The Mothers Who Kept the Window Open: What We Lost When We Took Away the Village

The hardest part of modern motherhood isn't the work. It's that we now do it alone. The work was always going to be hard. The village was the part we could have kept.

Generational futurist, USA Today bestselling author, and keynote speaker Ryan Vet starts at a high school production of Peter Pan, with the image of a mother lying on a windowsill, waiting fifty years for her son to come home. That ache is old. The conditions around it are not. In this episode, Ryan traces what happened to motherhood across the last half-century and makes a quiet, data-backed case: mothering has always been hard, but a century of trying to make it easier has, in many ways, made it lonelier.

For most of human history, mothers did not raise children alone. The work was distributed across siblings, aunts, grandparents, and neighbors, with a baby passed from one set of arms to the next. Ryan walks through what replaced that village: a child daycare industry now worth roughly $74.7 billion a year, early-care enrollment for three- and four-year-olds climbing from 9.5% in 1964 to 52.4% by 2011, and a $1.7 billion universal childcare plan announced in New York in 2026. When the family, church, and community leave the room, somebody has to fill the chair. Increasingly, that somebody is paid, scheduled, and unrelated to the family.

Then he takes on the cost of being alone. A 2024 Ohio State University survey found 66% of parents say parenthood sometimes or frequently feels isolating and lonely, and 38% report no support at all. Postpartum depression diagnoses nearly doubled between 2010 and 2021, from 9.4% to 19.0%. The first mothers carrying both loneliness and PPD at scale are also the first cohort who came of age inside social media. And Ryan applies the Friction Doctrine to mothering: every tool we built to remove the difficulty, from fertility apps to delivery services to overnight monitors and milestone trackers, carried a quiet weight in return. We now have more information about our babies than any generation in history, and we have often mistaken that information for wisdom.

In this episode:

• The Peter Pan windowsill image that reframes love, loss, and hope in motherhood
• Why mothering has always been hard, and why a century of making it "easier" made it lonelier
• What we lost when we traded the village for institutions, apps, and convenience
• The loneliness epidemic among parents, and why mothers report it most acutely
• The doubling of postpartum depression, and the first generation of mothers raised on social media
• The Friction Doctrine, Mother's Edition: how every labor-saving tool carried a hidden cost
• Why we now have more data about our children than ever, and have mistaken data for wisdom
• Motherhood happening later and less often, and the question hidden inside the fertility decline
• Wendy, the Lost Boys, and why children look for mothers even when they pretend not to need one
• What it actually looks like to become part of someone else's village

Referenced in this episode:

• Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff (2021)
• The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, National Survey on the Loneliness Epidemic Among Parents (Gawlik et al., 2024)
• Trends in Postpartum Depression, JAMA Network Open (Bruno et al., 2024)
• Pew Research Center, survey on U.S. adults who don't have children (2024)
• CDC/NCHS, Births: Final Data for 2023 (2025)
• COLLIDE Newsletter by Ryan Vet: ryanvet.com/collide
• Full essay version of this episode: https://collide.ryanvet.com/p/the-mothers-who-kept-the-window-open

Connect with Ryan Vet:

• Website: ryanvet.com
• COLLIDE Newsletter: ryanvet.com/collide
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ryanvet
• Instagram: instagram.com/ryancvet
• Book Ryan as a Keynote Speaker: ryanvet.com/generational-speaker

Subscribe to The Ryan Vet Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts. New COLLIDE essay episodes release every Thursday at 7am ET. Guest era episodes release Monday mornings at 6am ET. Join the COLLIDE newsletter at ryanvet.com/collide for the research, reflections, and frameworks behind every episode.

About Ryan Vet

Ryan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold.

