The baby shower I want to host every month
One vision of the village in action - and how it helps us to push back against a tech-mediated world
As many of you know, my dear friend Nancy had her fifth baby a few months ago. (Listen in here to our conversation about pregnancy, pivoting, sharenting, and transparency on the internet, if you’d like!)
For TCF readers, this is the relationship that keeps on giving, because today, I am delighted to share a bit about how we celebrated her baby’s arrival. It wasn’t with games or fancy outfits or gifts (though there were a few of those — and we definitely still had cake1). Instead, we offered her a nesting party.
What is a nesting party, you say? In place of a traditional shower, it’s a gathering to help a soon-to-be mom ready her home for a new baby, where friends and family work together to help with cleaning, organizing, or preparing freezer meals.
While a novel baby shower concept might seem like a strange topic for a newsletter about families and technology, I believe it’s actually quite relevant. That’s because for most of us, living a low-tech life is not the goal. Dropping our screen time to zero or mastering parental controls or logging out of social media forever is not the ultimate goal. Instead, I would suggest that the ultimate goal is leading a joyful, meaningful, fully-human life — and raising kids who can do the same. Living low-tech is only important so far as it helps with that.
But it is really important! We live in a world mediated by technology and shaped by its values, where the average adult relies on screens for work and play day in and day out, and so almost every topic we could cover has a link to technology. Our job is to tease out those threads —to make more visible the impact that technology is having on us and our children — so that we can make thoughtful, informed choices for ourselves and our families.
And today that leads us to talk about a baby shower. The attendees I talked to walked away from this day feeling like it was an incredibly special experience, and in the rest of this newsletter, I’m diving into why that might be. You’ll also hear from Sam (the official host!) on the logistics of planning this experience and from Nancy on what it took to receive it graciously. (For some of us, this might have been the hardest role of all.)
Let’s do it!