Look at me! I did my first Substack Live!
(Well, technically, this was my second Substack Live. The first one was last month with some of my favorite neurobollocks critics, Ana Lund and Diana Fox Tilson, LICSW, discussing a question that Diana had posed to us: “Why Do All Pop Psychology Books Suck?” Check that one out HERE.)
More conversation than interview (one of these days, I’ll hone this skill…. maybe) but another great excuse (and format) for chatting with fascinating and insightful people about their fascinating and insightful areas of expertise.
I had a sneaking suspicion that a conversation with Lisa Sibbett of The Auntie Bulletin would be super fun and it absolutely delivered. Lisa is a fantastic writer and an all around wonderful human. Even as her Substack speaks to Aunties1 (and her growing Auntie Collective), she has a significant chunk of parent readers too (she is #24 in the Parenting category.) Not at all surprising given how reading her Substack, as a parent, feels like a warm hug… or the life-saving toss of a flotation device (e.g. this one hit real close to home).
Lisa writes about what it means to be an Auntie and about how to auntie (I can use that as a verb, right?) She shares what it looks like to reject the false binary of having/not-having kids and embrace all paths towards a “childful” life. She centers care and why we need to see and value care, especially at a community level. She incorporates the Auntie perspective into brilliant social commentary (vive la cozy révolution!) and helpful insight into raising + caring for children at different stages of life. Oh, and did I mention that she has a PhD in Education and pulls in that expertise as well?
There is a reason the title of this video, The Aunties Will Save Us All, was the first thing that came to mind when considering how Lisa’s mission with The Auntie Bulletin fits into the context of the stressor map. The impact of inspiring a growing Auntie Collective – the support, community, empathy, love for each other’s children, and, and, and – ties so closely to how we all lighten our stress load in our increasingly stressful world.
Yes, I really do believe that the Aunties will save us all.
(NOTE: below is a rough and crappily edited transcript2. I highly recommend watching or listening if you can!)
MOLLY:
First, I love everything that the Auntie Bulletin stands for. We’ll get into all how your work moves across maternal stress and solutions in a bit but I want to kick off with a little intro about you and all the wonderful things about the Auntie Bulletin.
LISA:
Sure, thanks for having me, Molly. I’m so happy to be here.
I’m Lisa Sibbett from the Auntie Bulletin, and I’m not a mom. I’m an Auntie. An alloparent is the technical term from evolutionary biological research. This includes not just biological aunts, but anybody who’s involved in helping with the care and rearing of children who are not our own. And in fact, alloparenting happens both in the human societies, and also in the animal kingdom. Lots of animals engage in alloparenting as well.
I write a newsletter that is for and about Aunties – those of us who have kids in our lives who aren’t our own kids and/or people who want to have kids in our lives who aren’t our own kids. Also, a lot of parents read it because parents in our society are overworked and overwhelmed. If you live in the United States, we have a tattered social safety net that doesn’t support parents very well and so alloparents are a really important functional support network for families, and could be much even more if we normalized Auntiehood as a common path that women and people of all genders can choose in their lives.
We get a script that either we become moms or we are childless, or child free, involuntarily childless. There’s not a big cultural script that helps describe how to be an alloparent, how to be an Auntie, how to pick the middle path between being a parent and being childless. But we need that cultural script. That’s what the newsletter is about.
MOLLY:
You have written about this as a false binary – the choice that it’s either you’re a parent or you’re childfree. A premise of Auntie Bulletin is: why do we fall into this false binary when there’s this whole middle ground that we should be talking about and seeing and utilizing and building community around? You build awareness of this false binary and call out why it’s false. I also appreciate how you frame this discussion within your own personal story. Can you share a bit?
