Family-Friendly Third Spaces Can Keep Parents Connected

Stacey McLachlan’s cousin Beth has a 10-year-old daughter who gardens, does karate and makes stop-motion films. Beth loves her daughter and still describes the experience of parenting as “the loneliest decade of my life.” McLachlan connects that isolation to a wider pattern.

The figure comes from a 2017 Action for Children study of 2,000 people, McLachlan says. The same study found that another 40% felt unsupported in their parenthood. A different study in the UK, she says, found that half of mothers under 30 felt lonely often or always. McLachlan’s response to those numbers is blunt: “That sucks.”

She had watched friendships shift before she became a parent. Friends with children did not disappear because she resented the attention their babies received, she says, but because their lives fell out of sync. The old activities became harder to share: a baby cannot come along to a pottery studio or an improv class, and bringing a child to drinks can leave a parent worrying about disrupting everyone else’s evening. McLachlan describes the bind plainly: a parent may feel stressed about spoiling the fun, or later encounter online comments calling children in restaurants “crotch goblins.” Even after the newborn period, it is easy to withdraw from familiar social settings.

For McLachlan, that loss matters beyond the friendship itself. She points to an 80-year Harvard study that, as she describes it, found close relationships—not wealth, status or physical appearance—to be the strongest indicator of success, longevity and happiness. The important measure is not popularity but whether people care about one another, follow up and remain involved in one another’s lives: who laughs with you, argues with you and reminds you that an eight-pack is not realistic.

She frames parental loneliness as a collective problem. Close adult relationships are part of how people share care and information, and how they keep one another from falling through the cracks. They are, in her account, social glue: when parents are quietly pushed out of social spaces, the damage extends to the wider network those spaces sustain. The issue therefore reaches beyond parents themselves. McLachlan tells listeners without children that it is their issue too: losing contact with parents means losing relationships and weakening the everyday connections through which people support one another.

When Stacey McLachlan became pregnant, she was less concerned with the social fabric in the abstract than with whether she would still get to do the things she enjoyed. She did not want to be confined to parent-only activities, even if she was good at singing “Wheels on the Bus.” Her own childhood had given her a different model.

Growing up in the 1980s, McLachlan lived in a townhouse complex with a communal backyard and playground. The children roamed while adults watched from balconies or joined them in the yard. Parents made margaritas, exchanged gossip and took turns telling the children to stop playing Power Rangers in the garden bed. It was not a choice between supervising children and spending time with other adults. Both happened in the same place.

McLachlan calls that courtyard a “third space”: a gathering place that is neither home nor work. It made room for adults to enjoy one another’s company while children played nearby. She remembers the mix as a communal experience, with adults responsible for the children but also able to share a drink, an inappropriate joke and the frustrations of parenting. The childhood photograph she shows of the courtyard helps make the point concrete: this was not a specially organized parenting activity, but a shared outdoor place where children and adults were present at the same time.

She wanted to find that kind of community as a parent, rather than accept a choice between activities with her child and the friendships she had before becoming a mother. But a communal courtyard or safe cul-de-sac is not available to everyone. Living in Vancouver, McLachlan realized she would have to be deliberate about making a shared space herself.

When Stacey McLachlan’s daughter Coco was born, McLachlan brought her to adult social activities as well as parent-and-child classes: a wine bar, trivia nights and even a pro-wrestling show, with headphones for the baby. Coco was McLachlan’s “plus-one to everything.” That worked while she could be carried. Once she began crawling, walking and climbing, an ordinary happy hour became a sequence of rescue missions.

At a sports bar, McLachlan was trying to preserve her adult identity while repeatedly sprinting away from her IPA and the conversation to stop her 18-month-old from falling off a bar stool, taking fries from another table, hitting her head or trying to work behind the bar. After her fifth trip to retrieve Coco, she reached a different conclusion: the problem was not that she had brought a child to a bar. The problem was that there was no bar designed to welcome one.

McLachlan had seen versions of this idea elsewhere. In the UK, she says, children run around underfoot in local pubs; in Australia, restaurants and breweries may have playgrounds; in Spain, friends had sent her pictures of an espresso bar inside a playground. She pauses to make clear that her point is not that parents need alcohol, and that adults watching children should be responsible. It is that shared, multi-generational spaces are more vibrant and human, and that age-segregating social life can make everyone lonelier—not only parents. “Don’t you miss your parent friends?” she asks. “Don’t you want them to come out too?”

