It really does take a village to raise a child. When Hillary Clinton spoke of “the village,” she may have meant the Department of Health and Human Services, but throughout human history, “the village” has mostly meant extended family.

Neighbors, fellow congregants, and best friends can provide great support for families and be excellent babysitters and playmates, but nothing beats family. Yes, home costs are probably the reason why home buyers are buying with the intention of housing aunts, adult brothers, grandmas, and grandchildren (such purchases are up 42% since before the pandemic), but these families are surely seeing the benefit of a live-in village.

Parents who raise a first child with the help of their own parents and siblings are much more likely to have a second child, according to studies from the Netherlands, China, the United Kingdom, and the rest of Europe. Children who were raised with the aid of Grandma and Grandpa are healthier emotionally.

The old folk seem to benefit from it too. “Helping with grandchildren may stave off cognitive decline,” explained the recent headline at Harvard Women’s Health Watch.

All of these findings reaffirm what parents and grandparents have known for centuries, but they cut against the individualistic, autonomy-worshipping spirit of the age.

Not a few baby boomers, members of The Me Generation, say publicly that they have already discharged their child-rearing duties, and those kids are now on their own with regard to the next generation.

Parents believe that parenting is up to them alone, and any supplemental “care work” ought to come from the government or the marketplace.

One feminist Washington Post columnist, after complaining about the lack of government support for families, lamented that she was “mooching child care” from her husband’s parents — that is, her child was being cared for by Grandma. It’s a shift in assumptions that makes family formation seem so much more expensive.

“We can all agree that it takes a supportive village to raise a family, but nowadays we are hiring the village that used to be a normal part of life,” writes Catholic author Johanna Duncan.

Among a certain heavily educated and very ambitious crowd, getting away from Mom & Dad was the definition of success.

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“We decided that progress and independence meant separation,” Duncan writes. “That a good life looked like a nuclear unit, self-contained and self-sufficient.”

This progressive and individualistic dream of self-sufficiency, it turns out, is not terribly compatible with family. If the real estate trends tell us anything, we may be relearning that old wisdom.