How New Mothers Are Bringing The Evolved Nest To Life Through Virtual Village Support

Have you met the Cuddle Crew?

 

“I want to have kids someday, but I’m scared— it’s just too much responsibility.”

“Have kids? And risk messing up another human being for life? No way!”

 As a woman in my twenties, I frequently hear statements like these from my friends and peers. Parents are raising their kids with less social and public support than in previous generations. And navigating parenthood alone—and all the associated societal expectations—can feel heavy. For many, anxieties about being a bad parent seem to have displaced the urge to become one in the first place. In a recent CNBC article about the U.S. fertility crisis, Paula Fass, a cultural historian at U.C. Berkeley says it plainly:

“I do think that, right now, there is fear about child rearing and parenting, a kind of general anxiety that penetrates the younger generation. So they’re conflicted about whether it’s even worth having children, when so much is expected of you as a parent,” 

Recognizing the meteoric rise in paternal stress and the associated health concerns, the Surgeon General has issued an advisory, urging us to do more to support new parents, and particularly, new mothers.

This is why I find the work Brittany Chambers is doing at Good Night Moon Child to be so fascinating.

Britt encourages moms to lean into the power of nighttime nurturing, rather than use sleep training methods that force babies into nighttime isolation. Cuddle Crew is organized horizontally as a community to help new mothers feel confident in their own nurturing wisdom, especially during the nighttime. It helps moms navigate the waves of expectations, judgments, and conflicting expertise the larger society hurls at mothers. It’s a refreshing approach in a world filled with so much parenting anxiety and fear.

In its egalitarian, supportive structure, Cuddle Crew echoes the ways that women of all cultures come together around the birth of a new child, providing emotional and physical support. For example in China, the practice of Zuo Yue Zi (“sitting the month”) is a period of 30-40 days postpartum where a woman’s female relatives assist with cooking, cleaning, and household duties. Along with providing emotional support and wisdom, they help her adapt to the changes of motherhood. In many Latin American cultures, there is a very similar custom called La Cuarentena.

Cuddle Crew is a virtual community that helps supplement or recreate the “village” of female support around childbirth and childrearing that is often lacking in contemporary Western societies.

Britt started out her career as a 1-1 sleep consultant for new parents, trying to help them solve sleep struggles without using controversial sleep-training methods — and without pathologizing their new baby’s normal biological sleep patterns. Britt’s approach was research-centered. She says, “I wanted to show these mothers that [they] didn’t have to fully [sleep] train. They could get more sleep by playing with circadian rhythm, sleep hygiene, sleep associations, and all these things… They can tweak variables in a way that is respectful of biology and is not at all harmful to attachment or to the dyadic relationship.”

Soon, her experiences working with parents—and then, becoming one herself—led to a worldview shift.

She became aware of a major, yet rarely spoken, phenomenon among her clients: they felt deeply alone, especially when it came to night nurturing. Her clients often confessed they were afraid to talk about how they were mothering—with their families, or with other women—for fear of being judged, chastised, or ostracized. Britt notes, “I noticed that the prevailing parenting paradigm that we’re all parenting in was one of separation and disconnection and hyper-individualism.”

In our conversation, Britt and I note the irony that in the creation of the mother-infant dyad—the closest, most intimate human relationship one can imagine—moms felt more isolated and alone, rather than less.

So in her work with parents, Britt wanted to move away from an overly-medicalized, analytical view of sleep health. She wanted to help moms with taking up a more heart-centered approach, one that would help women grow into their loving, nurturing power as moms. Although she sees immense value in medicine and scientific research, she says she doesn’t want to be seen as an all-knowing “expert.” She explains, “Mostly, I would say, now what I’m doing is walking women back to their intuition.”

In less than a year, she’s seen Cuddle Crew grow to 120 women from around the globe. Her Instagram account, the bio of which reads, “Your instincts aren’t broken. And neither is your baby” has over 25,000 followers.

In the absence of a physical “village” to help raise children, the virtual community of Cuddle Crew proclaims, “we will exist in each other’s hands and pockets, connecting and creating through Cuddle Crew.” The Crew group meets regularly virtually, for conversations and for a book club. And, Britt tells me, “Most importantly… they can learn from each other, because the wisdom that women carry is so profound, and it has been so deliberately silenced by the patriarchal culture that we live in. Bringing that back is the medicine.”

If you or someone you know would like to join Cuddle Crew, you can learn more at their website, or at Good Night Moon Child’s Instagram account.

Night nurturing is an essential aspect of responsive, affectionate care which characterizes the Evolved Nest. Our Evolved Nest came to be from the collaboration of women and their relatives to raise children cooperatively. To keep our human nature strong, we must return to nurturing all children, ours or those birthed by others, with Evolved Nest principles. Find out more at EvolvedNest.org.

 

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