Her imagined Vancouver venue would allow children to play while adults finished a conversation. She pictured soft corners, few places for little fingers to get stuck, no unstable bar stools, toys and gates, and craft beer on tap. The essential feature was not the beer or the playful name, but permission for children to play and adults to remain in the conversation. She joked that it might be called “Toddlerz,” a name she was still workshopping.

When Stacey McLachlan decided to try the idea, she was a magazine editor, not a restaurateur, and opening a venue was beyond her budget. Instead, she emailed a cocktail-tasting room that seemed bright and family-friendly, with low, rounded Scandinavian-style furniture. The owner replied that same day: they had a two-year-old and the idea sounded great.

McLachlan settled on “Witching Hour,” a term parents use for the emotional stretch between nap time and dinner, when children can be, in her comic description, “maniacs.” The event sold out in a day. McLachlan says the buyers were strangers as well as friends. She bought a slide on Facebook Marketplace, packed toys and transformed the cocktail lounge into a makeshift play area.

One of the first guests was Allison, whom McLachlan had never met. Allison brought two children and took three buses from the suburbs—a 90-minute trip—to attend. She made the journey because she wanted to be around, as she put it, “people who get it.” The distance is one detail in McLachlan’s account of who came and what the event offered: a gathering where parents could be among people who understood the experience of bringing children along.

The gathering was noisy. Fishy crackers flew, and at least one child took off a shirt. But McLachlan remembers that nobody panicked. Parents were relaxed, children could play, and adults could talk. The atmosphere did not depend simply on everyone having a Paloma; it came from the permission the space gave people to be themselves. “The kids are free to be kids, and the parents are free to be people,” she says.

McLachlan enjoyed the event too. She could talk with new parent friends, while childless friends from the neighborhood dropped in for a drink. She was not only maintaining an old social life; she felt more connected to her community than before. She felt like her old self, and her life felt bigger, not smaller. Witching Hour went on to run more than 30 times, at Please Beverage Co. and other bars around the city, moving between neighborhoods and venues.

McLachlan says she received effusive praise for what she describes as a simple intervention: bringing a bag of Duplo to the bar. She says the response showed there was interest in multi-generational third spaces—places where children and adults can connect and be themselves together. The events took place in different venues, including a café, a pub and an outdoor patio, rather than in a dedicated children’s establishment.

Many ordinary adult spaces—restaurants, pubs, cafés and art workshops—are not accessible to parents with young children, McLachlan says. The physical environment may not accommodate a child, and navigating behavioral expectations while keeping a young child safe and occupied can be exhausting. Without resources for childcare, parents may stay home or spend social time on the sidelines of children’s activities, such as T-ball or karate.

Parental loneliness is one part of a broader loneliness problem, McLachlan says, but it is one she sees as solvable: let the children come too. Her proposal is not that every adult venue must become a playground, but that parents should have ways to keep participating in ordinary social life.

Stacey McLachlan offers distinct requests for the people who shape, use and share social spaces. Businesses could make one night a month family-friendly. Parents could email a favorite watering hole and ask whether they could bring a couple dozen children along; McLachlan says other parents will come, and promises Allison will be there. Designers and city planners could create places in the city that invite multi-generational interaction. And everyone else can remember the children in their lives and the people who raised them: those people deserve a night out, and perhaps a drink, as much as anyone else.

McLachlan’s own experiment began with an email, a slide and a bag of toys. The aim is not to teach toddlers to appreciate a well-made pilsner. Her case for a bar designed for babies comes from remembering a childhood in which children were simply present. Adults talked over their heads, kept an eye on one another and did not vanish from each other’s social lives when a baby arrived.

The townhouse courtyard mattered to McLachlan as a child, but it also made parenthood more joyful and communal for her own parents. They formed friendships there that they still have. Witching Hour, she says, asks what it would look like to bring that feeling back: instead of losing people to parenthood, make room for them and their “sticky little plus-ones” at the table—or at the bar.