At the very least, you need a whole society of aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins, and deep friends to truly do any kind of traditional family structure in the traditional way. Otherwise it's just emulating an extremely narrow portion of the trad that didn't exactly exist in the first place.

> At the very least, you need a whole society of aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins, and deep friends to truly do any kind of traditional family structure in the traditional way.

"It takes a village to raise a child" was meant literally. However, the glory of capitalism required people to move to where the jobs were, turning that millennia-old principle upside down ever since industrialization. And car culture was the ultimate fatal blow, when children can't even walk their own neighborhood any more.

I remember when Hillary Clinton said "it takes a village to raise a child" and she was mocked by conservatives and accused of undermining parental rights and wanting governments to control families.

And when BLM made it part of their charter to encourage community support for children beyond the typical nuclear unit they were accused of a radical Marxist agenda to "destroy families."

For some reason the very concept of extended families and community engenders deep anger and hostility from some Americans, and that's odd for a nation of immigrants considering how common the "whole society of aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins" is in the rest of the world.