LISA:
There’s a lot of different things to say about my personal story, but my immediate contextual reality right now is that I live in co-housing with my partner and our friends, and our friends’ kids and another couples. We have three households, six adults, two kids, one dog and a shared backyard. We live in separate domiciles, in two buildings, and we have a shared backyard. We, the non-parental adults in our community, do a decent amount of child care. I’m picking up kids after school today. Tuesdays are my day. We have shared dinners together four nights a week. We take turns cooking for each other, and that’s really delightful.
In the larger context, I’ve been an Auntie to lots of families in my life for many years, both my biological family and my adoptive family, and also non familial kin. It occurred to me that I could write about being really involved in the lives of other people’s children. It felt like an illegible experience to other people in my life but also a really important part of my daily lived experience. Once I started writing about it, I found that there’s quite a lot of hunger to talk about this and read about this. There are lots of Aunties out there. There are lots of people who want to be Aunties. And there are lots and lots and lots of parents, primary caregivers, who really need to be in this conversation as well.
MOLLY:
It also brings a different perspective to what we’re going through, when it comes to raising the children in our lives, whether we’re parents or alloparents. It’s a different framework for thinking about how we see kids, interact with kids, parent kids, raise kids, love on kids. All these different pieces, which I really appreciate.
Even from an information and educational angle. The perspective that an Auntie brings, the Auntie view, versus the parent view, in some ways seems almost… more productive? I find it refreshing to read the way you write about kids from the Auntie perspective. The parenting perspective too often carries layers of judgment. So much of parenting content in the wilds of social media takes what I consider the “sample size of me” approach where they are promoting the one thing that works for their kid as if it should work for everyone. It just sets parents up for failure when it the “best” strategy does not exist in reality.
As an Auntie, you don’t have the same social stakes, right? The cultural expectation that how a kid turns out comes down to parenting and how that might relate to someone’s protection over or their feeling like they need to “prove” they are doing it well or doing it right. You (as an Auntie) can have a more open conversation about kids and how you see kids, and how you interact with kids. I wonder if that is why your writing is so appealing for parents? Have you gotten that feedback from parent readers?
LISA:
Yeah, and I really appreciate the way that you put it. You have put a sharper point on it than I had recognized before, which is that parents have their very specific “my kids, my family” perspective. Aunties (once you get pretty involved with a family and have built that muscle) often are involved with more than one family and have loyalties to more than one family, so we get to see kids across different contexts. I think that really is a kind of Auntie superpower – being able to recognize that different families are different; different kids are different; different kids are different in different families. That’s the important part
I’ll also use this opportunity to give a real shout out to one of the most important kinds of groups of alloparents: teachers. Teachers come with this enormous wisdom that they get from working for many different kids and families over the years. That’s not culturally recognized that way – the wisdom and knowledge asset base that it actually is – but teachers tend to have that perspective too because they’ve worked with so many different kids. It develops some equanimity and an appreciation for how kids are so different and everything is family specific and also kid specific.
MOLLY:
So, the title of this Live/essay is “The Aunties Will Save Us All.” because, honestly, that was the first thing that came to mind. But also… true?
With The Maternal Stress Project, one of the original goals of it was to identify and map the stressors related to modern motherhood, especially in America, and how they’re all interconnected, how they all affect into each other, how they add to this cumulative weight in a way that relates to health. As it’s expanded across the years, and grown into more of a women’s health view, motherhood is still a part of it – there are definitely stressors that are specific to being a parent, and stressors that are specific to being in a birthing body and going through that experience – but there are also stressors that I might consider feminine-leaning just because of society and gendering. E.g. caregiving, especially caregiving without support. It’s very gender skewed.
The other thing with the mapping and creating this map was to enable seeing where the solutions are. We often think about “stress” as a health risk factor. With a message to reduce your stress, reduce your stress.
LISA:
Meditate, drink water, exercise…
MOLLY:
Practice, self care, whatever, take a break…
All those things are great but the reality is that most women and especially mothers have less time to even do these things.That’s the irony. So the idea was if we can take this big pan out and look down — when are we exposed to these stressors? Why are we exposed to these things? Why do we internalize them? — then, you can start to see the solutions that exist in those interconnections and solutions that exist as a layer over the whole thing.
