In Please Yell At My Kids (Balance, Apr.), the Brazilian American journalist “demonstrates how policy failings and damaging cultural expectations have made raising a kid in the U.S. unnecessarily difficult,” according to PW’s starred review. Lopes, who “makes a persuasive case against American-style parenting while charting a better path forward,” spoke with PW about rethinking rugged individualism and building the proverbial village.

In what ways do your experiences as an immigrant, foreign correspondent, and parent inform this book?

I’ve seen in countries around the world how having a community can make parenting so much more fun. This idea that parenting has to be depleting, that you have to be a martyr to be a good parent, and that your life is over when you have a child—that’s not how most societies view parenting. I want to push back against the American narrative that it’s good parenting to exclude other people from the fold of making parental decisions. Even if you don’t want 40 people showing up at your C-section, as my family did in Brazil, or you don’t want to stay home for a month and a half after you give birth, as they do in Singapore, there’s a lot that you can apply to your own life, wherever you’re living.

How can American parents incorporate others into their family life?

People say, “I was told there would be a village. Where’s my village?” Americans haven’t been raised to live in the village. If you want a village, you have to cultivate it. You need to show up for people and create a reciprocal cycle of care. When I know a neighbor is sick, I send over soup. I don’t think, “Am I invading their personal space? Is this more trouble for them? Is this the wrong flavor of soup?” We can overthink when we’re used to protecting our space.

Why is it desirable to let others into that family space?

We have a responsibility to include people of different generations in the process of child-rearing, and a responsibility to our children to demonstrate what these types of relationships could look like. It’s important for parents and children to feel like they belong somewhere, or it can come back to bite us—when a parent is alone with a toddler who’s not listening and doesn’t have access to generational wisdom from people who’ve tried and succeeded before; when a teenager feels like they don’t have a sense of place beyond their few friends at school; or when a child grows up and doesn’t have a community to return to.

You acknowledge that American parents’ choices are often limited by structural inequalities. How can they build community despite these?

I want Americans to understand that parenting without the support of our communities, our families, and this government is unique in this time and place—no one else in the history of parenting has tried to do what we are trying to do here. Americans have been trained not to think about the impact that our decisions will have on each other, to put ourselves and our own decision-making first. A lot of us follow our careers to cities that take us far away from our families. I challenge people to think about what is going to make them happy at the end of the day. Would being closer to family facilitate raising children in a way that is more community-oriented? Because of the research that I did in this book, my husband and I decided to move my mother-in-law five minutes away from us. There’s a lot that we can do on a micro level to invite other people in.

Return to main feature.