I answered the phone at 7:30 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001. On the line was Jane Huerta, a close friend who lived next door in our apartment complex. “They’re gone,” she said.
Sometime later on that wrenching September morning, I apparently wandered out into the courtyard. I say “apparently” because I actually remember nothing from the remainder of that day. But in writing this article, I spoke with several courtyard friends, including Inji El Ghannam and her husband, Shams ElDin Tantawy. That is how I learned that I am part of their 9/11 memories.
In 2001, our family was nearing the end of several enchanted years at Albany Village, a University of California, Berkeley, student family housing enclave located on the cool, foggy flatlands that stretch out toward San Francisco Bay.
Our courtyard was 1960s vintage, with three long buildings that formed a triangle, gated at each corner. The inner space had two circular grass play areas bounded by rain-friendly asphalt. The complex was designed by William Wurster, a nationally noted architect described as a “quiet modernist master.”
This masterful design blurred the lines between indoor and outdoor, and between your home and mine. Community life bubbled under our front window. If our blinds were up, we could watch our own kids from our living room and chat with neighbors right under our windows.
We pooled money for play structures, held spontaneous potlucks, sat chatting together on lawn chairs in the late afternoons. We strung wheeled toys into “trains” and took turns pulling kids around the circuit. The children wandered in and out of apartments at will.
We had neighbors from Africa and Asia and everywhere between. We were liberals, conservatives, Jews, Christians, Muslims, atheists, agnostics, Black, white and every shade of brown. We were students and parents, sharing curiosity about the world and awe of childhood.
“Berkeley is where we became who we are,” my wife, Cheri, would later say.
Partisanship colors how we see the world. But family identity is way more important to both Republicans and Democrats.
Where Republicans and Democrats agree
I thought of the courtyard during the run-up to the 2024 election. I wondered how our younger parent selves would have processed recent public strife. A lot of head shaking, I expect.
On the other hand, I think we’d be nodding knowingly at some findings in the latest American Family Survey, conducted by Deseret News in conjunction with the Wheatley Institute and Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at Brigham Young University.
The survey found that Republican and Democratic parents expressed very similar perspectives on what matters most to them. Among adults with children under 18, roughly nine out of 10 Republicans and nearly as many Democrats agree that “raising children is one of life’s greatest joys.” And asked about typical family activities with those children, there was again little difference.
The survey also found that parental identity supersedes political identity. On a five-point scale, Democratic and Republican parents ranked parental identity at 4.4 and 4.5, respectively. Career identity fell midway at 3.4 and 3.6. And partisan political identity trailed at 3.1 for Democratic parents and 2.8 for Republicans.
“Partisanship matters a lot, and it colors how we see the world,” says Chris Karpowitz, a political science professor at Brigham Young University who co-authored the study. “But is it the most important identity? Actually, when we ask people, they tell us that their family identities are way more important.”
Karpowitz would get no argument from our Berkeley courtyard. But we might add a bonus. Just by living our lives and raising our kids, we also discovered that our parental identities fostered a trust that turned us outward and helped forge diversity into community.
“This is when I started to understand what democracy is. You can talk freely, and it doesn’t mean that the other person will be angry because you have a different opinion.”
‘People are not stereotypes’
Inji El Ghannam was jarred awake early on 9/11 to a frantic call from a frightened grandmother in Egypt. She turned on her TV and with horror saw the burning buildings, shortly before they collapsed. After, in a daze, she wandered into the courtyard, sitting down to push her baby on a tree swing.
Inji and her husband Shams had recently arrived in the U.S. on a student visa, Egyptians by citizenship and Muslims by heritage. And while they wore those identities lightly, they were Arabs in America on 9/11. And here was a reeling Inji, a self-described “naive” young mother uninterested in politics, tending to her child while an equally stunned neighbor tried to engage her in a conversation she did not want.
Shams recalls looking out the window, getting a hunch his wife might need support. He stepped outside, picked up the conversation with me, and allowed her to retreat gracefully. The two of us were soon joined by two other courtyard fathers.
There was much confusion and few facts in those first hours, Shams notes. We had little to say about the events of the day, and instead, our conversation rattled broadly on war and morality, from the American use of atomic weapons in 1945 to the Israel-Palestine conflict. “I don’t remember exactly what your opinion was, but everybody else disagreed, and it looked like you felt like we were ganging up on you,” Shams says, remembering that I left the conversation and returned to our apartment.
The rest of that day is vivid in Inji’s mind. “The television doesn’t turn off. It was on all day and people were saying really nasty things about Arabs.” Late that night, Stafford Gregoire knocked on their door with a cake in hand. “Hey, I just baked this cake for you guys to apologize about all the nasty things people are saying about Arabs on TV,” Stafford said.
“I will never forget that,” Inji tells me. “For him to say, ‘We are here for you guys.’ That helped me realize that people are not stereotypes.”
Shams says he was surprised the next day to see I wasn’t holding a grudge and even seemed to have forgotten our tense conversation. That possibility was new to him. In Egypt, he says, such sharp disagreements fester.
“This is when I started to understand what democracy is,” Shams says. “You can talk freely, and it doesn’t mean that the other person will be angry because you have a different opinion.” In the weeks that followed, Inji says, the courtyard walked that line, growing stronger as a community. “We were able to have uncomfortable conversations, but we still were very safe.”
Crucially, Shams and Inji both emphasize that their sense of safety in that moment rested on a shared commitment to children — and often quite literally on sharing children, at least for the afternoon, between homes.
