It is tempting to imagine that raising children was once simpler. In fact, children have rarely been raised by parents alone. Anthropologists call it alloparenting, meaning care provided by adults other than the parents, and they consider it one of the defining features of our species. Humans evolved as cooperative breeders, a species that raises its young collectively, with grandmothers, aunts, older siblings, and neighbors all sharing the work of keeping a child fed, safe, and oriented. The evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has argued that this distributed care was not a convenience but a precondition for how human children develop. The village was real. What made it work was not the number of hands, but that those hands belonged to people who shared a language, a set of expectations, and a way of doing things almost no one had to explain.
Today’s households have rebuilt the village and lost the shared system that once held it together. This is most visible in affluent homes, where a single child may be supported by one or two nannies, a night nurse in the early years, tutors, a learning specialist, therapists, coaches, and household staff, often across more than one residence and around a parent’s travel. Each of these adults may be excellent. Few of them were trained the same way, answer to the same person, or share notes. The coordination that kinship once handled invisibly now has to be built on purpose, and usually is not.
Despite this, much modern parenting advice still assumes families operate within simple systems. The dominant conversation centers on individual decisions: choose the right school, find the right caregiver, select the right activities, manage screen time, foster resilience. These decisions matter. But they focus on individual components rather than the environment that connects them.
Dr. Ginny Schwager, founder of The Formator Institute™, believes this is one of the most overlooked aspects of modern childhood. After more than fifteen years inside private households, Dr. Schwager repeatedly watched families work extraordinarily hard for their children while struggling with coordination problems that were becoming routine. Caregivers lacked visibility into educational goals. Parents received information from many sources with no consistent way to share it. Specialists worked independently. Routines shifted depending on who was present. Everyone cared deeply about the child, and continuity still slipped.
What interested Dr. Schwager was not the performance of individual adults. It was the environment surrounding them.
“Children experience the environment as a whole,” said Dr. Schwager. “Adults tend to think in roles. The parent, the caregiver, the teacher, the therapist. Children do not separate those experiences in the same way. They experience the consistency or inconsistency of the entire system.”
That observation eventually led Dr. Schwager to create The Formator Institute™, the only credentialed, systems-based institution focused specifically on private household childcare. Rather than approaching childcare solely through the lens of caregiving, the Institute examines communication systems, caregiver coordination, developmental continuity, and the operational structures that support children in increasingly complex households.
The timing is not incidental, because the population living with this kind of complexity is growing quickly. UBS’s 2025 Global Wealth Report found that the United States added more than a thousand new millionaires a day in 2024, the fastest pace of any country. By UBS’s count, roughly one in six American households now holds at least a million dollars in assets. At the higher end, the real estate consultancy Knight Frank reported that the number of North Americans worth more than ten million dollars rose by about five percent in a single year. These are the households most likely to assemble large teams around a child, which means the number of families managing many caregivers at once is expanding rather than holding steady.
The strain is not confined to households with staff. In 2024 the U.S. Surgeon General issued a rare public advisory, Parents Under Pressure, reporting that parents have been consistently more likely than other adults to report high levels of stress over the past decade. Nearly half said that on most days their stress felt completely overwhelming, against about a quarter of other adults, and the advisory described a landscape of new stressors that earlier generations did not face. Across the income spectrum, the work of raising a child increasingly resembles the work of running an organization.
In many homes, the planning, communication, scheduling, and logistics required to sustain daily life would be recognizable to anyone who has managed a team. Yet unlike organizations, families are never taught to build systems for that kind of complexity. Most rely on informal communication and routines that develop on their own. Those approaches hold when circumstances are stable. As more adults enter a child’s life, they stop holding.
The consequences are rarely dramatic. They surface gradually. A child receives conflicting expectations from different adults. Important information fails to reach the people who need it. Developmental goals fragment across settings. Caregivers spend their energy adapting to shifting expectations rather than focusing on the child. None of this reflects poor parenting. It reflects the growing complexity of family life itself.
This challenges a common instinct. When difficulties arise, families tend to look for a different individual: a new caregiver, a new program, a new specialist. Sometimes that is the right move. Often it obscures a larger question. How well is the environment surrounding the child functioning as a system? Continuity no longer depends only on relationships. It depends on the structures that connect them.
There is something deeper underneath this. A child builds a sense of a coherent world out of the regularities around them, the small daily confirmations that the rules do not change when the adult does. When those regularities align, a child can spend their attention on growing. When they conflict, the child spends it absorbing the conflict instead. Consistency, in that sense, is not a refinement of good care. It is part of the material a child develops from.
The Formator Institute™ was founded on the belief that this kind of consistency deserves far more attention than it gets. Its work reflects a recognition that the future of childcare may involve more than finding exceptional people. It may require building the environments that let those people work as one.
For Dr. Schwager, that possibility sits at the center of an emerging conversation. “The question is no longer simply who is helping raise children,” she said. “It is whether all of those people are working from the same understanding of the child. As family life grows more complex, that distinction matters more than ever.”
Written in partnership with Tom White
