The Most Destructive Phrase of the 21st Century is: “It Takes a Village to Raise a Child”

The Question is: Are We Reaping What We Have Sown?

• The phrase “It Takes a Village to Raise a Child” has allowed birth mothers and fathers to abdicate their responsibility as parents by implying it is not their sole responsibility to raise the child. The phrase implies it is society’s responsibility to raise the child, as much as it is the parent’s.
• The phrase has facilitated greater state and federal government involvement into the lives of children and their educations. Simultaneously, it has limited the rights of academically independent families.
• It has contributed to the breakdown of the nuclear family construct and dulled stigmas associated with poor parenting in American society and culture.
• The phrase “It Takes a Village” dampens the call and need for personal responsibility, accountability, and consequences to be levied on those creating the child instead of those in their community. It also assumes “the village” the child lives in is a nurturing supportive community when in many cases it is not.

Villages don’t have children, parents do.