#this is from like last November help me I hoard drafts too long

[unfortunatelyilikebnha]

Thinking abt kazuma,,, thinkng abt how he has silver eyes compared to kazumi’s gold,,, as if even kazuma’s character design is telling the world he’s in second place, & that he’ll never live up to his brother’s example </3

[1kook]

skirt chasers - drabble i

a skirt chasers drabble bc they are my fave fictional couple to date <333

tags: coupley and domestic, jk’s terrible attempts at seducing via text, making out, dry humping, spitting (ik idk what came over me), too much talking for this to be sexual pero hey here we are wc: like 3k

entirely based off jungkook from bv3 that man had NO right to look that good and  the holy jirkenstocks (jungkook birkenstocks). wont lie this has been completely written in my drafts since November (yes 2019) and i hoarded it under the belief i would make this a whole part 2 which i did not 

que dios los bendiga <3

-

Much to everyone’s dismay, Jungkook’s spring break in Vegas with the boys is cut three days short when Jimin’s dog sitter suddenly cancels, citing a case of homesickness as enough cause to abruptly go home. When you first hear news of this, you’re preparing yourself for the return of a mopey, useless Jungkook, too drained from four glorious days in Las Vegas to carry on. What you’re not expecting is the mysterious text he sends you before boarding a five hour flight with no service (he was cheap).

kook still on vegas lockdown. Have that pussy ready when i get home

“The fuck does that mean?” Chaeyoung is the first to see the message, your screen lighting up on the kitchen counter beside you as you scrub through a mountainous pile of dishes. You try to play it off, after all, Chaeyoung had seen parts of you you hadn’t even seen, but there was no worse embarrassment than having your homegirls see your clown of a boyfriend’s ridiculousness. “He’s so romantic,” she swoons, and you shoo her away from the offending device as you wipe your hands down on your t-shirt. 

you for what?? One 20 second round 🤥

Chaeyoung suddenly cackles from over your shoulder, and you swear your soul leaves your body. 

You don’t get a response until exactly five hours and thirteen minutes later, your phone vibrating like crazy on the edge of your bathtub, and if you hadn’t given it a hearty kick and sent it flying across the room, front screen shattering into the most intricate spider web of glass shards, it would have fallen into the water. The terror. 

kook pls pick me up 

kook also haha. U r soooo funny 😑

You’re halfway to the airport, idly sitting in traffic and giving the public a free, Beyonce-like experience of The Script’s Breakeven, when you realize you’re not wearing any pants. You’re not exactly sure which part of Jungkook’s long t-shirt had tricked you into believing you were decently dressed, but you’re not too mad. After all, Jungkook’s trip with the boys had been a last minute decision that did not take into consideration your never-ending thirst for your boyfriend, so a little payback never hurt anybody. 

He’s sitting on top of his suitcase outside the airport when you get there, cute Birkenstock-clad feet swinging back and forth as he waits for you like the good boy he is. He crouches down by the passenger window, “Uh, yeah, is this the Uber?” 

You can’t even bother hiding the smile that consumes your face, and it only grows tenfold when he finally gets in and immediately leans over the center console to kiss you. “Look who’s finally back from their little bachelor party,” you murmur, eyes lidded dangerously low when he breaks away. 

“Oh, the party where I accidentally sleep away my life-savings to a stripper named Aries and then have to go home and beg for my wife’s forgiveness?” He responds immediately, devious pink tongue swiping out to lick at your bottom lip. 

You snort. “Joke’s on you, because our hot pool boy kept me company and treated me better in four days than my husband had in six years,” you mumble, finger looping into the silver chain around his neck to pull him close again. 

“Not our hot pool boy,” he whines, smile pressed adorably to your lips. 

You almost retort, but a ten-second horn blast from the car behind you has the two of you jumping three feet from each other, like teenagers caught making out in the school parking lot. 

-

Just as you’d predicted via text, Jungkook barely has the energy to walk up the steps to your apartment, much less fuck you like he’d promised. “Fuck, stop being healthy and let us take the elevator,” he grunts, pushing his suitcase onto the final platform leading to your floor.

