Hosting is hard. Do it anyway.

It’s the best way to fast track community.

This is a more formal Easter dinner celebration at an Airbnb that's far bigger than our home––but I just love Cypress' expression here, so I had to include it! See photos below of our more typical family friend dinner gatherings.

After I had my first baby, I stopped hosting dinner parties.

It wasn’t a conscious decision—I just couldn’t imagine welcoming guests when I was still in stained clothes and barely holding it together. I was too busy keeping a tiny person alive to be thinking about the best side dish for braised chicken thighs.

In the early days of parenthood, my husband and I hunkered down into our new little family of three, protecting the space we thought we needed for bonding and figuring shit out. It felt right at first.

But months passed. Then years. And I realized I had stopped investing in my community at precisely the moment when I needed it most.

Having kids turns you into a nuclear family, which feels novel and exciting for about five minutes. After that, it just feels... lonely.

If I wanted to feel like I was part of a community again, I was going to need to build it myself from the ground up. And with three little ones, I was going to need to make it happen inside our home.

My dinner party experiment

Spoiler alert: I did it. I—and the other parents around me—now have a thriving community: my kids head out into our little town unsupervised to play with other kids, we swap childcare with other families, we carpool, etc.   

The whole point of this newsletter is to inspire others to build supportive parenting communities using knowledge gained from my own experience and relevant research. But today I want to focus on one easy practice that served as a kind of foundation for all this: having other families over for dinner. 

At first, it sounds like way too much… and also not nearly enough.

Why does it seem like not enough? 

There is a national epidemic of loneliness. Parents feel overwhelmed and unsupported. There are complex structural reasons for all this that aren’t likely to change any time soon. If we could make a dent in this mess simply by hanging out over pizza, someone would have tried that already. Right?

Well, maybe not. Survey after survey reports that people are hanging out in person far less often than they used to. This leads to trust between adults breaking down and more social isolation. Getting together in-person, especially in each other’s homes, is the building block of trust and social cohesion. 

Sharing a meal together lays the groundwork for sharing a whole bunch of other stuff—like childcare, carpools, hand-me-downs—that makes parenting feel easier and better. It’s how to build the trust in other parents you need to feel comfortable letting your kid expand their radius of exploration, join sleepovers, and rely on other parents as trusted adults. Maybe when you know the family that lives three doors down, you decide to let your 8 year old walk to their house unsupervised. Maybe when you know the family your kid plays soccer with, it feels easy and natural to broach the topic of a carpool. You get the idea. 

Even if you already have a solid group of friends, it's still worth extending invites to the parents you see in your everyday life—at school drop-off, soccer practice, or dance class. These are the connections that build a day-to-day sense of belonging and support.

Why does dinner sound like too much?

If having people over for dinner feels too small and insignificant to make a difference, for many people it also feels big and scary. As social connections have declined, many of us have lost the muscle memory around how to have these kinds of simple in-person social interactions. 

And there are deeper, more uncomfortable dynamics at play too: inviting people into your home can feel fraught because your home is a physical reflection of your income, lifestyle, and choices. Hosting can stir up feelings of vulnerability, especially around economic differences that many of us aren't sure how to navigate.

If this is a worry for you (it was for me), there are ways to make things easier. A backyard BBQ or a picnic in the park can feel much less fraught—there’s no “home” to be judged, and the casual atmosphere puts everyone at ease.

Another trick: invite a second family over at the same time. A three-way conversation often feels easier and lighter than a two-way one. And if you're worried your home is too small to host two families, know that a little crowding can actually work in your favor—it makes the event feel casual, snacky, and unpretentious, rather than a formal sit-down dinner.

And if you're worried about bedtimes or things running too late, you can include an end time in your invite: “Come by 5:00-7:00 for dinner!”

I’m not immune to these types of worries. But my desire for social connection and support was strong enough that I pressed forward anyway. Here's what I learned:

Step 1: Systematize it

If you have a vague goal of inviting friends over to dinner more often, you’ll probably always come up with some excuse for why this week isn’t good. 