Auntiehood is an interesting stress-reducing layer to think about.
Multiple pieces to this puzzle. On one hand, Aunties relieve the weight of not having support for so many different things here. For example, focusing on the stress of child care, or lack of child care, that’s an obvious one at the basic level of what if I don’t have someone to care for my kid when I’m working?
Even beyond having options, there is research showing that another way child care issues affect health is when there is precarity around child care situations. In that precarity, just knowing that you have backup care – not even needing to use that backup care – is enough to positively impact long-term health. That’s the Auntie effect right there! Having an Auntie in your life, someone who is available as that backup child care option is a huge stress reducer.
Another big benefit, more generally, is the social community that Auntiehood helps create, this inter-web of a social support. And, again, the perception of the social support is so key as a stress buffer. Having the people in your life that you can rely on for all these different pieces. How do you see the creation of that community, how you talk about it or how your readers talk about being in that kind of community?
LISA:
It really is a protective factor. The social problem can be almost anything with research pointing out that a solution is community. Having a backup, having a safety net, having a fallback, having an emergency contact. I didn’t really fully realize the importance of the emergency contact function of Aunties until I started writing the Auntie Bulletin and hearing from parents a lot. I’m an emergency contact for a few different families.
And boy, does that make sense. To be able to literally relax your nervous system knowing that if something goes wrong, there’s a backup plan. In the United States, there is such a tattered safety net. And I’ve heard from families over and over again that the community piece is so important. When Vivek Murthy was the attorney general, he put out a couple of Surgeon General’s warnings: one of them was about the loneliness epidemic, and the other was about parental stress. I feel like there’s a way to consider them together. Could they solve each other? Something I’ve noticed over the years is that I hear from really overwhelmed parents talking about pushing a stroller past a retirement community and looking longingly: “anybody want to be a grandparent?” and then there’s a symmetrical phenomenon of would be alloparental people or those who want to be honorary grandparents walking past the playground thinking the same in the opposite direction.
Both longings could really answer one another. We need the policy and infrastructure to make it more possible for parents and non-parents to find each other and team up. I’m so interested in structures like a retirement community with a childcare center in it. That kind of setup. Some places like that do exist, but that could be a lot more widespread. Then there’s also the cultural normalization which is something that I’m trying to do with Auntie Bulletin and the whole Auntie Collective, I think of us as a shared project at this newsletter – the people who read it are involved in helping advance this movement. A social movement to that is partly about making these options visible – especially to women of childbearing age – that you have choices. Being a parent is a great choice and not being a parent is also a great choice. And that you can have a a childful life even if you don’t have children of your own, whether that’s through your own choice or because of circumstance.
MOLLY:
As you were talking, I was thinking about the conversation I had with Elissa Strauss, who wrote the book When You Care (and writes the Substack MADE WITH CARE). It wasn’t actually something I hadn’t even considered until we we talked a lot about it – which is how the flip side of caregiving stress is joy. We so often think about the weight of caregiving, the stress of caregiving, and how is negatively affecting our health. How it’s a burden. And that’s often how it is studied in the research. Elissa really flipped my brain on this to consider how much joy in just hiding under the burden. And how the “burden” mostly comes down to support… or lack of support. The burden is not related to the taking care of the humans. The burden is related to the lack of support to take care of the humans. When you alleviate that weight, scratch away at what is causing it, you have more access the joy.
There’s something almost mutually beneficial here for parents and Aunties and alloparents, right? You bring that support so that parents have more access to the joy, you open the joy to other people. And you get to access it too. I mean, to be silly with a four year old is so joyful!
It’s a health boost. This flip side of stress, the joy and the silliness and the fun that can come from being with children. Let everyone participate in that!