“Nope,” you concede. “The stairs give me a good view of your ass going up.”

He shoots you a scandalized look, like you’re an old man who’d just catcalled him on the street. “Pretty sure that’s my line.”

It’s when you’re unlocking the front door, sending out a little prayer to the heavens (Chaeyoung) for the blessing of an empty apartment, that he notices your lack of proper clothing. “Oh, hell no,” he groans, immediately crowding you against the armchair nearest the door. 

You laugh, struggling to turn to face him as he nuzzles his face into your neck. “What seems to be the problem?”

He sighs against the shell of your ear, and you’d be a liar to say it didn’t send a gush of wetness to your core. Jesus, just a single puff of air from Jungkook was enough to turn your coochie into a Fruit Gusher. “Not your sexy legs again,” he whines, and you giggle when he presses those pouty lips to yours. 

“Thought I was supposed to have this pussy ready for you,” you tease, tilting your head up until your noses brush against each other. Jungkook lets a soft huff of a sigh go, eyes fluttering shut at your close proximity. 

There’s a hand that creeps along the back of your thigh, fingers pressing into the soft skin until he finally guides it upwards, hitched over his hip. The new position has your body curving backwards, tilted over the edge of the couch as he continues crowding closer and closer to you. “Baby,” he whines, and the tone and sudden usage of your favorite nickname wipes the teasing smile off your face. “I missed you so much,” he purrs, in that tone that says he knows he has you under his complete control, all he has to do is take care of you. 

Still, you try to put up some sort of a fight. “I’m sure your eyes were kept entertained in Vegas,” you retort weakly, not even bothering to hide the jealousy in your tone. 

Jungkook laughs, before puckering his lips and smothering you. Instantly, you throw your arms around his broad shoulders to pull him closer. His hair tickles your face from how long it’s gotten, and when you brush it back, collecting it into a makeshift baby ponytail, you can’t even enjoy the sight because Jungkook is pressing his rock hard member against your inner thigh. 

“You think I’m a cheater?” He muses when he finally pulls away, a little entranced by the saliva that coats your lips in a thin sheen. “Couldn’t be even if I wanted to.” Before you can ask what that even means, he’s hauling you into his arms, your legs wrapping around his tiny waist, his cock now cradled between your thighs, right where you want him most. You moan immediately, head lolling backwards at the touch you’d craved for days. “Feel that? No one gets my dick hard like you do, baby.”

Even though his adrenaline is on one hundred, and he’s clearly blinded by his lust, Jungkook still sets you down on the bed like you’re made of glass. Any comments you may have made are smothered by his lips on yours, fingers gripping your waist like it’s the first time he’s ever touched you. When he pulls away, his eyes are dark and his breath is a little heavy where it fans against the lower half of your face. 

“So pretty,” he huffs, rolling his hips against yours. You groan, eyes rolling back as the familiar feeling of your boyfriend between your legs consumes you. Jungkook presses his mouth against the skin of your neck, where the faintest sheen of sweat had begun to form the moment you unlocked the front door. 

If you thought you were loud, the sounds leaving Jungkook’s throat are teetering on the edge between a pornstar and a yodelling-enthusiast. You can’t help the smirk crossing your features. “Are you really gonna come?”

Jungkook was many things, and drama queen was definitely very high on that list. He gives you the most scandalized expression, stopping the movement of his hips to scoff. “As if,” he snorts, but you know that little eyebrow furrow a little too well. 

You snort, reaching down to his sides as you try to discreetly urge him to start up again. “Baby, your jaw is twitching,” you point out, a soft whine leaving your lips when he shifts your leg up. It’s this same sound that has him finally moving again. 

“Yeah, well,” he groans, one hand deathly gripping into your hip now, pressing you down onto the bed so hard you feel the comforter will swallow you up any minute now. “I just got my wisdom teeth removed, ‘member?”