So reduce your mental load/decision fatigue and just declare that from now on, Tuesdays (or whatever) are the night you invite friends over for dinner. For my family, it’s Fridays. 

We don’t have friends over every Friday—sometimes no one is available. But every week, the default assumption is that we will try. Sometimes it doesn’t work out, and that’s fine. I end up having a quiet movie night with the kids. No disappointment—just a quiet night with the kids if nothing pans out.

With this system, we end up having people over two to three Fridays per month. 

Step 2: Make a list of everyone you want to have over

Write down the names of all the families you'd enjoy having over for dinner. It really helps to have a running list that you can mindlessly pull from, rather than spending mental energy each week deciding who to invite over. Then, simply work your way down the list.

You don't have to know someone well to put them on your list—in fact, in some ways it's better if you don't, since the whole point of this exercise is to build new, stronger connections with the parents already in your orbit.

Sometime during the week, I text a family on my list to invite them for dinner. If they can't make it, I just ask the next person. I try not to over-complicate it with rescheduling—I'll just try again later.

Step 3: Lower your food standards

Pre-kids, I loved planning out elaborate dinner party menus. And I still enjoy that once in a while! But most of the time, my weekly friend dinners are nothing special. It’s not a dinner party; it’s a friend hang with food. I don’t serve appetizers. I don’t serve dessert. I keep it simple and easy by defrosting a lasagna or soup I cooked in a big batch¹.

Not a batch cooker? There are plenty of other easy ways to handle it:

• Both families pool whatever leftovers you both have lying around and call it a meal

• Frozen pizzas + a big salad

• Pick up burritos from a casual, inexpensive taqueria

Another pro tip: consider feeding the kids first, then sending them off to play or watch a movie while the adults enjoy a slower, more relaxed meal.

Step 4: Lower your cleanliness standards

Our house is 1,200 square feet. It's not huge. It's not perfect. But it’s enough.

The very minimal clean up I do involves 5-10 minutes max of picking up toys, putting on a playlist and maybe lighting a candle or putting out some flowers. I don’t try to make it look Pinterest-perfect. If anything, showing people my real life—laundry baskets and all—helps build intimacy and connection. Here’s what the entryway to our house typically looks like when guests arrive:

Here’s a tip: have your kids make name tags to add a little creativity and elevation to the gathering. We keep ours next to our dinner plates as a reminder of all the people we care about. The goal is to rotate these friends back into our home regularly, and seeing their names every day helps me remember to reach out and plan the next dinner:

Step 5: Lower your parenting standards

I resist the urge to overly orchestrate the kids' social interactions during these dinners. If they get along? Awesome. If not? Movie time.

They’re learning how to navigate social dynamics, and I’m modeling flexibility for them.

Step 6: Settle in and try to go deep

After you find your rhythm with hosting, these friend dinners can become incredibly nourishing. Open up about parenting challenges—what you're struggling with, what's working, what you need help with. Ask good questions. In these moments of connection, we all become better at this hard job.

This photo is from a dinner earlier this year, and it gives me so much joy:

Or check out this one with a simpler vibe (and simpler meal of reheated black beans, avocados, and leftover lentil and sweet potato salad). I’ll try to add one with pizza boxes soon.

One final note: don't expect return invites—at least not at the same frequency you host. We get around one return invitation for every eight times we host. Lots of people are overwhelmed or socially anxious. That’s okay. It's still worth it.

Tell us: What's blocking you from having friends over for dinner? Post a comment, and we'll help you brainstorm solutions!

Don't wait until your house is cleaner or your week is quieter—those days rarely come.

Start now. One humble dinner could become the start of something bigger: a friendship, a shared carpool, a neighborhood where kids run freely and parents feel less alone.

This is how we rebuild our support systems. One pizza night at a time.

1. Sometimes I want to reheat frozen food in a nice pot so it looks fresh, but I’m training myself to just leave the Tupperware on the counter.