This post is for anyone who left their hometown, built a life somewhere that truly felt like them, and then found themselves wondering whether having kids meant they were supposed to move back home for “the village.”
It's the post we had been searching for, but never found.
So here we are, post-mortem, making it ourselves...
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My wife and I both grew up in the Midwest. Like a lot of people, we eventually left home and moved to a major city.
We ended up living there for more than a decade, and in a lot of ways, that city was where we became true adults. It was where our careers grew, where our worldview expanded, where we made lifelong friends, and where we became the people we actually wanted to be. It wasn’t just that we liked the restaurants or the energy or the convenience of city life. It was much deeper than that. The people around us felt aligned with who we had become. Our friends were curious, thoughtful, ambitious, open-minded, well-traveled people who challenged us and helped us grow. We built a life that felt intentional. It genuinely felt like home.
Then we found out we were having our first child, and suddenly the question of “home” became much more complicated. Like a lot of people, we started thinking about family. Grandparents. Space. Schools. Support. The village. We started asking ourselves whether we were being selfish by staying away. Whether our child would miss out by not growing up near extended family. Whether we were making life unnecessarily hard on ourselves by trying to raise a kid far away from where we came from.
And honestly, there is a tremendous amount of pressure around this decision, especially in the Midwest. There’s this deeply ingrained assumption that once you have kids, you move back home. You leave the big city, buy a house with more space, settle down near family, and raise your kids around the people who raised you. It’s framed as the responsible, mature thing to do. We absolutely internalized that pressure. So 3 months our child was even born, we made the move.
We told ourselves that maybe we could have both worlds. Maybe we could take the people we had become and transplant that life back home. Maybe proximity to family would outweigh everything else. Maybe the sacrifices would be worth it. On paper, it looked like we had made the perfect decision. We bought a beautiful dream house. Tons of space. Great neighborhood. Family nearby. Old friends nearby. Everyone around us reinforced that we had done the “right” thing.
But within six months, we knew something was deeply wrong. The strange part is that nothing looked wrong externally. In fact, our life probably looked ideal to most people. But internally, we were struggling in a way that was hard to articulate, even to ourselves at first. We started slowly losing ourselves.
And I want to be very clear: this was not about politics, weather, or some simplistic “city vs suburbs” argument. It was about identity. It was about realizing that we had spent more than a decade growing into people who no longer fully fit in the environment we came from. We had changed. Our priorities had changed. The kinds of conversations we wanted to have had changed. The way we viewed parenting, relationships, ambition, lifestyle, community, and the world itself had changed. And when we moved back, we felt ourselves slowly compressing into a version of life that no longer felt authentic. That was the part we completely underestimated. We thought moving home would feel grounding. Instead, it felt suffocating.
The hardest part is that you can’t really explain this to the people around you without sounding arrogant or ungrateful. How do you tell your family and old friends, “I love you, but I don’t think this life fits me anymore”? How do you explain that living in a place aligned with who you are matters deeply to your happiness? How do you say that growth changed you without sounding like you think you’re “better” than the people who stayed?
So most of the time, you don’t say it. We sit with it quietly. We talked about it privately every single day. We felt increasingly isolated because the people physically around us often can’t fully understand what feels off. Meanwhile, when you talk to the friends you left behind in the city, you immediately feel connected again. You feel understood again. And that contrast becomes impossible to ignore. It honestly felt like we were living someone else’s life.
Another thing we learned the hard way is that not every “village” is actually supportive in the way you need it to be. People romanticize having grandparents nearby, but proximity alone does not equal peace or alignment. In our case, there were constant tensions around parenting styles, boundaries, modern medical guidance, routines, sleep, feeding, and just basic respect for how we wanted to raise our child. A lot of boomer grandparents genuinely mean well, but that doesn’t automatically mean they respect your decisions as parents. We realized that some of the support we thought we were moving back for came attached to stress, guilt, unsolicited advice, and boundary issues that were much more emotionally draining than we anticipated. That doesn’t mean family is bad. It just means “near family” and “supported” are not always the same thing.
Eventually, we had to confront a difficult truth: we had made a life-altering decision largely out of fear and obligation. We convinced ourselves we were doing the mature thing, the selfless thing, the practical thing. But underneath all of it, we had ignored our own intuition. The irony is that we probably could have made it work in the city all along. Would it have been harder in some ways? Absolutely. We would have had to pay for more childcare. We would have had fewer spontaneous nights out. We would have had to intentionally build our own village instead of inheriting one. We would have traveled more. We would have had to ask family to come visit us instead of always being nearby. But that was the hard we should have chosen.
Because there is no version of having kids that isn’t hard. Living far from family is hard. Childcare is expensive. Travel is exhausting. Building community takes effort. But living somewhere that slowly disconnects you from yourself is also hard. Waking up every day feeling increasingly unlike yourself is hard. Feeling emotionally trapped in a life that looks perfect externally but feels wrong internally is hard. For us, that hard became unbearable.
As obvious as it sounds, we found out do not benefit from parents who slowly lose themselves trying to satisfy everyone else’s expectations. They benefit from parents who feel alive, grounded, connected, fulfilled, and authentic.
I’m not writing this to tell people never to move home. For some families, it is absolutely the right choice. Some people truly feel happiest where they grew up. Some families have deeply healthy, respectful, supportive dynamics that genuinely make life better. But if you’re on the fence about this decision, I would encourage you to be brutally honest with yourself. Are you moving because it genuinely aligns with who you are and the life you want? Or are you moving because you feel pressure, guilt, fear, or obligation? Are you choosing support, or are you choosing approval? Are you moving toward something authentic, or away from a version of life that simply feels harder logistically?
So if you're intense about moving back, we strongly advise the following:
- Try staying where you are for a while
- Test out the first year with the kiddo
- Travel and stay there for a month or two
- Just don't jump to conclusions
You have to "choose your hard" either way. And in our experience, the right hard was building a life that stayed true to who we were, even if it meant creating our own village instead of returning to the one we came from.
I wish we had trusted ourselves enough to believe that from the beginning.