It Takes a Village and We Built Cities Instead

This is not nostalgia, it is anthropology. For hundreds of thousands of years, across every continent and culture our species has inhabited, the raising of children was a shared, communal, multigenerational endeavor. A child was born not into a household but into a web. Grandmothers and aunts and older siblings and unrelated members of the band all participated in the holding, feeding, soothing, and teaching of the young. A baby passed from arms to arms. A mother was never the sole source of her child’s regulation, because she was surrounded by others who could step in when she was depleted, occupied, or simply in need of rest.

We have a phrase for this that has become so familiar it has nearly lost its meaning: it takes a village. We say it now almost wistfully, as a kind of greeting-card sentiment, a thing people murmur sympathetically to exhausted parents. But it was never a sentiment. It was a literal, structural, biological fact about how human beings were designed to raise their young.

And then, within the span of just a few generations, we dismantled it. We built cities. We organized our lives around work rather than kinship. We scattered our families across countries and continents. And we handed the entire weight of raising children to the smallest, most fragile, most isolated unit in human history: one or two adults, alone in a home, trying to do what an entire community once did together.

This article is about what that cost us. And, more importantly, about whether anything of the village can be recovered in the megacities where most of us now live.

The evolved nest

The developmental psychologist Darcia Narvaez has spent her career studying a question that most of us never think to ask: what did human children evolve to expect? Not what our culture tells us children need, not what the latest parenting trend recommends, but what the conditions were under which the human nervous system, the human capacity for empathy, the human moral sense itself, developed across evolutionary time.

Her answer, grounded in a synthesis of anthropology, neuroscience, and developmental science, is something she calls the evolved nest, or the evolved developmental niche. It describes the set of caregiving conditions that were universal among our ancestors and that shaped the optimal development of the human child. These conditions include extensive and responsive physical contact, breastfeeding on demand over a period of years, immediate and warm responsiveness to a child’s distress, self-directed play in the natural world, and, crucially, multiple responsive caregivers embedded in a supportive social community.

Narvaez’s argument, and the evidence she marshals for it, is sobering. Modern industrialized childrearing, she contends, has departed dramatically from this evolved nest, and the departures are not neutral. They have consequences for how the developing brain wires itself, for the capacity for emotional regulation, for the formation of empathy and the social brain. When the conditions a child evolved to expect are absent, the developing human system adapts, as it always does, but it adapts toward a more defended, more stress-reactive, less securely connected way of being in the world.

What is striking about Narvaez’s work is that it reframes so much of what we have come to treat as normal parenting struggle as, in fact, the predictable result of a profound mismatch. The isolated, exhausted, perpetually anxious modern parent is not failing at something that should be manageable. They are attempting, alone, to provide an entire evolved nest that was never meant to rest on one or two pairs of shoulders. The strain is not personal. It is structural and evolutionary.

This matters enormously for how parents understand their own experience. The guilt so many feel, that they are not patient enough, present enough, calm enough, comes into very different focus when we understand that the human mother was never meant to be the sole regulator of her child, never meant to be without a circle of others to share the load. We are trying to do, in isolation, what was always meant to be done together. And the body knows the difference, even when the mind has accepted the arrangement as simply the way things are.

The social hygiene of the megacity

There is a particular paradox at the heart of contemporary urban life that anyone raising children in a city will recognize intimately. We live in closer physical proximity to more human beings than at any other point in history, and we are more relationally isolated than our species has ever been.

The modern megacity is, in many ways, a marvel of organization. It is clean in a particular sense, efficient, optimized for the flow of work and commerce and transport. But it has been organized around a logic that has very little to do with human relational needs. We might call it a kind of social hygiene: an arrangement of life in which everything is separated into its proper compartment. Work happens here. Home happens there. Children are cared for in this designated place, the elderly in that one. The spaces between are not for lingering or connecting but for moving efficiently from one function to the next.

In this arrangement, the spontaneous, unstructured, relational life that the village provided has been almost entirely engineered out. We do not know our neighbors, often not even their names. The older people who once held the accumulated wisdom of childrearing are housed elsewhere, separated from the young families who most need them. Children, who once moved freely through a community of known adults, are now shuttled between supervised settings, rarely experiencing the casual, ambient care of a wider circle. And parents, who once would have been surrounded by others doing the same work alongside them, perform their parenting in private, behind closed doors, often without ever seeing how anyone else does it.

The result is a peculiar and painful form of loneliness. Not the loneliness of being physically alone, but the loneliness of doing profoundly relational work in a profoundly un-relational environment. Of being surrounded by millions of people while feeling that no one is there to help. Of raising the next generation of human beings in conditions of isolation that would have been unthinkable, and probably unsurvivable, for any of our ancestors.