Your retort is briefly cut off by the cry you let out when he ducks down to suck a mark beneath your jaw. “M-Months ago,” you weakly respond, 

Jungkook ignores you in favor of using his Hulk strength to fold you in half, groans borderline animalistic as he grinds his cock into your soaked panties. His jaw is tight like you’d said, but you can tell he’s holding himself back. He hated coming before you, seldom doing it unless it was one of those rare days where he wanted you to pamper him. 

“Fuck,” he grunts, swallowing your pitiful whines before pushing his tongue down your throat. There was something sexy about your boyfriend being so turned on that his saliva production was off the charts. “You’re gonna ask me to do that thing again, aren’t you?” He predicts. 

All you can do is nod, and Jungkook smirks. “Ah,” he says, much like a doctor would, and you comply, mouth wide. You see the muscles beneath his jaw twitch, and a moment later he’s leaning over you with puckered lips, a glob of saliva begging to drip down. 

The moan that catches in your throat has him smiling, tongue peeking out to cut the bridge of saliva that connected the two of you, and you want to tell him you love him, but then he’s raising his eyebrows at you, motioning for you to swallow, so you do. “Absolutely filthy,” he grins, and then returns to thrusting against you. 

As much as you liked to tease him, he’s good at fulfilling the sexual aspects of his boyfriend role, and he guides you to your orgasm moments later. Of course, he does so by toying with your tits just the way you like, lips pressed firmly to yours as you become a boneless heap beneath him. “That’s it, pretty baby,” he murmurs, pressing one final kiss to your lips before he’s shifting back onto his haunches, tugging you closer until the backs of your knees are cradled carefully in his elbows. 

Despite your transcended state, you love watching Jungkook get himself off, and your eyes flutter as you watch him thrust sloppily against your soiled panties. They’re soaked by your own arousal, and had Jungkook’s sweats not been as dark as they were, you’re almost certain you’d see how they stained. 

He comes a moment later, body twitching and fingers tightening against your skin. His chest heaves, head lolling back as he tries to regain his senses. Silence envelopes the room. 

“Do you wanna talk about it?” You blurt, no longer able to pretend like something isn’t completely wrong. 

Jungkook rolls his neck out, a satisfying crack resounding, as he angles to look at you again. His tongue is poking against his cheek in that cocky way it does sometimes, and he furrows his brows at you. “What?”

You shuffle up onto your elbows, motioning towards him with the vaguest wave possible. He blinks. You groan. 

“What did you do?” You question, and immediately his eyes go wide and shiny in that way they do when you’re reprimanding him and he doesn’t see the wrong in his ways. 

Cute little lips forming a pout he remains as confused. “Nothing? We really just went to fuck around and get drunk—“

“Kook.”

“You don’t actually think I cheated, I thought we were just joking? Unless…” he trails off, doe eyes suddenly filled with fear. “You weren’t?”

“Jungkook—“

He intercepts you, “did you do something while I was gone? Who was he? Or she? Wow,” he huffs to himself in disbelief. “I don’t even know you well enough to know if you’re into more than just men.” The frown on his face is getting deeper with each word he utters and you almost can’t believe how dumb he could be. “No wonder… am I a terrible boyfriend?” He asks, voice louder and more concerned than it’s been all night. 

“What the fuck are you even talking about?” You say, and Jungkook looks just as lost by your response as you are with his. “Because I’m talking about whatever this is,” you explain, reaching up to drag a hand through his dual-colored locks. 

They’d been carefully tucked under his bucket hat when you’d picked him up, a tuft of blonde peeking out from in front of his ear. It wasn’t until he’d tipped you over the side of the couch that it had tumbled off. Of course, at the time, there had been other pressing matters at hand than wondering why your Hannah Montana blonde boyfriend had returned as Todoroki, which is why you’d waited until now to revisit the topic. 

Jungkook doesn’t move for a solid ten seconds. Then, as if processing the emotional episode he’d just given you, he gives you a sheepish smile. It’s one of those smiles where his lips press together thinly and cutely and the apples of his cheeks seem like the squishiest things in the world. “Oh…” he says, voice soft and nothing like the man that spit in your mouth five minutes ago. “You like it?”

