Ask An Auntie: How Can I Connect with Families?

From strangers to acquaintances to friends

Welcome! I’m Lisa Sibbett and this is The Auntie Bulletin, a newsletter for people who choose to help raise other people’s kids. You can read my archive here. If you appreciate this newsletter, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for $5 a month or $50 for the year. You can also support my work by “liking” this post below. It only requires a click on the little heart icon, and it helps other people find my newsletter.

As always, read to the end for the Cute Kid Video of the Week! Also featuring the elusive kiwi baby, take 3! (Oh, you don’t know what I’m talking about? Better read to the end, because this baby is amazing).

Now Let’s Get To It

Today’s question¹ comes from reader Iris:

When I’m at the pool with my grandchildren, it feels ok to bring other parents’ kids into the ruckus without asking. But walking onto a playground not knowing anyone – most parents and guardians are unsure of me. Do you have suggestions about where I could go to connect with families who live closer than my out-of-state grandkids?

This is from Pixabay, it was taken in 2016, and that’s all I know.

Iris, I love your question for a couple reasons. First, it’s so timely! Last week, I wrote about how, according to the U.S. Surgeon General, American parents are overwhelmed and Americans in general are lonely. I suggested that these two problems might go a long way toward solving each other, writing: “We need to figure out ways for the overwhelmed parents and the lonely people to find each other, get to know each other, and start to treat each other a bit like family.” But I didn’t make any suggestions for how anyone might actually go about any of this. Today I’m going to do that.

Second, I love that your question points to one of the big challenges of kin-building: namely, that we can’t just go from being complete strangers – “walking onto a playground not knowing anyone” – to being part of each others’ lives. Instead, as you imply, building kin happens on the slow and purposeful timeline of any other important relationship-building. We go from strangers to acquaintances, then from acquaintances to friends, and then – if a lot of factors fall into place – from friends to kin. Basically, getting to know people and starting to treat them like family is a long game. It takes time, courage, and persistence.

In response to your question, today I’m going to focus on the earlier parts of the strangers-to-kin progression: from strangers to acquaintances and from acquaintances to friends. In future posts, I’ll be writing a lot more about Auntiefication – how we go from friends to kin. But today you have asked, “Where can I go to connect with families?”

Go to Your Own Closet

It’s easier to build on relationships that already exist than to start from scratch. I keep thinking about the expression, “shop from your own closet.” It’s the idea that, before we buy new clothes, we can go through our existing wardrobe and see what’s there, try things on again, decide what we still like and notice what we perhaps haven’t even worn. Our society encourages us to want new things and be dissatisfied with our old things, such that sometimes we don’t even notice what things we already have. I have more than once bought a new item of clothing, something I’d been wanting for awhile, only to get home and realize I’d already bought something similar and then forgotten about it. 

When assessing our existing community and possibilities for friendship and connection, we can fall into similar traps. I know I have. An acquaintance seems really busy. An old friend and I have fallen out of touch. With this other person, we had an awkward interaction or a disagreement, and navigating the relationship afterward seemed too hard. In each of these situations I’m making assumptions: that a friendship is not a good fit, or it’s not worth pursuing, or perhaps that I’m not wanted. And those assumptions might be wrong. 

Iris, I suggest you think through the families you already know, starting with the parents and kids nearby, and thinking also about any single parents you know (because single parents’ risk of overwhelm is very high). Then check: are you making any assumptions about why building a closer connection with these people won’t work? Are you assuming that they’re too busy, or that they’re not interested? Have you decided that you don’t like them on the strength of only a few interactions – or that they don’t like you? Notice who, if anyone, you’re ruling out, and consider if you might be able to rule them back in.

Go to Church 

Bear with me here. For people who are into this kind of thing, our number one best bet for building intergenerational community is attending church or something like it – really, any place of worship in any religion. I grew up in a devout Christian household and now I’m a longtime practicing Buddhist, so those are my frames of reference, but I believe most organized religions tend to share these same basic, kinship-incubating features: 

• Congregations gather weekly, or at least regularly

• People show up (forgive me) religiously 

• All age groups tend to be represented

Growing up in a Christian church, I knew people of every age. There were tons of “church ladies” in my childhood – people who made cookies for the after-service reception, who complimented me on my church dress, who taught Sunday school and occasionally showed up at our house to pick up or drop something off or eat a meal with us. I knew many church ladies, of all ages, by name and personality. There were young cool, funny moms in red power suits and old women who wore long ropes of fake pearls and smelled like baby powder. There were literally dozens of trustworthy adults around, people who I knew my parents respected and loved. Later I started babysitting the young cool moms’ kids. I was excited when babies were born and sad when elders in our church died. I was there for all of it, and lots of people of all ages were there for me.

