This article is a great piece that really encapsulates why I’m uncomfortable with the emphasis on “the village” in a lot of motherhood spaces.

“Having a village” sounds great when you think of it as composed of rational, intelligent, economically secure families and family friends coming together to help one another raise children and care for the elderly and sick. Yet this article suggests that in practice, “village-based” communities quickly derail and systematically drag down their most successful members.

A drug addict brother, a narcissistic parent, a grasping aunt or uncle asking for money: having just one of these figures in “the village” can make life hell for the more functional members. Furthermore, members of this sort of kinship network are actually incentivized to prevent any one member from becoming too successful; if they do so, they may no longer need the “village” in the first place, and so destructive traditions like the ones described here emerge.

With this in mind, the atomized, two parent household starts to sound a whole lot better. The Western traditions of privacy around things like how much money an individual makes start to make a lot more sense. It may be that feminists can start to emulate some of the traditional benefits of a kinship society with some new form of social technology. But before we can do so, we need to really think about how to make any “village type” social network avoid collapsing into the kinds of dysfunction described here.