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Transcript

Ryan Vet 0:00

On this episode of the Ryan Vet Show, 66% of parents in the United States say the demands of parenthood sometimes or frequently feel isolating and lonely. 38% report no support in their parenting role, and nearly 80% say they would value a way to connect with other parents outside of their work and home. Mothers report feeling these most acutely. Two things have been quietly rising alongside each other. Loneliness among parents is climbing, as the Ohio State data already showed. So is postpartum depression. And now, a reading from Ryan Vet's newsletter, Collide. The mothers who kept the window open. What Peter Pan's Neverland, Mother's Day, and Modern Parenting reveal about the village we lost. We arrived at a local high school auditorium with no more than 200 seats and a stage smaller than most convention stages I speak on. My oldest son, six years old, sat beside me, excited to see Neverland unfold in real life. We were in the second row of maybe eight rows, close enough to see the students' faces and even be in the spit zone. It had been decades since I watched the movie Peter Pan, and despite flying on the ride at Disney World last year, the plot line was still not solidified in my memory. In this stage production of Neverland, Wendy is swept away with the darling children. There are swashbuckling pirates, children flying across the moon, the lost boys, childhood imagination, and the familiar attention of Peter Pan, the boy who does not want to grow up. And don't worry, they still had the constant tick tock tik tock of the crocodile, though much to my chagrin, we never saw the crocodile in this version. But the moment that stayed with me was not the sword fighting or the whimsy or the clever way that they made us feel like we were flying to Neverland through audience interaction. It was the mother. At one point, Peter's mother, played by a high schooler, looked out the open window and then lays down on the windowsill, sad and longing. She says that she has been there for more than fifty years, every single night, waiting for her son Peter to return home. There was, tucked inside a school production performed by teenagers, profound emotions felt by a mother, love, loss, and hope. Mother's Day lands differently for everyone. Some will celebrate, some will mourn, some will be hopeful, some long to be mothers and for various reasons are unable. Some have strained relationships with their mothers, some delayed motherhood, some chose another path. Some are raising children with deep joy, some are raising them with deep exhaustion. Many are doing both at the same time. We are all here because of a mother, but that does not mean Mother's Day lands the same way for everyone. Mothering has always been hard. In 1966, General Electric ran a magazine ad around Mother's Day for a dishwasher called the Mobile Maid. The ad copy described dishwashing as the most monotonous, hand scalding, dish-breaking, glass chipping, never-ending, thankless job in the world. The promise was that a machine could finally rescue mothers from the part of motherhood nobody wanted to do. Thankless is all too often sad, but true. Mothers have always been working, whether or not anyone handed them a W 2. My grandmothers, my own mother, and my wife, as the mother of three, are all women I've watched across three generations in a single living room and did not stop working when they came home. They were already home, and yet the work had not stopped, cleaning, feeding, teaching, soothing, mediating, planning. This is not new. Mothering has always been hard. What is new is that we have spent the last century trying to make it easier, and somehow it feels as if it has gotten harder. Then we took away the village. For most of human history, mothers did not raise children alone. They raised them inside a community structure of siblings, aunts and uncles, grandparents, neighbors, friends, and extended family. The work was hard, but it was distributed. A baby was passed from one set of arms to the next. A toddler had a dozen adults whose authority and affection she trusted. A new mother could go to the bathroom. I can attest to this tension, and I'm not a mom. In her book Hunt, Gather Parent, journalist Michaeleen Doucleff describes carrying her newborn daughter to a sink for a bath and being struck by how completely dependent the baby was, how limp, how unable to do anything for herself, and she even likened her baby to prepping a turkey at Thanksgiving. In the animal world, newborns stand within hours and can move to latch onto their mothers for food. In humans, the full dependence lasts for years. That helplessness was always meant to be carried by more than one person. We do not live that way anymore. The data is no longer subtle. A 2024 national survey by the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center found that 66% of parents in the United States say the demands of parenthood sometimes or frequently feel isolating and lonely. 38% report no support in their parenting role, and nearly 80% say they would value a way to connect with other parents outside of their work and home. Mothers report feeling these most acutely. The market has been adjusting for decades. In 1964, only 9.5% of American three and four-year-olds were enrolled in any kind of school or early care program. By 2011, that number had grown to 52.4%. The US child daycare industry is now estimated at roughly $74.7 billion annually. What used to be a grandmother, a sibling, or a neighbor down the street has become an institution that seems to be quickly rising as the cornerstone of child rearing. Policy is following the same trajectory. Over the past decade, more than 40 states have created or expanded some form of paid paternal leave. In January 2026, New York Governor Kathy Hochul and newly elected New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a $1.7 billion plan to provide free childcare for two-year-olds across the five boroughs, with the goal of universal access by year four. The program is the first of its kind at scale. Mamdani's own framing of the announcement is worth quoting. Raising a child takes a village, and it takes a city government willing to step up and tackle this childcare crisis head on. He is right about the village. He is also describing what happens after the village is gone. When the family, the church, and the community