To Raise A child

It apparently doesn't take a village. An anthropologist reports on her research in an African village:

"There's a naïve belief that villages raise children communally, when in reality children are raised by their own families and their survival depends critically on the survival of their mothers."

When she says "naive" here, I agree, but not in the sense of a natural belief. I think the natural common-sense belief is that it helps a lot to have a living mother. We have a vast store of myths about orphans that make this point, as well.

It's a "naive" belief in the ideological sense - it fits in with the communitarian wish-list for human nature - that life in simple societies was somehow a noncompetitive paradise.

Look closely at "simple societies" in the present,
and learn that our past was often rather unpleasant.