The Mothers Who Kept the Window Open
What Peter Pan's Neverland, Mother’s Day, and modern parenting reveal about the village we lost.
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Straight answers to the questions this essay raises. Open by default, structured for search and AI.
What is the main argument of The Mothers Who Kept the Window Open? +
Mothering has always been hard; what changed is that we now do it alone. Across the last century we built tool after tool to make the work easier and, in many ways, made it lonelier. The work was always going to be hard. The village was the part we could have kept.
Why do so many parents feel lonely today? +
For most of human history mothers raised children inside a community of siblings, grandparents, and neighbors who shared the load. That structure has thinned. A 2024 Ohio State survey found 66% of U.S. parents say parenting feels isolating and lonely, and 38% report no support at all.
Is postpartum depression really rising? +
An analysis of more than 442,000 births found postpartum depression diagnoses nearly doubled between 2010 and 2021, from 9.4% to 19.0%. Some of that reflects better screening and less stigma, but the trend, rising alongside parental loneliness, is hard to ignore.
Why are people having fewer children, and later in life? +
The average age at first birth rose from 21.4 in 1970 to 27.5 in 2023, and the fertility rate of 1.62 is the lowest the U.S. has recorded. A 2024 Pew survey found 57% of adults under 50 who are unlikely to have children say they just don't want to. Ryan suspects it is both a story of convenience and of how isolating and expensive motherhood has become.
What does the essay suggest we do about it? +
Become a small piece of someone else's village: the grandmother who calls, the friend who drops off a meal, the neighbor who knocks, the aunt who stays for the week. The work stays hard, but the isolation does not have to. The window is still open.
Full show notes
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 motherhoodWhy mothering has always been hard, and why a century of making it “easier” made it lonelierWhat we lost when we traded the village for institutions, apps, and convenienceThe loneliness epidemic among parents, and why mothers report it most acutelyThe doubling of postpartum depression, and the first generation of mothers raised on social mediaThe Friction Doctrine, Mother’s Edition: how every labor-saving tool carried a hidden costWhy we now have more data about our children than ever, and have mistaken data for wisdomMotherhood happening later and less often, and the question hidden inside the fertility declineWendy, the Lost Boys, and why children look for mothers even when they pretend not to need oneWhat it actually looks like to become part of someone else’s villageReferenced 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/collideFull essay version of this episode: https://collide.ryanvet.com/p/the-mothers-who-kept-the-window-openConnect with Ryan Vet:
Website: ryanvet.comCOLLIDE Newsletter: ryanvet.com/collideLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ryanvetInstagram: instagram.com/ryancvetBook Ryan as a Keynote Speaker: ryanvet.com/generational-speakerSubscribe 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.
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About Ryan VetRyan 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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