MILLHEIM, PA—I’m on a getaway in rural Pennsylvania, writing my book from the summer house of a college friend. I didn’t realize until after I got here that I had landed in Amish country.
Parenting: Getting away from home means coming to your senses
“Home” for many people means a sanctuary. I come across this idea everywhere. Ironically, I found it expressed very clearly when I got away last Spring in order to finish this book proposal. I stayed at an AirBnB, and the owner left a note asking guests to remove their shoes upon entering. This was to “leave the outside world outside, literally and figuratively.”
I pondered this idea my whole stay there, in part because I have often argued something kind of contrary: that in America, families are too atomized. Stay-at-home moms feel isolated and alone and anxious because they are stuck in the house with tiny insane humans all day. A healthier society has less of a divide, I sometimes think, between the home and the community.
I wrote about this in Alienated America, pointing to the early chapters of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy:
A clan that had never seen the need for many bourgeois virtues now found itself in a situation where families were more isolated. “In the mountain homes of Jackson,” Vance explained, “privacy was more theory than practice. Family, friends, and neighbors would barge into your home without much warning. Mothers would tell their daughters how to raise their children. Fathers would tell sons how to do their jobs. Brothers would tell brothers-in-law how to treat their wives. Family life was something people learned on the fly with a lot of help from their neighbors.”14
Things were different in suburbia.
“In Middletown, a man’s home was his castle.” Vance’s grandparents “brought an ancient family structure from the hills and tried to make it work in a world of privacy and nuclear families.” This world of privacy and nuclear families is an individualist world, and absent robust institutions of civil society, it can be an enemy of social cohesion. For Vance’s class of hillbillies, the cultural changes of the later twentieth century resulted in social isolation, and thus “social decay.”
…
Think about the things you count on your neighbor or roommate for, or used to, at least. A ride to the airport? Take an Uber. A cup of sugar? FreshDirect! Any small arrangement of convenience, either regular or in a pinch, for which you might count on a neighbor, you can now pay someone to come on demand. This is both a cause and a mitigating instrument of an erosion of neighborliness that can arise when suburbs become isolating and atomizing.
All that said, the idea of a home as a “sanctuary,” as a place away from the world, sounds lovely to me—in part because that’s not how I feel about my own home.
Sanctuaries are quiet and peaceful. My home is not. I love how alive my home is. It’s alive in that it has eight humans and two dogs, and on occasion other random kids. It’s alive in that we have all sorts of flowering trees—cherries, magnolias, dogwoods, crape myrtles, and more. It’s alive because vines, bamboo, and all sorts of odd plants are always springing up in our more wild corners. It’s alive in that our humans and dogs run around and destroy the grass, wear down the deck, break things. My home is alive because the children are growing, and so we constantly need to change dressers, beds, cribs, closets, playthings, and so on.
All this life means work. “Even when the kids are out of the house,” my wife said to me today when I brought this up over the phone, “there’s always a task that needs to be done at our house.”
That’s the biggest reason I need to get away once in a while to get writing and thinking done. Whether it’s repairing something, supervising my kids’ chores, cleaning, improving, or defusing some situation, there is no end to domestic work I could do. That makes it harder to simply focus on a task like reading a book or writing a chapter or reading a paper. The last three novels I read, I read on vacation—away from the bustle of home.
Maybe there’s something I could do to extract myself from the bustle. Maybe that burden of a home is part of what makes family so daunting to so many. For now, I escape that burden by escaping home.
People I met: The quiet Amish
Smullton is a tiny place in Miles Township, Pa., and it seems to be part of Rebersburg, another tiny place in Miles Township. Rebersburg has a few churches, a general store, and a book store. Smullton, just across Elk Creek, mostly has farms and small houses, but it also has a donut shop. This is Amish country.
I stopped in at Mammy’s Donuts this morning and spoke with Elizabeth, “They call me Liz at the donut shop,” she said.
Elizabeth is Amish, about 20 years old, and the youngest of five. “Most families around here are bigger,” she told me as I filled up my coffee, which, together with a “peanut butter cup” cream-filled donut, was a dollar.
Elizabeth is unmarried and lives with her parents next door to her brother and his wife and kids. Her brother and sister-in-law are free to go out and leave the kids at home, in part because grandma and aunt Elizabeth are right next door. “They always like it when we are home.”
That free, informal, unplanned babysitting extends beyond extended family. Regularly the women of the community there find themselves looking after someone else’s baby or young kids. “We don’t expect to get paid. It’s just the way we do things.”
This arrangement is one of the most valuable ways to make child-rearing easier. One friend of mine who lives in DC said that if she had “just one neighbor” with whom she would feel comfortable simply leaving her kids at a moment’s notice, “it would be life-changing.”
Gideon is the husband of Mammy, who runs the donut shop. I spoke to him just outside. He spoke of the expectation that kids work for the good of the family, at a fairly young age. Elizabeth mentioned this too.
So the tight-knit nature of the Amish community and the expectation for domestic labor from everyone is key to making family-formation easier.
But here’s the thing: neither Elizabeth nor Gideon brought this up when I asked repeated open-ended questions about whether the community takes active steps to promote and support family formation.
When I asked Gideon why families in this Amish community were bigger, he said “Well, we don’t believe in birth control,” as if it were the beginning and the end of the explanation. “We believe in the Lord’s will.”
Elizabeth responded to my first question “does the community here do things that really support family,” she was stumped. “I don’t really know.”
When I pressed, both Gideon and Elizabeth cited the near universality of stay-at-home mothers in the Amish community. “The women stay home, and the men provide for the family,” Gideon said. “The mothers aren’t sent out to work,” Elizabeth said.
But what was interesting to me was that neither of them pointed, on their own, to the free-range nature of the kids’ upbringing, the availability of neighbors, the solidarity of the community. I’m pretty sure all of these things drive up marriage and childbearing, but I’m not shocked the Amish I spoke to didn’t think to mention them. I’m asking them to describe the air they breathe.
I had the same experience in Utah, speaking to young LDS couples. The first students I met on campus at BYU Idaho were a married couple—both sophomores. I asked what BYU-Idaho or the surrounding community did to support families, marriage, or parenthood, and they couldn’t answer.
But the school community does tons. It’s normal to ask a friend or TA to watch your kid. It’s normal to bring a baby into a classroom. There are nursing rooms, or “mother’s lounges” everywhere on campus. There’s a used baby-clothes store right there on College Ave.
Provisions that other moms and dads, stuck in more alienating and isolating environments, would find life-changing, are everyday life in some of these tight-knit religious communities.