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

Palm Reading + Mandarin | Fostered Writing Update

Hey People of Earth!

It’s been *years* since I wrote my last writing update, and seeming as though I have some time to draft this, I thought I’d pop another one your way!

This update is going to cover the writing haps from FOSTERED!

The last FOSTERED update I posted was in October, so here’s a summary of what’s happened in the last few months:

I drafted Palm Reading and Dark Room from October to November

^ And then never wrote anything in December

Literally had a crisis

What’s New

These last few chapters of this book were not happening? I’ve probably drafted a total of four chapters this entire semester because of how little time I have to write, which isn’t fun. I was having a hard time balancing writing for school, and writing for myself, so my book definitely suffered a lil bit. 

In terms of plot summary, the squad has been at a cabin in Oregon for the last few weeks. I’ve translated this to literally only two chapters, however, it will physically pain me to keep writing in this setting, so I’m moving on! The first chapter I’ll be updating you on is called Palm Reading. 

I mentioned in my last FOSTERED update that this book is currently split into two parts: part one being tentatively titled ‘Children’. PALM READING is the first chapter of part two, and also, the first full chapter at The Cabin. In my last update, I talked about the squad arriving at the cabin. I thought I’d flesh this out more in this update! (Also: I’m hoping to make a 3D model of the cabin in the future--I already have all the blueprints!)

The cabin is owned by Lonan’s (deceased) father, and is now inhabited by Reeve + Lonan’s sister, Christiane, who now goes by Anna. Bad Things happen at this cabin, which is why I’m swinging out early! PALM READING is split into five scenes:

All you have to know: the squad has travelled across the universe to cheer Lonan up because he’s going through some Tough Times. This is, of course, a very bad idea. 

Scene A:

This scene is a flashback Reeve recounts of her and her sister as children before their mother’s fancy garden party. 

Scene B:

Reeve makes French onion soup for Lonan in an attempt to cheer him up. Her estranged mother, Izzy, tries to help, to no avail. 

Tbh, this scene could be cut lol. It’s very short, and not super interesting in my opinion! Though I’m not very fond of this chapter in general. 

Scene C:

Lonan doesn't like Reeve’s soup (apparently this whole chapter is just soup?? we should just call it soup???), and dissociates when he encounters Anna’s son. He gets a lil violent and Darren steps in to save ze day (a valiant boi). 

Fun fact: I wrote an entire mini story with Lonan and Harrison, recounting the aftermath of this encounter (see more below ;))

Scene D:

Anna and Reeve hang on the porch, and Reeve fantasizes about what her life would be like if her sister was still in her life beyond childhood. 

Scene E:

Reeve leaves her sister on the porch and her and Darren have some timezzzzzz. 

Fun fact:

This chapter was originally called just PALM before I started writing this update. I wasn’t mega happy with the title, but I like it a lot more as this expansion!

Yo dis chapter the whole alphabet or what?? I’m not particularly happy with it because it’s not cohesive at all?? I found I wrote a ton of tiny lil scenes that didn’t fit together very well, lol. I think if I cut the scene breaks and integrated the chapter into three bigger scenes, this would’ve been a lot more effective. The reason most of these scenes are so tiny, is because I believe I wrote this chapter over a very long period of time. I find if I leave a chapter for too long between breaks, it just isn’t very good since I lose a lot of momentum.  

Excerpts:

I’ll share the whole first scene! Not my *favourite* scene but is ok:

Izzy made it clear it was a garden party, even though we didn’t have a garden. She’d rewritten her plans on her toile stationary from Paris, and pinned the leaflets to the fridge so the neighbours would think she looked rich. She bought a red check pinafore from the Goodwill and pretended it was designer. Her panty hose were sheer and black and made her look like an off-brand prostitute.

The neighbours would be in by three. Christiane and I set the table with the good cutlery, and hung Chinese lanterns from the doorways. Izzy lit the tea lights and peeled the carrots over the sink.

