For millennia, there were villages, large groups of people woven together in communities of around twenty individuals linked by proximity and dependent upon one another. They hunted for food together, protected one another, and shared responsibility for tending to children, a structure called alloparenting. They lived in a web of extended families united by their common need to survive.1 This period of history, when raising kids was a group effort among several generations of a family, with friends, neighbors, and even other children pitching in, lasted tens of thousands of years.