LISA:
I completely agree. I think we have a very unjust, unfair, unequal distribution of the care workload in our society. Disproportionately on parents; disproportionately on underpaid essential workers, lots of whom are women of color. Then we have large swaths of people in our society who perform very little care work, or none, or most of what they put into society is extractive. Actually subtracting from the net wellbeing. There are people who are really miserable and do not perform any care work in their lives, and my immediate thought to that is “I wonder, what would shift if you were contributing?” The most essential work that humans can do is to care for one another.
I would really love to see a huge shift in policy infrastructure around how we distribute who’s doing the care so that care can be joyful. Which, in fact, it actually is. Aunties get to experience that more because we don’t tend to be nearly as depleted. We often come into a family situation and help the primary caregivers catch a breather. That can shift the vibes when kids (or parents) are going off the rails; you can come into the situation and reset the mood, yeah.
Building on your point about Elissa Strauss’ work, her book is so wonderful and one of the things that I love is how she argues that we can be ambitious about care. That it can be a domain of ours. I’ve thought about that a lot (especially as somebody with a disability that derailed my career in academia) how now I’m spending my life writing about care and performing care work. I would love to live in a society where there was a cultural norm that we can be ambitious about the care that we give and value it. I can be accomplished and valued,
MOLLY:
The other aspect in terms of the value of care work, and something I appreciate from your writing, is how it expands even out further out to establishing a more empathetic society. The more people value care and the more people perform care work – caring for young kids, caring for chronically ill, caring for family, caring for elders – we more we expand empathy for those around us and in the world, in general. I don’t want to be too rose colored glasses about this, but you wrote about it beautifully: if you exercise this muscle, it’s available in all kinds of different way. Advocacy is big and small. We need more empathy in this world. Again, the Aunties will save us all!
We need more empathetic humans who actually give a shit, right?
LISA:
Yeah. I think it’s been good timing for me, personally, to start a newsletter about care, voluntary care, in this administration. Because it’s easy to despair in the political situation that we’re living in, and the amount of cruelty and ugliness that’s being actively perpetrated by our federal government and is widespread in our culture as well.
Because I’m writing about care all the time and I’m talking to people who think about care all the time, I feel so hopeful. I have hope!
I see it in the work of other people too. Like Rebecca Solnit, I appreciate her work so much. I read an interview with Angela Davis and her sister Fania Davis, and they were just talking so much about the joy and hope in organizing and being in solidarity with other people who are trying to build a better world and how it helps you recognize that it is possible to build cultural momentum around these things. That is what’s gonna save us. Not technology. It’s gonna be humans and care.
MOLLY:
There’s a comment that came in from Gabriella: “what I wouldn’t get to have a backup plan” in relation to having a chronically ill child. I think this can often relate to family caregiving in general.
One of the things that we talked about in a separate conversation goes even beyond that feeling of having a backup care option. It’s more about how having a human who can step into care in your life opens up time. Especially for those caregivers who are around the clock and need access to rest and respite. All those things they recommend for stress management and the ways to reduce stress require time. A break. If you’re going to get more sleep, if you’re going to exercise, if you’re going to meditate, it’s nearly impossible to find the time to do any of that if you’re caring for somebody around the clock. Having someone in your life who can sit with the person that you are caring for is so important. It’s not even asking them to take over the harder parts of care, it’s just being in the room with them. That’s a whole other piece – Auntiehood can give people access to respite and the time they would need to access stress management tools!
LISA:
Totally. That’s making me think about something a mom I know said to me recently. She has a child who’s going through a very acute health care health crisis and she said to me – it just helps me relax in my body to know that help might be coming. That really stuck with me and I think about that a lot.
It points to why an Auntie movement is urgent. We urgently need to normalize choosing our parenting, normalize choosing care. I really hope for you, Gabriella, that there’s an Auntie headed your way. Yeah. And if you’re not already reading the Auntie Bulletin, we have lots of suggestions for how to cultivate that.
