Thoughts on the village
The concept of "It takes a village" is not intended to be applied so literally as some have suggested. It involves various aspects of conduct that, these days, are held in broad disdain as people prefer to worry about their own selves.
Simple things: My friends still stop and apologize to me when they cuss in front of my daughter. On the one hand, I appreciate their awareness; to the other, I'm not concerned about their lapses. She will eventually learn to cuss—in fact, it appears she's already trying out "damn" as an expression of disappointment, like when her Star Wars video game character misses the jump, or the spaceship blows up—and, in truth, I'd rather she learn how to do it right. As none of my friends speak generally in the various dialects that consist of stringing certain words together, or placing variations of fuck at every few words—"You know, fuck', he was, like, fuckin', sayin' all this fuckin' shit and fuckin' telling her she's a fuckin' bitch, and he fuckin' just needs to fuck off!"—I'm not concerned about the occasional lapse.
But the old expectation that we do not cuss in front of children has fallen out of favor among many whose first concern in the world is themselves.
People are torn, too, about whether to say anything when a parent spanks a child in public. Sure, what we saw might seem a stupid reason to get that angry at a child, but we don't know the full history, so we only intervene in more extreme cases. Or, as is the manner of people concerned about themselves, they intervene in a moralistic manner: they are offended, and the child's welfare is only a utility to advance that sense of offense.
Some would hide their morals behind a pretense of concern for society. Recently an episode was recounted in which some elderly people deigned to lecture a parent on the dangers of letting toddlers run around naked. That someone, somewhere, might get off on seeing a naked three year-old isn't a good argument unless one presumes the parent so naive as to be unaware that pedophiles exist. No concern was shown by the elderly—and perhaps this is something they don't understand, but maybe they just don't care—about the damage of early childhood demonization of the body.
The sounds of bloodshed? Well, there was an occasion fifteen years or so ago when a trucker was driving along when he came to what looked like an accident. There were a lot of people standing around in the highway, and what looked like a car at the middle of the knot. He got out of his truck, pushed through the crowd to see what he could do to help, and was horrified to find that the people were standing around, watching a child being raped on the roadside. What the hell was wrong with these people? And the local police, commenting to the media afterward, were unsure what the witnesses' obligations were in that situation. Such incidents (albeit generally less severe) led to the passage of certain "good samaritan laws"; not those that protect someone against liability for failing to revive a heart attack victim with CPR, but laws that actually obliged people to intervene in muggings and other dangerous situations. The closing episodes of Seinfeld mocked these laws.
I had an occasion a couple years ago in which I had to choose between calling children's services or not. The eldest boy, eleven, knocked on my door at one-thirty in the morning, visibly shaken, and said, "I need help. My mom's bleeding."
The incident was one of domestic violence, but alleged by both parties to be accidental. In the middle of an intoxicated argument, the man had "kicked off his shoes", something we all do. Only one of the shoes arced off his foot and smacked the woman in the face, bloodying her nose. The timing of the incident, of course, was unfortunate. I spent about three hours with them, trying to get a grasp on the situation, and while I never did, the one thing that both insisted with believable sincerity was that this was a genuine accident. After a while, everyone was calm, and they laughingly recounted some of their prior DV episodes. It was clear to me that this one was over, and that their occasions of violence were less about malice itself than a lack of restraint. This is an important criterion to me. A lack of restraint they can work on. And they did, and still do. Life goes on. Everything seems to have worked out, but every now and then, I still wonder if I did the right thing.
It's a hard call. But the one thing I couldn't do was look at the boy as he stood at my door and say, "Sorry, kid. None of my business."
Of course it's my business. His little sisters played with my daughter every day. The effects of any trauma they suffer could come out in play. That's dangerous. In the longer view, too, it is, statistically speaking, children of dysfunctional homes who become the greater part of society's troubled individuals. Dysfunction often begets dysfunction.
There is no easy solution, no obvious balance of community intervention; there is a Caribbean culture I've heard of, although it was a few years ago and I forget which, exactly, where pretty much any elder was allowed—and even expected—to scold a child for misbehavior witnessed. I don't recall if that extended to corporal punishment, and I would certainly hope not. But in the United States, or, at least, my corner of it, parents are more likely to take offense at the notion that someone down the street took it upon themselves to lecture and scold the child. I have, to the other, been told by a parent that I'm allowed to smack their kids if it's necessary, but the thought of it horrifies me. And while maybe patient lectures and explanations of why certain behavior is wrong didn't work at the time, maybe—just maybe—sometime down the road, those kids will remember that at least one adult in their circle (actually, there were a few) took the time to talk to them, and to listen to them, and remember how that felt. And, hopefully, something good will come from that.
Objections to breast-feeding in public? These are purely selfish concerns that do nothing to help the community.
And so on, and so on.
The list is long. Few of the considerations are easy and clear-cut. But whether we appreciate the notion or not, it does, indeed, take a village to raise a child. Parents, educators, role models, peers—not all of these are easily contained under one roof. And, in truth, the closer we get to that sort of self-contained unit, the less I recognize the customs and perspectives that grow out of such situations.
