A parenting handbook distilled from the wisdom of a vast virtual village

27 Aug 2024

Vanessa Raphaely and co-author Karin Schimke have ‘bottled’ the wisdom of The Village online community into a book that should prove a handy resource for most parents: We Were Perfect Parents Until We Had Children.

If you’re an adult, you’ve no doubt had that experience where you were in a restaurant or on a plane, rolling your eyes at a heated argument between a parent and a teenager. Maybe you have your own teenager, and despite all your best efforts, connecting with them isn’t easy. Now imagine being in a group where you can chat with thousands of other parents in the same boat or who had navigated these waters before you.

Award-winning editor Vanessa Raphaely created just such a resource in the form of The Village, a group on social media. Seven years later, the group boasts more than 60,000 members on Facebook and more than 250,000 members across all social media platforms. They are largely South African, but some live in Dubai, the UK and Australia.

“I wanted to create a community for parents of teens, tweens and young adults. You get flooded with information and advice when you have babies. By the time they reach the dreaded teen years, nothing works. The beauty of The Village is that everyone has a different parenting philosophy, so you can sample different viewpoints before deciding on what works for you and your family,” said Raphaely.

Now, seven years down the line, Raphaely and co-author Karin Schimke have “bottled” the wisdom of The Village into a book that should prove a handy resource for most parents: We Were Perfect Parents Until We Had Children. Daily Maverick interviewed them at a recent webinar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=WjpBsMcw1Uc

Raphaely and her team of administrators moderate roughly 9,000 posts every six months.

“That’s a lot of information. Posts that come up range across the board — everything from dealing with digital devices, to not having enough money, to which schools to apply to. The Village is so reflective of our country. We have different races, different religions, different political opinions, different everything except a value system,” explained Raphaely.

Some of the issues that crop up on The Village are serious, such as financial abuse or sextortion of young teenagers.

Read more: Sextortion — frantic teens trapped by blackmailers on social media

“One of the difficulties of being a parent in our generation is the digital revolution. The average age that a child will engage with porn for the first time is 11. Most have their own phones and that means that they are absolutely unprotected from the rest of the world.

“We’re living through a pandemic of loneliness. What happens with sextortion is that young males and teens are the most affected group. They think they are talking to someone they know and then find themselves being blackmailed,” said Raphaely.

“What you learn along the way is that you actually can’t altogether protect your children from these things. You can’t take the devices away from them.

“Living in a country and a world with high crime rates, the only thing you can do is to be the cheerleader, the rock, the reliable, loving person in our children’s hearts and their brains. Be that person who says ‘I will stand with you when times are tough’.”

Money matters

The book and many posts on The Village deal with the thorny topic of money — not having enough, talking to children about it and addressing wasteful habits. Schimke talked about her experience as a divorced mother who started teaching her children about money when they were under 10.

“Dealing with divorce is incredibly painful. Someone described it to me as surgery without anaesthetic, and that’s exactly how difficult it feels. When you’re married, you have two heads and two hearts and two incomes that contribute to making a family.

“When you get divorced, you have one head and one heart in two different houses and you have to maintain two different houses on the same income. The only people who don’t suffer financially in a divorce are the lawyers.”

Schimke took both her children to meet her financial adviser when they were 18.

While the group was initially set up for parents, it has evolved to include grandparents, aunts, uncles, older siblings thrust into the caregiver role and even teachers who have to deal with teenagers regularly.

Raphaely pointed out that families had evolved since the days when a nuclear family consisted of a male parent, a female parent and one or more children.

“One of the most moving Village stories for me was a single, young man whose sister passed on, leaving him the sudden guardian of a teenage girl. He joined The Village, set up a post and next thing you know, everyone just stepped in to help and advise ‘Instadad’, as he came to be known,” she said.

She related the story of a mother who posted on The Village in an absolute panic.

“She was sitting in the emergency room at Groote Schuur Hospital and out of nowhere, her daughter in medical school had tried to commit suicide. The mom was completely alone, in a government hospital on the weekend, unaware of what to do.

“Being part of The Village meant she could just write an SOS out into the ether, and people got in their cars and drove to her. People from Groote Schuur went to her, and others from UCT helped her daughter.

“Six months later, she wrote to me and said that her daughter had gone through that year’s exams, that she had got the support that she needed. I can guarantee that there is no magic wand, we don’t have all the solutions, but we sure as hell can help each other.” DM

We Were Perfect Parents Until We Had Children is available at the DM168 bookshop.

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