This is not an argument against cities. O-st of us live in them and will continue to. It is an argument for seeing clearly what the city, in its current organization, fails to provide, so that we can begin, consciously and deliberately, to rebuild what has been lost.

Why this is not just a parenting issue

It would be easy to read all of this as a problem specific to parents, a hardship to be endured by those in the demanding season of raising young children. But the dissolution of the village is a far deeper civilizational issue, and its consequences extend well beyond the family.

When children grow up without the experience of being held within a wider web of caring adults, they internalize a particular model of how human beings relate: as separate units, self-sufficient, responsible for managing their own needs in isolation. This model becomes the water they swim in, the unexamined assumption about what life is. They carry it into their own adulthoods, their own relationships, their own parenting. And so, the isolation reproduces itself, generation after generation, each one a little more disconnected than the last, each one mistaking the conditions of its own deprivation for the natural order of things.

Narvaez and others working in this field have raised a genuinely urgent question: what happens to a species, to a society, to a moral fabric, when the conditions that produce empathy, connection, and a felt sense of belonging are systematically removed from the developmental environment of nearly every child? The answer, visible all around us in rising rates of loneliness, anxiety, and disconnection, is not encouraging. But it is not fixed either. Because what was built by human choices can be rebuilt by human choices.

Bringing the village back

Here is the hopeful part, and it is genuinely hopeful, because it is achievable.

We cannot return to the ancestral past, nor would most of us want to. But the essential functions the village performed, the shared regulation, the distributed care, the felt sense of belonging to something larger than the isolated household, can be consciously and deliberately recreated within modern urban life. It requires intention, because the city will not provide it by default. But it is possible, and it begins with a shift in how we understand our own needs.

The first movement is to recognize that needing others is not a weakness to be overcome but a truth to be honored. So much of modern parenting suffering is sustained by the belief that a good parent should be able to manage alone, that asking for help is a kind of failure. This belief is not only false, but also precisely backwards. The capacity to build and accept a web of support is one of the most important things a parent can do, both for their own wellbeing and for their children, who benefit enormously from being known and held by a circle of trusted adults.

The second movement is to actively build the relationships that the city does not build for us. To learn the names of neighbors. To create the small, reciprocal arrangements of shared care that once happened automatically: the families who trade childcare, the friends who become the chosen aunts and uncles, the intentional communities of parents who agree to show up for one another. None of this happens by accident in a megacity. It happens when people decide, consciously, that they will not raise their children in isolation, and then take the small, sometimes awkward, deeply worthwhile steps to build connection where none was provided.

The third movement is to seek out the structured forms of support that can stand in, at least partially, for what the extended community once offered. This is where intentional spaces of accompaniment, including the work we do, find their meaning. Not as a replacement for the village, but as one of the threads from which a new kind of village might be rewoven.

What this archetype offers

The Parenthood and Nesting work at ReHuman Lab is, grounded in this understanding: that the struggles of the modern parent are not primarily personal failings to be corrected, but the predictable consequences of trying to do profoundly communal work in profoundly isolating conditions.

We hold this work with that frame at its center. We support parents not by adding to the impossible standard of the self-sufficient family, but by helping them recognize their genuine need for connection and regulation, and by being one reliable thread in the web they are rebuilding. We work with the inherited patterns and the nervous system depletion that isolation intensifies. And we hold a vision, drawn directly from the wisdom of the evolved nest, of what genuinely sustainable, connected, communal caregiving could look like, even in the heart of a city that was not built for it.

Because the village is not gone. It has simply been forgotten, scattered, engineered out of the architecture of modern life. But the human need for it remains exactly as strong as it ever was. And the work of rebuilding it, thread by thread, relationship by relationship, conscious choice by conscious choice, is some of the most important work any of us can do, for ourselves, for our children, and for the kind of world they will inherit.

A reflection to carry with you

Consider, honestly, the web of support around you and your children. Not the ideal version, but the real one.

Who, besides you and perhaps a partner, genuinely knows your children? Who could you call at three in the morning? Who shares, in any real way, the weight of the daily work of caring for the people you love most?

If the answer feels thin, that is not a judgment on you. It is the predictable shape of life in a world that dismantled the village and forgot to build anything to replace it.

But the threads can be rewoven. And you do not have to begin alone.

This is the second article in the Parenthood and Nesting series at ReHuman Lab. If something here named a longing you recognize, we would be honored to be one of the threads in the web you are building.