing for industrial societies.