THE saying ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ traces its origin to several African countries but it gained Global North popularity when Hillary Clinton chose it as a title for her book on how you needed a community to raise a child. What was a ‘duh’ moment for us was apparently a surprising revelation in the US, to the then largely white majority, whose children were reared by parents, maybe some family, childcare centres, or, if they could afford it, nannies.

Their version of community is vastly different to ours. Even though I grew up abroad, I knew instinctively that my Filipino best friend’s mother in grade school was ‘aunty’. Our extended family included other Pakistani families and one special aunty can scold me today, like she could 40 years ago.

As we grew older, and the trend of sleepovers became the norm, my parents gave in to our demands, but there was always a check of sorts they wanted to do, much to our annoyance. It wasn’t about our safety per se, because we lived privileged and sheltered lives in suburban areas but about who will be there, who will take care of us, where are the parents from? I was only allowed to go on my first sleepover, aged 10, because the girl’s father was from Cameroon. They are like us, they said, without........

© Dawn