Parents are often told it takes a village to raise a child. So, where is it?

If you're a parent, you've likely heard or read some iteration of the proverb, "it takes a village to raise a child."

Maybe you recall Hillary Clinton's famous "It Takes a Village" speech and book of the same name, a quest to improve the lives of children which she often referred to throughout her political career. Or perhaps you've seen a Facebook "mom village," chuckled at one of the 50,000+ TikTok videos tagged #ittakesavillage, or read many different stories about the village that should, theoretically, be helping to raise the children of sleep-deprived new parents hanging on by a thread.

This village concept sounds great! But if you're a modern parent, you might also be wondering: Where, pray tell, is it?

"I keep hearing that it takes a village to raise a child. So … do they just show up? Or is there a number I call?" a TikTok user asks in a popular 2022 video.

"I've come to the realization there is no village," writes another mom on TikTok

Experts say the concept of the traditional village that supported parents — where extended families, communities and neighbours all lend a hand — is outdated. Part of it is the nature of Western nuclear families living in individual households, people living further away from their relatives, and changing expectations for grandparents. 

Studies have also shown millennial parents are more likely to get advice online than from their parents, feel pressured to be more hands-on and intensely involved with their children, and often clash with their parents about child rearing. 

All this breeds isolation, experts have noted. Yet the idea of "the village" persists, as does the longing for it.

"The truth of the matter is the majority of parents are not feeling like they have that village of support. It's probably almost daily that I speak to a parent who is feeling very alone in their journey and feeling really overwhelmed," said Vanessa Lapointe, a registered psychologist and parenting consultant based in Surrey, B.C., and the author of Parenting Right From the Start. 

"We weren't ever meant to have this experience of doing it on our own."

According to 2023 research on contemporary hunter-gatherer societies published in the journal Developmental Psychology, children may be psychologically wired to thrive with high levels of contact and care from multiple people.

Lead author Nikhil Chaudhary, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Cambridge in England, pointed out in a news release last year that "for the vast majority of our species' evolutionary history, mothers probably had far more support than they currently do in Western countries."

As part of his research, Chaudhary observed Mbendjele BaYaka hunter-gatherers in the Republic of Congo, where children often had 10 or more caregivers. In this population, at least 40 to 50 per cent of a child's care-giving came from "allomothering," or from caregivers who were not the child's mother.

"Levels of closeness and close care were exceptionally high, children were virtually never alone and spent extensive amounts of time in physical contact, receiving close care and being held," Chaudhary and his co-authors wrote in the research paper.