Before the guests arrived, Christiane and I played out by the marsh. We hopped puddles and skipped rocks. We practiced our Spanish in ruled notebooks even though Izzy enrolled us in French. We caught crickets and brown-bellied spiders in bug boxes, and ate crackers and deli meat, and the leftover frog legs Izzy bought from the bistro. The Tupperware sweat with chervil and nutmeg. She said, Evie, it tastes just like chicken you know, like that somehow made a difference. Izzy yelled at us for scraping our knees when we got back home. The neighbours are going to think I have savages for children. Do you know how mothers with savages for children look?

She made us wash our hair with castile soap, and pinned it back in matching chignons. She dressed Christiane in a tartan smock, and me in a tunic and skirt. She was twelve, I was ten. Izzy pulled her hair into two Dutch braids, and tied off the ends with bits of ribbon from the Christmas wrapping drawer. Dad came home from work late, and said, Izzy, baby, you’re looking so new age, and she cried and had to reapply her lipstick. 

Scene two, three, and four are like, not good, lol, so skipping to scene five!

Scene five gets a lil steamy yeepers--keeping it PG, but just a warning:

You are a system of constellations—all blinking and in order. A life sized Orion, all neon Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka. 

Putting this in for the Darren Roast (also lol look @ me just switching POVs):

You’re so je ne sais quois, you’re so candied and virgin, you’re so liberal, it hurts. You kiss me like we’re dating, and maybe we are. Maybe I’m your girlfriend, and you’ll take me to Thanksgiving at your mother’s, and your family will love me, and serve me cranberry sauce and tofurkey and kefir from mason jars.

That’s it for PALM READING!

The chapter I wrote after palm reading is called Dark Room. I briefly mentioned it in a vlog I’m compiling, however, I’m skipping out on writing an update on it because a) nothing is really shareable, and b) the content is kind of too difficult to explain/sift through!

The last thing I wanted to share was this lil adventure I wrote in October called Mandarin. 

MANDARIN is a short-somethin (story??? i say lightly) following the events of PALM READING, and covers Lonan and Harrison in a tent in the woods. ;) I hesitate to call it a story because it’s more just me being a shit disturber to see what I can mess up in my book in a different point of view. ;)

I can’t remember why I wanted to write this, lol. I think it’s just because I was feeling a lil stressed, and writing with my boys is always very fun. I knew things went very wrong for Lonan at the end of PALM READING, so I wanted to take some time to experiment with what exactly happened that the reader doesn't get to see.

The premise is: Harrison is being *nice* and offers to help Lonan fix his face after Darren comes in like Godzilla for his lil noggin, and things Go Wrong. 

(Also: at this point, I’ve written three *shippy* stories with these boyz, and I’ve made it my duty to compile a lil anthology of *ship* and print it out and put it on my shelf. ;))

Excerpts:

I really only included this segment because of this paragraph, not even that I love it, but because Harrison always describes Lonan with such an acute awareness to detail and its soooooooo cuuuuute:

Tangles of dark hair part down Lonan’s scalp, and drift into Harrison’s eyes. It’s getting long, now. He hasn’t had a trim in months. Harrison can measure the days since, like a personal calculator. He’s been paying attention. It’s two inches past his eyes. He hasn’t cut it since April. His skin is white, like the ivory tusks of an elephant, or the swirl of half and half. His eyes marbles of aquamarine, like an expensive China doll. Harrison would import copies and hoard them. Even though he’s bruised around the eyes, the skin puffy, and purple, he’d display him and tell everyone he’s handmade from Russia. 

same

Alrighty folks, that’s it for this update! I’m almost finished an update for a new short story, so keep an eye out for that! My semester finishes on Wednesday, so prepare to see me clutterin’ up your feed in the near future!

