Meaning
Bringing up a child properly is the work of a whole community, not just the parents; by extension, any ambitious undertaking needs broad collective support rather than isolated effort. The clipped form is now applied to everything from software projects to disaster relief. Warm, communal register, though in the United States it can carry a political charge because of its 1996 association. Regional use: General English; popularized in the United States.
Origin
The full form is 'it takes a village to raise a child', routinely described as an African proverb, but the evidence behind the label is thin. The proverb scholar Wolfgang Mieder searched for a specific African source and found no traditional proverb matching the exact wording, and NPR's 2016 investigation, consulting researchers across Africa, concluded that the honest answer to where it comes from is that nobody knows; one scholar described it as a mythical saying misattributed to an entire continent. Related genuine proverbs do exist, including a Lunyoro saying rendered as 'a child does not grow up only in a single home', a Kijita proverb from Tanzania, and a Swahili saying that whoever is not taught by the mother is taught by the world. In English the saying circulated before it was famous: Jane Cowen-Fletcher's children's book It Takes a Village appeared in 1994. Hillary Clinton's It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us (January 1996) then made it a household phrase in the United States, and the shortened version spread from there.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- It takes a village to raise a child
- It takes a village to raise a puppy
- It takes a whole village to raise a child
Usage Examples
- The school recruits retirees to read with the children, on the principle that it takes a village.
- Finishing her residency while raising twins would have been impossible without the neighbours; it takes a village.
- The block finally organized a rotating carpool to the pool, agreeing that it takes a village.