are no longer in the room, somebody has to fill the chair. Increasingly, that somebody is paid, scheduled, and unrelated to the family. The real cost of being alone. Two things have been quietly rising alongside each other. Loneliness among parents is climbing, as the Ohio State data already showed. So is postpartum depression. A 2024 analysis of more than 442 births found that PPD diagnoses in the United States nearly doubled between 2010 and 2021, rising from 9.4% to 19%. The CDC has reported that the rate of depression diagnoses at delivery was seven times higher in 2015 than it was in 2000. Some of that increase shows medical advancement, including better screening, better language, less stigma, and more women willing to say the thing out loud. I'm not claiming causality, but it is hard to ignore the trends. Loneliness is up, postpartum depression is up, and the women carrying both at the same time are also the first cohort of mothers who came of age inside social media. They learned in middle school what it felt like to be measured against a curated feed. They are now learning with a newborn on their chest what it feels like to be measured against one as a mother. The Neverland drama made this part powerful without words. A mother on a windowsill waiting 50 years. The ache is not new, but the conditions surrounding it are. The decline in motherhood. Motherhood is happening later in life for many, and less often. In 1970, the average American mother had her first child at 21.4 years of age. By 2000, that number was 24.9 years. By 2023, it had reached 27.5 years old, the highest on record. Family sizes shrank alongside the climb. Using a simple generational prism lens, not a rigorous cohort study, the median boomer mother had three children across their lifetime. The median Gen X mother had closer to two. Today's total fertility rate sits at 1.621 births per woman, the lowest the US has ever recorded, and well below the 2.1 needed for population replacement. A 2024 Pew Research Center survey of US adults under 50 who say they are unlikely to ever have children found that 57% cite as a major reason that they just don't want to have children. There is a question hidden inside that number. Is the decline a story of convenience, with motherhood treated as an option among many in a crowded life? Or is it a story of difficulty, with mothering becoming so isolating, so expensive, and so culturally unsupported that the rational response is to opt out? I suspect it could be both, and I suspect the ratio is shifting. The Friction Doctrine Mother's Addition. This is what the friction doctrine looks like when applied to mothering. Each tool we built to remove the difficulty of the work has carried a quiet weight in return. We invented ovulation tests, pregnancy tests, and fertility apps that catch the news of a new life within days. The same precision that brings the joy earlier also brings the grief earlier, with women now aware of pregnancies and miscarriages their grandmothers might have never known they had. We engineered cars to get us further, which required car seats to be safer than at any point in human history. They also are a small construction project to install and a daily wrestling match to fasten. We designed delivery and convenience services that put dinners, diapers, and groceries at the door within an hour. The labor was saved, the neighbor was never met, the family never came over to clean, the friend never came over to hold the baby and let the new parent have just a moment of rest. And we have multiplied our knowledge of the babies themselves. We track the milestones, we chart the sleep, we measure the pulse ox overnight. Even when we're not with our baby, we're watching them on camera. And even those cameras now tell us if there are red flags we should be aware of. We know with more precision than any generation before us whether our child is on schedule or not. Our daughter, our third, was ahead of nearly every fine motor checkpoint and other milestones, and yet she was significantly behind on rolling over. Our middle son fell off the growth chart early and went through years of kneel pricks and lab work and follow-up testing that ultimately proved worthless and was likely a result of an incorrect first measurement on his earliest checkups. We have more information about our babies than any mother in human history, and we have in many cases mistaken that information for wisdom. The data tells you when to worry. It rarely tells you when to stop. It offers a precise sense of what's happening and a false sense of being in control of it. Wendy, the window, and us. Back on stage in Neverland, we have to consider Wendy, the oldest girl in the Darling family. She never set out to be a mother, a bossy older sister maybe, but she didn't sign up for motherhood. The lost boys saw an older girl and they followed an instinct as old as childhood. They called her mother. They needed somebody to be one. They were fighting pirates and encountering mermaids in an imaginary land, unsupervised, pretending not to grow up, and they still needed a mother in the story. In the very next scene back in London, Peter's mother lay on the windowsill 50 years into her watch, waiting longingly for her lost boy to return. The two images side by side showed me something that statistics cannot. Children look for mothers even when they are pretending not to need one. This Mother's Day will end different for everyone. Some will celebrate, some will mourn. Some will sit with what could have been, some will hold a child they once thought they would never have. And some will set the table, leaving an empty seat for a child that was taken too soon and will never return home. What we have tried to make easier across the last half century, we have, in many ways, made lonelier. The work was always going to be hard. The village was the part we could have kept. Maybe the most honest thing any of us can do this Mother's Day, whatever our story is, is to become a small part of someone else's village. Maybe the grandmother who calls, the friend who drops off the meal, the neighbor who knocks, the aunt who stays for the week. Call first, of course. The window is still open. Until next time, thanks for listening to this video in Collide. I'm Ryan, Inspire Forward. Thanks for tuning in to the Ryan Vet Show. Be sure to subscribe, comment, and like this episode. Plus, share it with someone who needs to hear it.