--Rachel

[newstfionline]

Every Parent Deserves a Nanny State

By Vanessa A. Bee, Current Affairs, November 27, 2017

Now that my mother is deep in that phase of her life where every one of our meetings concludes with an inquiry regarding my womb’s reproductive intentions, I often think of the old adage that “it takes a village to raise a child.” Contemplating the possibility of future children, I consider the fact my mother had already had me by the time she was my age. I also consider the fact that I quite like children: their sense of wonder, their earnest hopefulness, their sharp-tongued wit, their obliviousness to Twitter. But then I recall the stark reality: that growing wealth and income inequality has turned the “village”—now a network of low-waged (or sometimes unpaid) nannies, au-pairs, tutors, chauffeurs, and other “help”—into an unrecognizable, privatized luxury for the rich. If I were to have a child today, I would find myself in the shoes of most parents in America, for whom there is no village. Just a nuclear family, if you can hold it together, and an unfair economy in the backdrop.

The richest 10% of people have spent the last forty years hoarding 75% of gains in the U.S. economy. For the rest of us, the apex of American capitalism has mostly taken the form of losses: stagnant wages, predatory financialization, eroded labor power and job guarantees, burst housing bubbles, too-damn-high rents, and a hollowed safety net. Even though our economy benefits from population growth, the state continues to confine the costs of care to nuclear families and the private sector. This toxic dynamic is straining our society’s ability to rear its children. Our society is facing a crisis of care. And it is making American parents absolutely miserable.

This is not a hyperbole. As the New York Times enjoys reporting with regularity, a trifecta of anxiety, financial, and emotional drain have led to a “happiness gap” between American parents and non-parents, as well as between American and European parents. As a recent study out of the University of Texas makes clear, these significant differences between the U.S. and Europe are not explained by something inherent in our soil’s composition (notwithstanding our occasional water poisoning crises). Instead, the greatest predictor of parental happiness is the existence of policies that make it “less stressful and less costly to combine childrearing with paid work.” Simply put: European governments help their folks, while the United States hangs its own out to dry.

Today, most American parents work. Specifically, nearly half of two-parent families include both parents working full-time, and only a quarter are supported by a stay-at-home mother. Mothers consistently report bearing the brunt of domestic and caregiving duties. Mothers also report greater rates of feeling rushed; of finding parenting stressful; of feeling the impact on their careers; of finding work-life balancing difficult. One can only imagine how much more intense these burdens can be on single-parent households, or where one of two parents has a severe handicap. A true village, a socialized one, could go a long way towards closing the Happiness Gap—not only between parents and non-parents, but also between co-parents.

Despite the fact that it is 2017, neither parental leave nor universal childcare is a given in the United States. This is baffling, considering that both family policies enjoy wide support from the American public. In most places, hardworking families must renounce income during the critical weeks following and sometimes preceding a new child’s arrival. The federal government, also the single largest employer in the nation, leads the way by depriving its two-million employees of paid parental leave. The private sector, including behemoths like Wal-Mart, follow suit in its treatment of its lower-wage workforce.

In the struggle for free universal childcare, we’ve actually regressed since World War II. For a brief three years, Congress funded an expansive childcare program through a 1940s wartime law called the Lanham Act. With large segments of the male population drafted away, the state tapped women to sustain production at home. In exchange, it offered affordable relief from caregiving duties if the mothers could meet the low eligibility bar: working in a community contributing to the war effort, and paying of a small flat fee under 75 cents per day. The school formats and hours varied by locality but, in some places, ran 24/7 to accommodate round-the-clock work schedules. The scheme worked. For the first time in the country’s history, married women even surpassed single women in the labor force. By the time the war wound down, the program had become so popular that protests broke out around the country when Congress began closing facilities.

Since then, the federal government has failed to offer any childcare programs anywhere near as generous as those created by the Lanham Act. Through the Head Start program launched in the 1960s, the federal government has tried to improve access to childcare. But with a limited number of slots available and eligibility to participate restricted by income, the program is even further removed from a universal ideal. Nor have the 50 states sought to create any better childcare options. Jurisdictions that provide universal free preschool remain the exception; meanwhile, daycare expenses continue to devour family budgets in large metropolitan areas. In San Francisco, New York City, and Boston, childcare costs easily rival already-exorbitant housing costs. For households of modest means, this often means no assistance in figuring out what to do with their children during the day. Given all of this, frankly, it’s a wonder American parents do not report even higher rates of dissatisfaction.