A place of worship supplies the big four elements necessary for building friendships: proximity, frequency, intensity, and duration. In other words, when we gather weekly at church or temple or mosque or synagogue, we enter into the same physical space, we interact often, we have meaningful interactions, and we spend a substantial amount of time together. Connections naturally emerge and deepen (including with people whom we may otherwise have discounted). 

David Rees, Our Savior's Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota, 1974.

If you already attend a place of worship, and there are families there, this is absolutely your best bet for building intergenerational connections. And if you don’t currently participate in organized religion but you’re interested, connecting with other people is as good a reason as any to explore. It’s okay if you’re attending mostly for the community – that’s what lots of people do. 

Now, religious communities obviously aren’t for everyone. If you’re a Christian-flavored maybe, you might try a Unitarian church – they tend to be a lot more secular and pan-religious than other Christian denominations. Western Buddhism attracts mostly retired people (kids aren’t big on 45 minute meditation sessions), but there are family retreats which I’ve heard are completely awesome, like this annual retreat at Thich Nhat Hanh’s Deer Park Monastery in California. If you have insights on other religions/spiritual communities and their pros/cons for community-seekers, please (kindly, civilly, non-judgmentally) share in the comments!

In some places, there are also secular church substitutes that happen on a weekly basis. Here in Seattle, we have “Civic Saturdays,” described by organizers as a civic analogue to a faith gathering. 

At Civic Saturdays, we share music, poetry, readings of civic scripture, and what we call a civic sermon. If these elements sound familiar, it’s because we’ve designed Civic Saturdays as a civic analogue to a faith gathering. We recognize the power of coming together in this way — with a sense of ritual and structure — in service of deepening connectedness and belief. In this case, belief in democracy.

Whether through solemn truth-telling or spirited celebration, this model is rekindling civic faith in towns around the nation. From Wichita, Kansas to Miami, Florida, Civic Saturdays are happening in banquet halls and street corners, art stores and Zoom rooms.

You might try Googling “Civic Saturday” and see if there’s something like this in your area (it’s in a lot of places). They train a big cohort of fellows every year to go forth and spread the civic good word.

Here’s a Civic Saturday in Nebraska!

If organized religion or its analogues still aren’t a good fit, here are some other options. 

Go to School

Volunteering at a school is a great way to build relationships with families over time, especially if you stick with it and start to meet sibling sets. Depending on what state you’re in, you will likely need to be fingerprinted in order to volunteer, which can be great because caregivers will have that much more assurance that you’re a safe person for their kids to be around. You can volunteer in a classroom, for after-school clubs or tutoring, athletics or performing arts programs, or with the parent-teacher association (PTA).

You don’t have to be a parent to be part of the PTA – the president of my neighborhood elementary school’s PTA doesn’t have any kids and is widely appreciated by parents and school staff alike – and while this work won’t bring you into contact with families, it will help you get to know parents and also give you a great opportunity to organize family-friendly events in your community. 

Organize Family-Friendly Events in Your Community

If you want something to happen, sometimes you have to do it yourself. Last week I recommended that readers check out this report from The Grandmother Collective and Ashoka, entitled Thrive Together. It’s full of real-world examples – some ambitious, some low-key – of how people in communities around the world have built opportunities for intergenerational collaboration. I keep thinking about the one in Indonesia where people of all ages, from kids to elders, get together for daytime “social dancing.” This isn’t just a dance free-for-all (which makes my neurodivergent self very nervous); it’s more of a regular class. They suggest:

Play your music and begin dancing. Choose a dance trend that has relatively simple steps and can be learned through online tutorials or with the assistance of a dance instructor. Encourage friends, family members, or community members to dance with you. Establish a routine.

I imagine an intergenerational group of people – kids to elders – all learning the latest Tik Tok dance trend together, and my heart brims with joy. I would totally go to that. Lots of people would go to that, if you can figure out where to do it and how to advertise it.

Routines Are Key

Whether you’re finding opportunities to meet new people – going from stranger to acquaintance – or you’re deepening relationships that already exist, I cannot recommend routines enough. If you’re seeking to get to know people, find family-friendly activities you genuinely enjoy and do them regularly, at the same time, in the same place. Just keep showing up. You can do this at your rock-climbing gym, your community pool, your local library, the aquarium. You’ll start running into the same people over and over. And with more proximity, frequency, intensity, and duration of interactions, connections will emerge. Be patient. Persist. Do the activity because you actually like doing it, and let the friendships arise naturally.

With people you already know, get something easy, low-key, and kid-friendly on the calendar. Maybe once a month you host a neighborhood Sunday dinner and have one or more families over. Serve flexible, kid-friendly foods like spaghetti or tacos. Don’t make it fancy, don’t ask anyone to bring anything, and be clear that you understand folks are going to leave in time for kids’ bedtime – potentially 7 or even earlier. Buy some age-appropriate books and toys secondhand, clean them with warm water and dish soap, and keep them in a bin that kids can easily see and reach. Then try my tips for befriending kids.

