What Happened to the ‘Village’ That Used to Raise Our Children?

As a parent, there is no shortage of advice on how to raise a child.

When is bedtime? Is breastfeeding or bottle-feeding best? Should crying children be encouraged to self-soothe, or should parents respond straight away?

At one point in time, when kids were indeed “raised by a village,” these questions were easily dealt with.

But according to Rebekah Delahoy, a former research assistant at the Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre, the once-simple choices have given way amid a broader tension between the “industrialisation” of parenting against traditional community ties that have bound generations.

The mother-of-four says that since the Industrial Revolution and rapid urbanisation in the 19th century, the traditional family unit has been eroded as people moved to big cities—a trend still happening today—away from relatives and community networks.

“Everyone knew what to do because if you hadn’t done it yourself yet, you probably helped raise younger siblings,” Delahoy told The Epoch Times.

As more people across the West shifted to urban cores, family networks became weaker, and outside advice played a bigger role.

“If you look at journal articles, [parenting] wasn’t researched until the last 50 years,” she said.

“It’s only been in the last 100 or 200 years that we started to write down parenting advice and give it, and started thinking that we needed an expert to tell us what to do.”

In fact, psychiatrist Tanveer Ahmed has observed that the expansion of government and the welfare state in recent years did not occur in a vacuum, instead, as Western societies became more “atomised” compared to Asia, community links broke down leaving the state to step in.

“This has been going for around 50-100 years and is part of the emergence of the market economy,” Ahmed previously told The Epoch Times.

“Everyone lives in cities, we don’t live in extended families or tribes—a biological need actually …”

Meanwhile, Delahoy, also a Substack author, says parenting has now become almost robotic or corporatised—a practice to be researched and “optimised.” The internet has not made the situation easier with social media inundated with “advice” on how to raise kids.

“We kept trying to improve [parenting],” Delahoy said. “But at the same time, it’s made it harder.”

This in turn, motivated the former researcher to find out why parenting had changed so much.

The Industrial Revolution, Marxism, and the Eroding Family

The 19th century was marked not only by the end of the Industrial Revolution, but also the rise and spread of Marxism.

In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto, which would underpin a vision for society. Among its many ideas was one of class struggle between the rich and poor, parents and children, teacher and students, as well as communist regimes against free societies.

Another tenet that has filtered through other research areas is Marx and Engel’s idea that religion or spirituality has little bearing on a person’s life and that a person is, instead, moulded by the material environment. On top of this, communist regimes like the Chinese Communist Party or the Soviet Union claimed humanity could dominate nature, as seen by the latter’s “Great Plan to Transform Nature.”

Marxist scholars also advocated for the destruction of the traditional family unit, as they saw it as the foundational building block of free democratic societies.

“The writings of Karl Marx and other communists describe the family as a form of private ownership to be abolished. In addition to persecuting religion and spiritual faith, communist regimes place love for the Communist Party above love for even one’s own parents, spouse, or children …” writes The Epoch Times series’ How the Spectre of Communism is Ruling Our World.

While there is no obvious link between communism or behavioural scientists, it was barely 50 years after the release of The Communist Manifesto when American paediatrician Luther Emmett Holt, released his, “The Care and Feeding of Children,” in 1894.

The book was published over several decades and advocates for strict regimens for children, including fixed feeding times, withholding affection, or advising parents to let babies “cry it out.”

There were some successes with the work though, as some of the ideas helped deal with genuine health risks of the time.

In New York City, infant mortality fell from about 288 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1880, to around 189 per 1,000 by 1900, as safer milk and public-health knowledge improved.

Later, American psychologist John Broadus Watson, a leading figure in behaviourism, built on Holt’s work and cautioned against excessive affection or frequent hugging or kissing—in 1924, he wrote:

“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select–doctor, lawyer, artist–regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors.”

Three of Watson’s four children attempted suicide later in life with one succeeding.

What Should Parents Do Now?

Today, many of the practices linked to early behaviourist parenting have fallen out of favour, but strains still remain.

“A lot of the stuff that they were doing was based on very little actual evidence,” Delahoy said. “They didn’t actually do much hands-on raising of children.”

She also said some of the child-rearing ideas drew heavily from animal behavioural experiments involving pigeons, dogs, and seals—questioning why kids need to be so obedient in the first place.

“Even if we can train our children and make them more obedient, is that really the goal that we want anyway?” she asked.

“I want my children to learn to think for themselves and not just do what anyone says.”

Her suggestion is that while advice is welcome, parents don’t need “all of the advice.”

“Find just one or two trusted voices and tune out everything else. You need to figure out what family you are going to have.”