Inji described the rhythm of a courtyard day: caregivers chatting outdoors after breakfast while children ride bikes and play on the grass. “If I need to go inside and cook, then I know the other person is watching my kid. If I can’t find my kid, he’s probably in someone’s house. I wasn’t thinking he had been kidnapped. I just go find out which house he is in.”
The frequency and types of activities families engage in were nearly identical among both Democrats and Republicans, once they had crossed the line of parenthood.
‘Alloparenting’ and its psychosocial benefits
Inji’s description of neighbors intuitively sharing parental burdens is referred to in academic literature as “alloparenting.” Primates are noted for alloparenting, and humans especially excel at it.
But the instinct to care for children who are not one’s own happens among mammals and birds — very often crossing species lines — and wherever it is found gives the lie to the “selfish gene” theory, which argues that parenting is strictly driven by an evolutionary urge to propagate one’s own genes.
The internet pulses with credible stories of dogs nursing abandoned kittens and cats nurturing ducklings and chicks, much to the bemusement of the hen and the rooster. In 2019, an animal shelter in Crimea gave four orphaned newborn squirrels to a mother cat, who added them to her litter and raised them as her own until they were reintroduced into the wild. And that same year a sandhill crane couple in Michigan was observed parenting a Canada goose with its own brood.
In one case, a beluga whale pod adopted a young narwhal, who then swam with them for years. Martin Nweeia, a leading narwhal expert and lecturer at Harvard, told the Canadian Broadcasting Company that the beluga pod adoption shows “the compassion and the openness of other species to welcome another member that may not look or act the same. And maybe that’s a good lesson for everyone.”
Abigail Marsh, a cognitive scientist at Georgetown University, argues that the extraordinarily slow and demanding infancy and childhood of humans really demands alloparenting. It’s a logistical imperative, she says. Alloparenting also comes with psychosocial benefits. “When children receive care from a network of loving caregivers,” Marsh writes, “not only are mothers relieved of the nearly impossible burden of caring for and rearing a needy human infant alone, but their children gain the opportunity to learn from an array of supportive adults, to form bonds with them, and to learn to love and trust widely rather than narrowly.”
Shams and Inji’s experience seems to take Marsh‘s observation to another level. Shared parenting in this case led to reciprocal trust-building among the parents themselves. Shams pointedly noted how often his kids and my kids played at each other’s homes. “We saw how everyone is caring about other people’s kids,” Shams says. “So if you care about my kids, OK, you’re a kind person, a good person.”
Given that the cadence of parenthood so easily transcends species, we should probably not be surprised to find that human alloparenting works across mere cultural or ideological lines. In fact, the 2024 American Family Survey found that the rhythm of family life — the frequency and types of activities families engage in such as dinner hour, kids sports, recreation — was nearly identical among both Democrats and Republicans, once they had crossed the line of parenthood. In behavior as in identity, parenthood trumped partisanship.
The partisan fertility gap
Shortly before we left Berkeley, the university began knocking down the courtyards. In their place, construction crews erected sterile townhouses whose doors face the street and whose windows face nowhere. A courtyard like ours was destined to be bottled lightning. Even William Wurster’s brilliant design was no guarantee. One of my wife’s best friends who lived in an adjacent courtyard with identical buildings suffered “courtyard envy” when visiting ours.
Few if any human experiences are utterly unique. That this sort of magic occurred once in Albany Village suggests broader possibilities. The role of children as little trust machines who turn diversity into community certainly calls out for attention. There is no simple way to operationalize or test this, of course. But one obvious requirement is children.
We have a marvelous group courtyard photo taken with Shams’ camera on June 29, 2001. The occasion was the third birthday of Shams and Inji’s older son. Seventeen adults stand and kneel, with 19 children perched around them, ranging in age from newborn to about 8. A quarter century later, the question is unavoidable. Will these children have children?
Fertility rates are cratering worldwide, with sweeping economic and social implications, as fewer people are left to keep the engines of commerce and government running. No one anywhere has any idea how to fix this. Pro-natalist policies have failed wherever tried.
So perhaps the majority in the American Family Survey are just realists: Just 23 percent of Americans support funding policies that encourage more children. The survey does offer some optimism on fertility, though. Asked if they “hope or desire to have a child someday,” a slight majority of childless adults age 49 and under said yes. But then on a follow-up question, 73 percent of the “yes” responders also said that won’t happen in the next two years. So it remains to be seen.
Among those who do end up having kids, the partisan fertility gap is another concern. Using data from the University of Michigan-based Monitoring the Future, researchers at Duke University and Louisiana State University recently found that Democratic and Republican 12th graders are splitting apart on their desire to have children. Prior to 2004, there was very little difference on that point. The gap began to widen in 2004, and by 2019 young Republicans and Democrats differed markedly on expected fertility. Republicans are now far more likely to want more than a couple of children, and Democrats are now twice as likely to select zero as their expected outcome.
The American Family Survey noted, however, that over 85 percent of parents from both political parties describe parenthood as “one of life’s great joys.” According to Karpowitz, 64 percent of Republicans and 48 percent of Democrats who reported having had no children of any age gave the same response.
That’s a notable partisan gap. But it is nonetheless striking that so many adults of either party who have never had children endorse that definition of joy. As one courtyard friend emphasized to me, you don’t have to have children yourself to engage in effective alloparenting. Many adults with no children of their own do tremendous work transforming young lives and building community trust. “There are diversities of gifts,” the Bible teaches, “but the same Spirit.”
That said, there is something qualitatively different, archetypal and even transcendent in trusting “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” to someone who seems so very different, seeing them do the same, and realizing the two of you differ so little on the one thing you both hold most dear.
This story appears in the May 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.