Seeking Community is Both Awkward and Awesome

Iris, you asked such a great question about where we can go to find community with families, short of just walking up to them on the playground and introducing ourselves. It can feel awkward to be the one seeking community connections, hanging out in kid-friendly places in hopes of making friends with families. Yet most parents don’t have a lot of time to devote to actively seeking Auntie-types, so it actually is very helpful for those of us who aren’t actively raising children to play this role. It’s good if we can make parents’ work easy for them – show up where they’re already going to be, or tell them when and where to show up and be genuinely fine with it if they leave after 45 minutes. In a society where everyone is supposed to fend for themselves, the active seekers and makers of intergenerational community are doing invaluable work – on behalf of all of us.

Warmly,

Lisa

Three Recommended Reads

One. Moral Codes.

In her newsletter On the Commons this week, Antonia Malchik wrote a beautiful and bracing account of her grandfather’s refusal to denounce his neighbors during the Stalinist purge of Russia. I think we really need these models of straight-up moral courage right now. We need to remember who we are, and recognize how brave we can be.

Jacob replied that he didn’t believe the man was an enemy of the people. In doing so, he knew the risk he was taking. To be denounced in 1937—and, equally, to refuse to denounce someone—meant a surprise visit in the middle of the night followed by a show trial, possibly torture, and either a bullet or exile to Siberia. Denunciations were anonymous, required no proof, and more often than not led to the victim’s death.

Two million people died during Stalin’s first purge, known as the Great Terror, an average of a thousand executions per week. 

The Party boss tried again to convince Jacob to write a denunciation, but he refused to comply. Jacob went home that night, told my grandmother Anna Davidovna what had happened, and together they packed a small suitcase and waited for the KGB’s midnight knock. 

Two. Individual Action Matters After All.

At Vox, Rachel M. Cohen writes about why, even though structural and policy change are incredibly important, she’s recently been feeling a lot more positive about the value of volunteering. 

At their best, these collectivist messages inspired hope, agency, and empathy — spelling out a concrete playbook for a more just planet. At their worst, though, they fueled despair, cynicism, and nihilism, promising a better world only if near-impossible political changes were made, and fast….

Meanwhile, though the climate crisis drove people like me to be more distrusting of calls for individual action, some climate leaders have been calling for a different approach. More activists now stress that systemic and individual change should be understood as two sides of the same coin, and that individual action can be necessary for building sustainable, transparent political movements.

Three. Don’t Throw Your Vote Away.

One of my favorite novelists, Rebecca Makkai, contributed an essay to 270 Reasons. She’s making, much more skillfully, the same point I tried to make above that the right to vote is sacred and we should not squander it. Coincidentally, here we have another story of a very courageous grandfather.

Here’s how my father and his friends used to vote in 1950s Hungary, where election results were preordained: They’d make an “X” on one thumb with an inky, black marker. Then they’d bring their own pen to the voting place, filled with disappearing ink. You had no booth to hide in, and election officials would watch you. Vote for the wrong candidate, and your name could wind up on a list. So, they’d mark the “correct” box with disappearing ink, lick their thumbs, and—as they folded the ballot in half and put it in the ballot box—transfer that inky “X” to the spot they actually wanted. This was extremely dangerous, all of it.

But my point here is not about the satisfaction of the protest vote. It’s instead about not taking your vote for granted, not treating it so lightly that you might toss it around just to make yourself feel better. My father and his friends knew that their only hope was to make this one very small statement. Had they been given the chance to cast an actual, critical vote for the future of their country, they would never have dreamed of throwing that vote away because the better candidate was imperfect.

And Now, Your Cute Kid Video(s) of the Week

The theme of the week is courage. Prepare yourself. I could never.

Mea culpa, elusive kiwi baby.

Last week, I attempted to share a video of a baby trying their first kiwi. I shared the wrong (albeit also awesome) video, so then I sent a correction email in which I again tried to share the baby eating the kiwi, and again shared the same wrong video instead. A generous commenter found the elusive baby-eating-kiwi video, and if you viewed last week’s post in your browser or via the Substack app, you probably got to see the actual baby eating the actual kiwi. But if not: Here is the baby. Here is the kiwi. Third time’s the charm.

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1. LOL, as if I have an advice column schedule. Actually, we’ll just do these when people send me questions until I’ve got enough piled up to do “Ask an Auntie” monthly or however often. If you have a question, you can drop a question in the comments of any post – I always read the comments – or you can message me through the Substack app, or email me at auntiebulletin@gmail.com.