MOLLY:
I think that story lends itself so much to the way that I think about and talk about stress too. There’s multiple levels in terms of how stress gets into your body and can affect your health – there is exposure (which might be inevitable) relating to what’s around us, what’s external to us. But then there’s perception. The filter in our brain that perceives the world around us and dictates whether or not our brain and our body act as if this is an emergency to respond to. If we don’t perceive whatever that exposure is as a stressor, we don’t respond in our bodies, which means it won’t affect our health. Some of the most interesting research, especially when it comes to supporting parents or division of load is how this might affect health. And it seems to really come down to that perception – perception of support, perception of the experience, perception of the moment.
Perception of support is super interesting from this perspective, because it’s not just the physical support or taking away whatever that burden/stressor is. It’s just knowing that it’s available if I need it. That’s enough. That’s enough to impact health. And that’s an Auntie, right?
That’s having someone next door who you can call in a pinch. That’s having someone as an emergency contact. That’s having someone as backup child care. It’s having the person that person you trust, the person who loves your child, the person who’s not judging you as a parent…. It’s all of these things! And just having that person in your life is enough. Again, the Aunties will save us all! Because it’s the perception of support that seems to be the critical piece reducing how we internalize the stress around us.
LISA:
I love that.
MOLLY:
So, how can we study this, Lisa?
LISA:
For the researchers who are studying alloparents, I hope that they find the Auntie Bulletin. There’s not very much research about modern day alloparenting in bourgeois Western white people’s society, or the many cultures where people forget how to do it in the first place. The
Western educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies. There’s just not very much
I happen to have a great big pool of my Aunties who they could tap into that study population!
MOLLY:
Well, I wish I had time to do the research but I think it’s so interesting to think about what could come out of learning more from the Auntie Collective!
It could be fascinating to study alloparenting in our individualistic, capitalist society, right? Especially when you consider how this same society is suffering from a loneliness crisis. There could be a lot of fascinating things coming out of it.
The other thing that I keep thinking about is how much studying Auntiehood could tell us about the stress of parenting and caregiving. When you take it from the perspective of Auntiehood, remove the societal expectations of the good mother myth and the narratives and the pressure, the stakes and the pressure of being labeled “mother” … you have parenting and care. Just parenting and care. I mean, there’s still other elements to it… I just think there’s something interesting there around this is what it could or should look like – this is what having kids, raising kids, loving on kids, what it could look like.
LISA:
Motherhood is such a fraught and vexed political category and its, just so loaded as a social category, and as an individual role.
Aunties – particularly in this nuclear family-centric society – are under defined and under-conceptualized, a sort of illegible category, which on the one hand is hard, but on the other hand, means it’s kind of like an open. A lot of things are open, not predetermined in the same way.
Motherhood has all these scripts imposed on it. There’s not a lot of scripts imposed on Aunties in our society. It does raise really interesting questions about what happens when you take a lot of those scripts away, what can you see?
MOLLY:
We can think of that in terms of having backup as who’s going to pick my kid up from school or who will take my kid if childcare doesn’t open today. But there’s also something interesting with the Auntie relationship for older kids too. There’s gonna be things that your tween and teen don’t want to talk to you about, as a mother, and things you might be affected by more as a mother. If you have an Auntie in your life – a safe, loving trusted adult – knowing that that person exists for your child to go to when they feel like they’re worried about coming to you with something is huge. Here’s another adult that I trust, and I know my kid won’t tell me everything, but I trust that however they interact with you in this situation, I trust that you’re going to do a great job at it. It’s having a safe open line.
How do you see this with older kids?
LISA:
I think all kids need multiple trusted adults. And that’s about preventing abuse too. The more eyes are on a situation, the more we can see red flags. It’s also about intervening in crises, mental health crises, physical health crises, all kinds of different things. There’s a lot more risk that teens face than younger kids. It’s a really important protective factor for adolescents to have adults to go to
Also, sometimes there’s more heightened conflict between kids and their parents. Then there’s a really important alloparental category around queer and transgender and youth families. Parents who are chosen family have been really essential and important for the queer community.
