Possibly the most frustrated I ever got during my pregnancy was when I read a tip in a baby-advice book that said something like, “Swap child care with one of your friends—it takes a village!” At the time, I lived an hour from most of my friends, almost none of whom had kids. I didn’t have a village, but now I had another thing to feel bad about.No one knows where the adage “It takes a village” came from exactly. Though it was popularized by Hillary Clinton’s 1996 book of the same name, an NPR investigation suggested that it might be “some sort of pseudo-African mix of Hallmark and folk sentiments.” But the proverb is now ubiquitous, along with its equally grating corollary, “Don’t be afraid to ask for help.” To name just one example, the American Academy of Pediatrics’ baby bible, Caring for Your Baby and Young Child, asserts “Family and friends can be helpful; don’t be bashful about asking for assistance” and “Try to create a ‘village’ around you.”A few “villagers” did come through for me after my son was born: A friend with a slightly older child lent me baby gear, several people visited me during my maternity leave, and a neighbor who was busy with her own kids selflessly offered to watch mine if I ever needed her to. I don’t want to minimize these contributions, without which my Zoloft dosage would doubtless be much higher. And I’m sure some moms are able to create an even bigger village. Maybe they moved back to their hometown when they got pregnant—or, blessed be, their parents moved to be closer to them. Maybe they are part of a faith community that nudges their members to help one another. Maybe they’re doing some sort of communal-living thing, I don’t know.[Read: Why parents struggle so much in the world’s richest country]But not every mother is able to create a village of free or cheap helpers whom they already know. Times have changed since Millennials were little and neighborhoods had lots more stay-at-home moms available to pitch in. For nearly 70 percent of kids under 6 today, both parents work, compared with half in 1985. Your friends with kids might not be able to do school pickup in an emergency, because they, too, might be working. “We just don’t have as many people around,” Elliot Haspel, a child-care researcher who has written for The Atlantic, told me. “There are just fewer people physically available to call.”Highly educated women, who are a growing proportion of American mothers, are more likely to live far away from their family than those without college degrees. These long distances put the most common type of “village” help—grandma and grandpa—out of reach. About a third of Americans with a postgraduate degree don’t live within an hour’s drive of any of their extended family, compared with 14 percent of those who have a high-school degree or less, according to a 2022 Pew survey. I spoke with a variety of mothers for this story, many of whom told me that they did consider moving closer to their family but it wasn’t possible, because of their own or their partner’s career, or because their kids needed resources that were available only in a large metro area, or because raising kids was too expensive in their hometown. (I interviewed mothers exclusively because studies show that child care tends to be performed by women, and because the “village” advice is largely addressed to moms.)Plus, to truly get help from your extended family, you need to live not just close, but really close. Adriana Reyes, a Cornell professor who studies proximity among family members, told me that some people think that by moving, say, within an hour of their parents, they’ll be able to rely on them for urgent child-care needs, such as picking up the kids if you’re working late. Realistically, she said, “you’re gonna see them more regularly, but I don’t think you’re gonna be able to have the same kind of emergency backup.” And even if your parents do live right down the block, they might not be much help—as people have kids later in life, their own parents are also older and may be less adept at child care. I noticed this myself on a recent trip home to visit my elderly parents, when my toddler waddled up to a fragile glass lamp and broke it while my dad sat two feet away, staring at Russian disinformation on his iPad.When I asked about the village concept in a Facebook group for moms in the D.C. region, a highly educated, highly transient area, I received one type of response over and over: I don’t have a village, so I buy one. Some of these moms have nannies, house cleaners, dog walkers, and house managers. Or they have less expensive villagers: Various moms told me that the McDonald’s drive-through, Instacart, and Doordash were their “village.” Paying people is a remedy for not having a village (and indeed, it’s the one that I chose), but it’s hardly a solution for everyone, or even for most people: Many parents cannot afford to pay a nanny a sizable chunk of their salary.But also, a village implies a loose, reciprocal network of people who want to help one another, not an employee who is obligated to work for an employer at certain times. The idea of the village is that you might have someone who wants to help you, because they like you, and because you might help them, too. Finding people like that can be difficult. Liz Suders, a mom of twin toddlers in southern Pennsylvania, told me she is so village-less that when she experienced a medical emergency days after giving birth, she felt she had no option but to wait for her husband to drive hours home from a work trip to watch her newborn twins before she could go to the hospital. She hoped she wouldn’t have a stroke while she waited. Madelline Castillo, who lives in California, told me that when she moved to the suburbs recently, she found a “backyard culture” where you “smile to your neighbor, but then it ends right there.” Castillo said that she wishes she knew who in her orbit would be “willing, available and have the time, effort, et cetera,” to be her village.Peanut, one of several apps that allow moms to find one another, much as Tinder helps singles find dates, aims to be one solution. “In real life, we don’t walk around with a tag that says ‘eight weeks postpartum’ or ‘trying to conceive for six years,’” the app’s founder, Michelle Kennedy, told me. “But on Peanut, that’s exactly what you do.” Kennedy said that the app’s typical user is about 30 and lives in an urban area, and the most important predictor of whether two users will become friends is their proximity to each other.[Read: Doomed to be a tradwife]During my pregnancy, I used Peanut to chat with a few potential mom-friend candidates. But for me, the process suffered from the same pitfalls as online dating: too many options, no clear reason to “go out” with anyone in particular, and tedious app-based small talk that made me want to die. Kennedy told me that making friends as an adult takes a certain level of bravery, and, at least at the time, I seemed to lack the fortitude.Having friends, though, is no guarantee that you’ll have a village. Parents of school-age kids tend to be swamped with extracurriculars in the evenings or sports practice on weekends. A Northern Virginia mom, Kristyn Admire, told me that she does have a friend group, but the area’s size and transitory nature, combined with peoples’ crammed schedules, make it hard to form a village. She described village building as “just a bunch of type-A, busy people trying to coordinate their personal and professional and social lives. It just seems really hard.”I did talk with moms who had managed to convene a village of sorts. Another Northern Virginia mom named Cait, who asked to be identified by just her first name for professional reasons, told me that she “leeched off her kids” by befriending their friends’ parents. But this was possible, she said, only after she cut back at work and had more time to get involved in their school. For the years when she and her husband both worked full-time, “I really didn't meet anybody,” Cait told me. “And we were more alone than ever and needed the help more than ever.”“It takes a village” is advice that sounds communitarian, but in fact, it pushes for an individualistic solution to a societal problem. And it can distract people from demanding the kinds of solutions that could truly help families: longer parental leave; more flexible remote-work policies; child-care support; a work culture that accepts the constancy of kids’ sicknesses. Instead, families are left to “ask for help” on their own: You find the village. You join the app. You move closer to your mom. You need to be friendlier, more active, more approachable, more involved.Those who can cobble together a network—by virtue of luck or wealth or people skills—come out ahead. Everyone else, the “village” wisdom implies, isn’t asking hard enough.