David Auburn’s Summer, 1976 is not a love story in the traditional sense—and Alice and Diana’s friendship is certainly not love at first sight. The women meet out of necessity: they both need cheap childcare during the summer. “We’d been in Columbus for three years,” Alice says in the first scene, “and there were a bunch of young faculty parents with small children on tight budgets so we started this thing, it was a babysitting co-op.”
The desire for affordable childcare is likely familiar to current parents. Today, the average American household with children spends almost one third of its income on childcare. The average annual cost of daycare across the country is $18,866 per child—and nearly $24,400 in Washington, D.C. This expense has a particular impact on working mothers: a 2023 survey found that 45% of working mothers have considered leaving their jobs or reducing their hours due to childcare costs.
(From the Economic Policy Institute's "Child Care Costs in the United States")
The 1970s saw a similar trend. America’s 1973-1975 recession was marked by slow economic growth, high unemployment rates, and quickly rising prices. Amid this economic unrest, Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, a bill intended to create federally funded public childcare centers. Historian Anna K. Danziger Halperin calls the bill “the largest federal investment in childcare”—but it never became law. Under pressure from critics labeling the bill as “communist” and even a ploy to “Sovietize our youth,” President Richard Nixon vetoed the Act in 1971.
As economic pressure grew for the nuclear family unit, commune living was on the rise in American counterculture. In the 1960s and 1970s, there were nearly 3,000 communes across the United States. Various communities were formed on different missions, ranging from ecological goals to political aims to religious beliefs. However, a shared feature of many communes was collective child-rearing.
Twin Oaks, America's oldest secular commune, is located in central Virginia. It was founded in 1967 by Kat Kinkade and seven other behavioral psychology students. The community, which still exists today, shares childcare duties. Parents and non-parents alike cook, clean, and spend time with the community’s children. Many members joined Twin Oaks with the specific intention of raising children there: “I’d done a lot of babysitting before I came here, so I knew what I was getting into, and I purposefully wanted to raise children in community,” one member said in an interview. “I could see that raising kids in a nuclear family was going to be hell.”
While the popularity of commune-living has fallen since the 1970s, new collective childcare practices are gaining popularity, such as social media-dubbed “Mommunes”—or mom communes. The term describes a growing phenomenon of single mothers choosing to live and raise their children together. Websites like Roommates with Kids and CoAbode have become popular ways for single parents to find each other. Since CoAbode’s founding in 2002, hundreds of thousands of women have used it to find other single mothers to live with. A woman living in one such community went viral on TikTok for a 2023 video captioned “This is your sign to move into a Mommune.” The comment section is a testament to how attractive this idea is to many women:
“Where do I get into a Mommune? Sounds like the perfect plan,”
“Brilliant. I swear moms were meant to parent with other moms around.”
“Do I have to leave my husband at the firehouse or something?”
“This is the village we’re all supposed to have.”
“THERE’S A NAME FOR THE DREAM???”
This generational desire for mothering in community is influenced, at least partially, by necessity. The 2022 U.S. Census found that of more than 11 million single-parent households with kids under 18, 80% are led by mothers. Recent studies have shown that single mothers are at increased risk of experiencing poverty; others have found that single mothers are at considerable risk for mental health disorders. Many single mothers see collective parenting as a way to alleviate some of these burdens. Women who live in “mommunes” talk about the support they feel both financially and emotionally from the women around them. “We formed our own alternative family unit,” writes Janet Hoggarth, the author of the book The Single Mums’ Mansion.
In both the 1970s and today—the world of Auburn’s piece and the world we live in now—single and coupled parents alike struggle to afford childcare. The potential solutions that show up in the piece, from Doug’s co-op to Diana’s fantasy of New York, are reflected in America’s real parenting trends. As the price of childcare rises today, women like Alice and Diana are finding new ways to realize the proverb found among many Bantu-speaking peoples of South-Central Africa and recognizable to parents everywhere: “it takes a village to raise a child.”
—Nora Geffen