Of all the things we may miss from the past, perhaps the security net provided by tight communities may be one of the most important.
We can still hear stories from our grandparents telling us how, when they were kids, they would walk alone to school or to the corner shop, and play freely on the street, because every member of their community was familiar and watched out for them.
Nowadays, most of us live in big cities, locked up in apartment buildings, offices, or cars, surrounded by strangers, isolated from the rest of the world, feeding from violent entertainment, fake news, and viral social media trends.
The changes brought up by a faster life pace, bigger cities, technology, and more competitive work environments have conspired to deteriorate our social connections, our mental health, and our quality of life in general.
It’s no wonder that the rates of loneliness, depression, suicide and antisocial behavior have spiked in recent years.
Because, despite the independence that we have gained thanks to technology, and in spite of the recent raise of individualism and empowerment in our societies, we remain social animals with evolutionary traits that require much more than what technology can provide.
It takes a village to raise a child.
We all may have heard this saying which, in a few words, comprises the ancestral wisdom of African tribes:
“A child doesn’t grow up in a single home.”
“Irregardless of their parents, a child’s upbringing belongs to the community.”
“A child belongs to no sole parent or home.”
It’s no secret that children acquire their first building blocks from their parents, but even young babies are influenced by stimuli from the outside world, and our evolution demands this should be so.
Over the centuries many theories have tried to explain how we learn.
The Russian psycholinguist Lev Vygotsky stipulated that cognitive development requires social interaction, and that the social environment in which the child learns has the potential to accelerate or hinder the child’s development.
The American philosopher and social psychologist George Herbert Mead supported this concept, stating that the qualitative nature of learning is defined by the social boundaries of the society we live it.
The Canadian psychologist Albert Bandura went even further in associating the development of the individual with society, affirming that both people and their environments are reciprocal determinants of each other.
All of these theories point at the profound interconnection between society and learning.
Moreover, recent theories point at the important influence of emotions in learning, which has prompted social-emotional lessons in schools.
This emotional learning provides children the fundamental tools to function in society, teaching them the basics of tolerance, good manners, self-awareness, respect towards others, etc.
However, while children learn and refine their social skills through social interaction (classes, sports, parties, collaboration, etc.), the seed of their social and emotional skills lay in the behaviors learned at home and immediate environment.
Brooklyn, 1950's. Picture: Arthur Leipzig
Up until the first half of the 20th century, it was normal for neighbors and even complete strangers to praise or censure a child’s behavior, enforcing the approved rules of social behavior, and thus taking active part in a child’s upbringing.
However, with the appearance of new educational theories in the late 1960s, the ancient tradition of communal education was discarded, establishing that only the child’s parents, tutors, and teachers could educate children.
In recent years this trend has become even more restrictive, leaving to parents alone the task of correcting their children, advising them to apply ‘reasonable dialogue’ with the child instead of traditional forms of punishment.
And while violence against children has mercifully decreased, the trend of leaving the sole responsibility of children’s upbringing to parents alone seems to have backfired.
Social and psychological studies demonstrate that children who grow up with tight links to a community have a greater sense of belonging and higher levels of self-esteem.
Children raised in tight communities feel accepted, supported, and integrated to the rest of its members. Their relationship with the community and the world around them is fearless, natural, and balanced. All these provides the child with a sense of security and healthy self-worth, in the knowledge that they have a role to play in the community.
Children who lack these emotional elements during their upbringing may feel disconnected, and even severed from society in general. They tend to exhibit social adaptation problems, have a higher incidence of aggressive behavior, depression, and low self-esteem.
Isolation, ostracism, and social maladjustment carry along a series of negative consequences, both to the individual and to the society in which he lives.
Children who do not find the emotional support they need at home often turn to school ties for reassurance.
When school fails to provide a supporting and integrating environment, children usually drop out, further severing their ties from a society that only seems to reject them.
If a child does not find support and acceptance within their immediate circle, he/she will look for it elsewhere, often gravitating towards groups of other social outcasts.
Although the cohesion of the members of these groups tends to be high - through loyalty and brotherhood -, they are also vulnerable to become the target of criminal or radicalized groups, who manipulate their social discontent for their own purposes, putting their members at a high social risk.
The rise of social media in recent years has only heightened this risk, due to its intrinsic individualistic nature, and its power to galvanize groups and exacerbate extremes.
The social problems arising from the initial fragmentation in the social chain are extensive, and extremely complex to be eradicated. Not one single entity is capable on its own to provide a solution once they spread and become a rooted behavior.
Its simplest solution, and its surest prevention, is to provide children from infancy with the necessary elements of guidance, support, and integration into the community. And these can only come through the combined efforts parents and tutors with their immediate relatives and the rest of their community.
In addition, societies with strong community links exhibit lesser rates of social discontent and are often more resilient to crises, since the individual and the collective interact in symbiosis, and are interdependent from one another.
Raising children is a complex task, carried out throughout the millennia by the joint effort of parents, guardians, relatives, nannies, governesses, educators, and more.
But in addition to the effort it requires, we are programmed to learn from the whole environment around us: from friends, classmates, neighbors, and everything that permeates our society.
Parents who neglect their children’s upbringing and leave the task to teachers or household help, often find that their authority is ignored.
When children notice that their parents aren’t around to teach them social manners, establish boundaries, provide guidance, praise, or support, they are also less prone to obey them when the time to apply discipline comes.
On a more global scale, this neglect may mean that children are not being raised by their parents or guardians, but by countless external influences. Some of these can enrich their upbringing, but others can be potentially harmful to their development, and by extension, to society.
Children’s psychologists agree that, often, misbehaving in children is no more than a cry for help, a desperate call for attention.
Although often regarded as ‘meddling’, active intervention to correct children -even unknown children- may be more important than we may think.
In 2018, Swedish broadcaster and writer Alexandra Pascalidou
interviewed Martin Karlsson, a former Neo-Nazi who had long harassed her. When asked how he started into the path of National Socialism, Martin replied that his father had kicked him out of the house and he’d ended up in a foster home. Then, he began hanging out with friends at school who were Neo-Nazi.
“The teachers would look and shake their heads,” Martin said. “No adults reacted to me reading odd books, wearing combat boots or having a swastika on my breast pocket. No one — no teacher, social worker, guidance officer — said a word. We shouted [insults] at people, and the adults just sighed and walked away.”
And later added, “No one had ever set a boundary for me or tried to stop me. People are so damned afraid to say that it is wrong of you to be a neo-Nazi. If anyone had said "For God's sake, Martin," when I was 16, I don't think I would have been radicalized.”
Perhaps it’s time we go back to the ancient traditions, in which every member of a society was an important link and had a role to play in the community.
In order to have a healthy and cohesive society, we must begin by strengthening its foundations - family and community. This implies becoming involved, not remain indifferent, and be allowed to act when required.
We may not notice, but our societies are made by all our small actions and inactions. No man is an island, and in our communities we are all responsible for one another.
We all form part of the solution. Because, after all, it takes a village to raise a child.
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