When you need it the most. Obviously, for raising kids.
In the by-gone, black & white, pre-digital era when joint families still existed, there was definitely, literally and truly- a village. In fact, am going to call it "The Village".
Where there were people of different age groups, genders, personalities (some of them quite colorful) that roamed about freely. Some were close families, some extended, and the ones "no-one-knows-who", but somehow get mysteriously added to the tree.
Nah, just kidding, am sure the seniors would eventually get there by racking their brains to come up with a twisted, long-winded term to justify their relationships to the pack. Neighbours were close enough to be called part of the families too.
My point being - all these people directly or indirectly had a big impact on the children of the household. Was it all positive, inspirational, fairy-land style of an influence? Heck, no.
No such dream place ever existed. People are always people - with the extremely nice, decently good, not bad, ugly, uglier and ugliest. A sum totality of experiences, especially handy and closer to home sounds like what the doctor ordered . That's what kids used to go through, which in turn shaped their values, ideals etc.
Fast forward to the child (please note the singular) of today.
Parents are pretty much the big influence here, and I can only speak for myself and let me put this as eloquently as I can and say that - "Me no help, not in a million years....no". Plus, the intensity between kids and parents these days is on dangerously high toxic levels.
By thrusting our own unreasonable expectations, past-life and present-life successes or failures, and an impulse to run the race, we have somehow managed to successfully cut off meaningful messages and thrown it out of the window.
So, what do I do?
After clenching, unclenching, and back to clenching my fists for hours, I start looking for any "metaphorical-only" glimpses of the village around me.
Wait, am seeing vague, ghostly figures now, let me bring them closer to the light. Ok, got them!
Seriously, for the kids of today, a combo of teachers, close relatives, books and the Internet gurus are the only access to the big world.
Which is not bad, except- teachers are too busy meeting goals, benchmarks and have no time for personal mentoring, relatives are sometimes spread far and wide, books can allude a false sense of reality, and the Internet is a tough jungle to navigate and sometimes overwhelming even for adults.
The evolutionary angle to this would be the obvious - we have changed from needing skills to survive in a geographically limited area to a more wider, global world. Which is fine, it's just a different field, with hard-to-reach tools to plow through.
And, somewhere the connection to stories from your own gene pool, which you can relate to is missing big time.That's all.