Quality Time Apart

On a recent Saturday, I received a text from my close friend Diana that said only, “Hey is T around today? I think I could use some T time.” T is my 3-year-old daughter, and Diana is my 30-something friend without kids. And Diana was in luck: T’s weekend schedule was wide open — well, she was supposed to make a toilet paper roll turkey with me, but that could be rescheduled. So Diana came over and took my daughter to the playground for an hour; I spent that sacred time on the couch with a book.

If you’ve been a parent of a toddler, you’ll understand that a text like Diana’s can be a literal dream-come-true. On those wide-open weekend days, no matter how much you love your kid, it can be hard to fill the time. You could be the kind of parent who puts together play dates or organized activities; or the kind who scours local calendars for kid-friendly events. “Just let them be bored,” goes one parenting philosophy (that fails to factor in how much children have the capacity to wreck your house, or scream very loudly for a very long time). Or you could let them watch TV, and never tell anyone, lest you be judged. So a bid from a responsible adult who wants to hang out with your kid, who you don’t have to pay to do it? It’s the holy grail.

The fact that being a parent is hard isn’t news. Modern parents are so stressed out that Dr. Vivek Murthy, the US surgeon general, issued an advisory about it in 2024. Parents are more likely than other groups to report overwhelming stress on a day-to-day basis. The rising costs of raising a child are increasingly debilitating, and parents feel isolated in their responsibilities.

Also not news: adults in general, and in particular younger and unpartnered ones, are lonely; and loneliness is rapidly killing us. (It’s reportedly more of a threat to human health than cigarettes, alcoholism, and obesity.) Paradoxically, adults with children and adults without them describe the same core feeling: they are alone.

There’s a simple adjustment that could help us all: single adults need to spend more time with children, and parents need to spend more time without them.

On paper, this solution is kind of obvious. Decades of research have proven that children who grow up around multiple healthy adults fare better in nearly every measurable way. They develop stronger emotional regulation, perform better academically, and show greater long-term resilience. And that makes sense: we learn by example; more examples mean more opportunities to learn.

As for the child-free adults in the equation who are giving up their time (a truly valuable resource as there are ever-more things to do and less time to do them in), I acknowledge that hanging out with a person whose fingers are perpetually sticky with jam might not be top-of-list. But research has shown that adults who spend time with children experience lasting benefits, like improved physical and mental health, and increased social activities. 

I like to think about it like this: we probably don’t brush our teeth or exercise because we impulsively like doing it; rather, we’ve come to understand that those habits improve the quality of our lives. Could hanging out with children be the next steamed broccoli? I think so.

There are a few roadblocks in the way, to be sure. Culturally, we’ve privatized family life so much that it can be logistically or actually difficult to cross the threshold of another family’s routine. Parents worry about judgment; non-parents worry about intruding. We’ve walled ourselves off so much that it’s all trees and no forest. The rhetorical village it takes to raise a child has largely become a mythical one. 

Part of the problem is that people of all demographics are moving so fast and are stretched so thin that there’s little time to believe a different world is even possible. Adults in nuclear families are supposed to do all the invisible labor that a household requires alone — an amount of work that can constitute a full-time job. Rising inflation continues to steadily increase the cost of living, and recent data shows that more than half of American families don’t have the resources they need to cover what it costs to live securely.

This is not how it has to be. To start, a family shouldn’t have to be defined by lineage or law. Queer folks have always understood this. Though so much of the history of queer families was historically kept under wraps, we know now that queer bars, community centers, houses, and non-place-based activist organizations were sanctuaries where chosen families were able to thrive. Because the law created barriers to marriage and adoption, queer people were forced to create their own framework for family. Out of necessity, queer people redefined family to include the people who gave each other emotional and practical support. Taking on this definition of family could benefit all of us.

More adults started spending time with my daughter after we intentionally began thinking about developing some of our close friendships into relationships that more closely resembled family. Diana comes over for dinner several times a week. We had another friend live with us for a while so he could take his time shopping for a condo. Friends who come by for dinner help to clean up. We don’t host; we integrate. 

Intergenerational connection is a biological good, and everyone should have access to it. The nuclear family, as we now practice it, is a social structure that we’ve long-since learned breaks its promises of fulfillment. We all deserve something better — and it’s right in front of our noses. It might be a single text message away. 

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Sophie Lucido Johnson is an award-winning cartoonist and writer in Chicago. She is the author of Many Love and Dear Sophie, Love Sophie. She is a cartoonist for The New Yorker, and has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, and elsewhere. She has chickens and bees.