Auntiehood needs to be valued from a maternal health perspective and a child health perspective, and health of the community in the world, and all the things public health.
MOLLY:
Aunties – a public health solution.
How do we continue just highlight and advocate and push towards whatever the perfect alloparenting world looks like in 10 years?
LISA:
Parent utopia? Yeah, we can work toward it. We all can afford it, right? Like those of us who are not actively parenting children can cultivate if we so desire. I’m partnering with a person who didn’t necessarily know that he wanted to be an Auntie, but he’s such a good one. He’s adored by the kids. And it brings up so much joy
I think there’s sort of all of us marching in an Auntie society world direction, which means cultivating relationships between parents and non parents. And a lot of times that adult<>kid relationship is mediated through the adult <> adult relationship, right? Ao a lot of this is actually just about cultivating connections across parent, non-parent divide, and that’s hard to do.
I will just give a plug for whats over at the Auntie Bulletin. We’ve got lots and lots and lots of resources and ideas about how to navigate that, including the post that came out last week that was a guest post talking about rethinking reciprocity when one friend has kids and the other one doesn’t.
I think it’s partly about parents reaching out to alloparents. I think a lot of times people who make good Aunties or the people who make good family connections for Aunties aren’t necessarily the people that would be your soul mates or your best friends. It might be the elder couple who lives next door, or it might be just like your acquaintance at work who keeps signaling that they think your kids are so cute they want to hang out with you. I think parents should look for who’s signaling and who is interested in your kids. Who needs help. Who’s nearby. Who’s on your block, who’s in your building?
MOLLY:
Even just the social narrative around the existence of Aunties and alloparents, doesn’t seem to exist widely in media. We don’t see enough examples of it. We see more examples of the tension between parents and non-parents. I think that has further created this false binary that it’s one or the other. It’s more work to break that down but it would be really helpful if we saw more just examples of it and talked about it more.
LISA:
I think we all need to be talking about it. I think the more we do more to normalize it, the more we see “oh, that’s interesting. Maybe I should try that”. And I think that you’re totally right about representation in the media. I’m always interested in elevating the representation in the media that already exists. I’m thinking about the show Shrinking for example.
It’s helpful for us to name it when we see it, really elevate it. We do have cultural scripts. They’re just not as widespread as they should be. The more we talk about it, the more it gets into the zeitgeist, and the more it filters over to Hollywood and general culture, including here.
MOLLY:
Because the Aunties will save us all. Value the Aunties and everything they bring to the world and to public health and parenting stress, and… all the things!
Thank you, Lisa. It’s so good to talk with you!
Hi friends! Can I bug you for a tiny gesture of support? A simple tap on that ❤️, a share, a recommendation, or (if you’re feeling extra generous) a ridiculously low monetary upgrade of $6 for the entire year (yes, that’s the equivalent of one of over-priced coffee for a much appreciated, annual gesture of support):
Lisa considers “Auntie” a gender neutral term. From an earlier essay:
“I use Auntie as a gender neutral term. Given that women have been doing almost all of the work of childrearing for literally all of human history, I feel like we get this one. Men are welcome when they choose to join us in equal partnership in the childcare domain, and when I include men in the category “Auntie,” I mean it as a very high compliment indeed. But I want to argue for the feminine term as the umbrella term. An uncle is a male kind of Auntie as a warlock is a male kind of witch. That’s what I hope could catch on.”
I did the Live with Lisa last Tuesday afternoon.
Left at 6:30am the next day for a 3-day, 2-night field trip to an outdoor school with 45 4th graders.
Returned Friday evening epically exhausted and rolled right into Spring Break.
So, yes, I’m a wee bit strapped for both time and fucks left to give about sending out something remotely close to perfect.
Sorry and thank you for understanding.