Then there’s the issue of after-school and evenings. As made clear by parents’ exhausted reports from the “second shift,” caring for children is no easier after work. We rarely think to extend our demands for childcare assistance beyond the workday, but there are very sound reasons for doing so. First, the idea that extended after-school care can only be performed by parents is undercut by reality. The majority of households already trust the state and private sector to attend to their children’s needs on their behalf when they send their children to school every day. Though there’s a pervasive social assumption that 100% “DIY parenting” is inherently more virtuous, the truth is that parents, as a class, are not innately better-suited than experienced caregivers when it comes to performing emotionally rewarding, but ultimately mundane childcare-related tasks like homework, cooking dinner, and tucking children in. One Percent families have no qualms enlisting the private village to help their children with Common Core-style math and building science projects. In fact, rich parents are the few people in the U.S. who are able to take advantage of the ultimate outsourcing village: the boarding school.

But why should boarding schools only be the purview of the wealthy? In Europe, this isn’t the case. When I was growing up in France, my mother took a job as a caregiver, in a home for people with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. This was just a few years after my parents divorced, in the mid-’90s. The two of us decamped from a sleepy village outside the City of Lyon to a cheaper unit in the city. Our new home, in the projects of the Duchère neighborhood, was rougher. Concerned about my ability to adjust—I was, in her words, “an easily influenced child”—my mother enrolled me in the Internat Adolphe Favre, in the hilly Croix-Rousse quarter. Formerly a boarding school, the public institution (paid for by the city) now sent its attendees to the local elementary and high school. Like most parents who sent their children there, my mother paid an insignificant fee. From ages eight to ten, my mother dropped me off on Sunday nights and picked me up on Friday evenings. Our parents remained responsible for school-related meetings, and could call us during phone hours in the evenings if they wished. We were cared for by educators, fed by chefs at dinner, and at night, we were watched by guards we knew on a first-name basis. We slept in loft beds with our own very desks at the bottom. If we finished our homework early, we played soccer in the field outside, screamed at each other over foosball on the second floor, or hid out to read. We shared secrets and blanket forts and, occasionally, lice. Meanwhile, our parents had the space to get themselves together, knowing we were safe and happy. For my mother, this meant being able to work nights to support us, to sleep soundly when she got home, and even to have a hint of a social life as a single mother.

Although boarding schools are rarer here than in Western Europe or even China, they have long been a part of this country’s fabric. But for the most part, the boarding school is still principally a tool of the rich. Some, like Exeter and Andover, boast having cared for former United States Presidents as children. Privately owned and operated, the five-figure annual price restricts attendance to the elite, save for a few scholarship-sponsored spots. The children who attend these schools are well cared-for by a team of educators, for extended periods of time away from their parents.

We should reclaim the concept of the childrearing village from the rich. Under the auspices of the WWII childcare program, the American state once proved its willingness to go to great lengths to support parents. Curbing the crisis of care, and producing happier families, is surely a worthy goal in and of itself, even outside the context of a war effort. Childcare programs could create thousands of public, caregiver positions nationwide, for competitive wages and employment benefits.

Boarding schools should be about expanding options to parents and reimagining our childrearing culture. But carving out more time to care for children and for oneself can be achieved by additional means, too. For instance, shortening the work week would grant parents who wish to spend more time at home the power to do so. In the Netherlands, which already works one of the shortest weeks in the European Union, the government actually encourages parents to take more time off during the week. For many, this day or half-day has become kinderdag, or kids’ day. Imagine a state where taking weekly family leave was not only possible, but encouraged—and where, depending on the family’s wealth, parents who opted to work a shorter week would be entitled to compensation to balance their reduced hours. A statutorily-reduced work week would also discourage employers from demanding longer hours from parents who would choose to place their children in boarding schools.

American parents across all economic classes deserve better help during the work day and outside working hours. A nanny state would go a long way towards giving us all a chance to be happier.