Two hundred years ago, five or six people raised every child together.
Today, we expect two exhausted parents to do it alone and wonder why everyone’s burning out. The nuclear family isn’t natural. It’s an industrial accident we’ve normalised.
We’ve Been Raising Children Communally for 2 Million Years
Anthropologists believe cooperative child-rearing began appearing in hominins approximately 2 million years ago. This wasn’t just helpful—it was essential for human survival.
Among the Efé people of Central Africa, babies have an average of 14 different caretakers on the first day of life. When researchers asked an Efé woman “Who cares for the babies?” the immediate answer was: “We all do!”
In contemporary hunter-gatherer societies like the Mbendjele BaYaka, 40-50% of childcare comes from alloparents—people who aren’t the mother. These children often had 10 or more caregivers and were virtually never alone.
In these villages, embodied care practices like infant massage weren’t taught through courses—they were transmitted through observation, touch, and communal participation. Grandmothers, aunts, and neighbours would demonstrate baby massage techniques whilst caring for infants together, passing down somatic knowledge as naturally as language.
This is how humans evolved to raise children. Together.
Then the Industrial Revolution Weaponised Isolation
The term “nuclear family” was only coined in 1947. It’s literally a modern invention.
What happened? The erosion of the village.
We used to live in close proximity in small communities where we helped each other. We lived in gift economies. When women had to move to work in factories and corporations, everything changed.
Mothers couldn’t take their babies to work, so there had to be separation between mothers and babies. The expansion from small communities to larger cities meant losing that village support system where multiple people would naturally help with raising children.
The nuclear family became a “financially viable social unit” during industrialisation. Men worked in factories whilst women were consigned to domestic drudgery, fundamentally isolating the family unit from communal support networks.
The Predictable Consequences
Today, 65% of working parents report burnout. This isn’t surprising—it’s predictable.
Research shows that parental burnout is characterised by exhaustion, emotional distancing from children, and feelings of inadequacy. This burnout is strongly associated with the absence of support systems.
Associate Professor Darby Saxbe states: “We are a social species living in an isolated, distanced society. This leads to heightened rates of maternal depression and anxiety, postpartum depression, and anxiety and depression amongst children.”
Human babies require 10-13 million calories to reach independence—a workload impossible for one person. Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s research demonstrates this represents a workload too great for any single caregiver.
We evolved for cooperative breeding. Isolated parenting is toxic and out of step with most of history.
What We’ve Lost
In Canada, just 9% of children aged 0-14 live in households with at least one grandparent. The village is dissipated and fragmented.
Research on kin-based infant care found that alloparenting reduced infant hospitalisation risk by 15%. Communal care directly improves child health outcomes.
We’ve also lost the transmission systems. Practices like baby massage and other touch-based infant care are now commercialised, isolated, individualised. Parents search online for “infant massage techniques” because there’s no grandmother in the next room to show them. We’ve turned embodied wisdom into paid content consumption.
But we’ve normalised the industrial accident. We’ve accepted that two people should do what evolution designed dozens to do.
And we wonder why everyone’s burning out.
The nuclear family isn’t failing because parents aren’t trying hard enough. It’s failing because it was never meant to work this way in the first place.
Rebuilding What We’ve Lost
Here’s the truth: we can’t reverse industrialisation. But we can deliberately reconstruct the village.
This means training practitioners who understand that infant massage isn’t just a technique—it’s a transmission system. That teaching baby massage is about rebuilding communal care infrastructure, one family at a time.
If you’ve read this and recognised the problem, you’re already halfway to being part of the solution. The question isn’t whether the village is needed. It’s whether you’ll help build it.
To find out how to join us to teach love, chat to me now.