It is often said that it takes a village to raise a child, but when Marina Lopes became a mother in the United States, she found herself looking around and asking, “Where is my village?”
“I found that around the world, all parents are exhausted, but in the United States, parents are really uniquely lonely,” Lopes said.
Lopes, BC ’11, a journalist and author, explores these kinds of cultural differences—and what the United States can learn about parenting from families across the globe—in her new book, Please Yell At My Kids: What Cultures Around the World Can Teach You About Parenting in Community, Raising Independent Kids, and Not Losing Your Mind.
At Boston College, Lopes majored in international studies and minored in communications. She said she knew early on that she wanted to be a journalist.
“I’ve always known I wanted to be a journalist,” Lopes said. “I grew up partially in Brazil, partially in Miami, and after I graduated [BC], I went straight to journalism school and got my first reporting assignment in Mozambique.”
After Mozambique, Lopes spent time reporting for outlets like The Washington Post and working as a freelance journalist took her from New York to Washington, D.C. and eventually to Brazil and Singapore.
But while life in different countries brought new experiences, one aspect stood out to Lopes: Parenting looked drastically different everywhere she lived.
“Globalization has made life look similar in a lot of countries,” Lopes said. “But parenting was the one thing that was completely different.”
In Brazil, parenting revolves around involving extended family, Lopes said. Every weekend, she explained, families visit grandparents, and aunts, uncles, and cousins regularly help raise children.
In Mozambique, she saw examples of collective childcare, as one parent oversaw 10 or 12 children from the same neighborhood while their parents worked somewhere else.
In Singapore, government housing policies encourage grandparents to live close enough to support their grandchildren and assume caretaking roles in their lives, according to Lopes.
“There were so many people involved in raising a kid,” Lopes said. “And it made it all the more poignant to me that Americans are trying to do it by themselves.”
When Lopes looked at parenting in the United States, she saw parents handling nearly everything alone, often without the support of extended family or other community members.
“The idea that a child is supposed to be raised by one, or, if you’re lucky, two people, is very new,” Lopes said. “And the data is clear that it’s not working.”
Inspired by her travels, Lopes began writing Please Yell at My Kids in 2021, when her children were still young. As she researched and interviewed families across the world, she found herself testing the ideas in her own home.
“My kids were my total guinea pigs,” Lopes said.
In Mozambique, she had watched young children take on meaningful household responsibilities from a young age. When she began raising her own family in the United States Lopes started to integrate this responsibility into her children’s daily routines.
“My kids were four and six when they started doing all of our laundry, which I thought was an insane thing when I first started it,” Lopes said. “But they were totally able to do it.”
Little by little, Lopes realized that she could integrate her children into the household routine, just like families do in Mozambique.
She also began encouraging independence outside of her home, allowing her children to walk to friends’ houses and play outside without constant supervision.
Over time, other families in her neighborhood joined in.
“We changed the culture of our block,” Lopes said. “Now I’ll be sitting here and the doorbell will ring with kids who are coming over to play without their parents.”
Although some people might see these methods as impractical, Lopes ensured that everything she included in her book could be realistically applied in the United States.
“Every country that I went to, I’ve just learned so much, and I wanted to make sure that the takeaways were extremely practical,” Lopes said. “So if it didn’t work for my family, I didn’t include it in the book.”
According to her father, Ernesto Lopes, the ways Lopes approaches both parenting and her work reflect who she has always been.
“Marina has always been extremely curious about things, about different parts of the world,” Ernesto Lopes said. “She always had, and I still think she has, a fear of missing out. She wants to be everywhere, and part of everything, and she’s extremely connected to her roots and her family.”
He said watching her become a mother added a new dimension to the person he knew.
“The amount of effort that she put in makes us admire her even more,” he said. “As her father, I think she’s an amazing woman and an exceptional mother, but most of all, I admire her as a human being, and how her actions reflect her vision of the world.”
For Lopes’ longtime friend, Sofia Barbieri, BC ’12, Please Yell At My Kids is a true reflection of the woman she first encountered years ago. Barbieri met Lopes during her freshman year, when Lopes was assigned as her international student mentor.
“[She] had this incredible mix of warmth, humor, and grounded confidence in her,” Barbieri said. “And I remember thinking, if this is what American college students are like, I’m gonna be okay here.”
When Barbieri read Please Yell at My Kids, she recognized that Lopes’ in-person presence carried through to her work.
“The book feels like a conversation with somebody who just gets it, who just gets life,” Barbieri said. “It’s the kind of work that I think makes people feel seen. And making people feel seen is something that she’s always done so effortlessly.”
Lopes says she hopes her book helps parents rethink what they have come to accept as normal in raising children.
“Parenting does not have to be this way,” said Lopes. “You get to choose what values you want to adopt as a parent, and ultimately, what values you want to pass on to your kids.”
Today, Lopes teaches journalism at American University in Washington, D.C. She is also a fellow at the Solutions Journalism Network, an independent, non-profit organization that works to advance reporting about responses to social problems. There, she researches how communities help young adults feel a sense of belonging.
In the future, Lopes hopes to turn her attention to exploring the role of the village in a different stage of life: how different cultures care for aging adults.
“The way that we take care of babies and the way that we take care of our elderly are very, very different, and I’m fascinated by it,” Lopes said.
Lopes’ work spans multiple countries and cultures, but it keeps returning to the same question that first surfaced when she became a mother: “Where is my village?”
Over time, Lopes found the answer by choosing not to accept loneliness and isolation as inevitable for parents and families.
“Just because you don’t have a village doesn’t mean you don’t get to build one, plant one from scratch with the materials you have available to you,” Lopes said. “The situation that you were born into doesn’t have to be the situation you pass on to your kids. If you want to change the environment around you as a parent, that’s in your hands.”