Kevin Frazier i s an Assistant Professor at the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University. He previously clerked for the Montana Supreme Court.
“It takes a village to raise a child.”
It’s a common refrain. It’s commonsensical. And, it should be a common basis for the informal norms and formal policies intended to support young families. A “Leave It To Beaver”-esque upbringing should be our shared aspiration, rather than the target of skepticism. Such an upbringing is unquestionably a privileged one, but such privilege should become as common as the cold. There’s a difference between mandating a specific kind of family and celebrating the positives that come from surrounding a child with a community of support.
On a recent visit to Oklahoma City, I saw a model for such a community. At the center of that village is a toddler named Clarissa, the bundle of joy born to good friends who we visited on our summer road trip.
Within a five minute drive, Clarissa can count on at least six adults to go out of their way to ensure her well-being. A two-hour drive would bring four more adults into her village. A four-hour drive would add two more. Then there’s the entirety of the congregation at Clarissa’s church, all ready and willing to babysit, play, and mentor her.
Once I realized the breadth and depth of Clarissa’s village, it made all the sense in the world why her parents were nearly as giggly as she was. I expected to find them hassled, haggard, and hurried. Instead, the young family welcomed me and my fiancé into their home with open arms and dinner waiting on the table. Don’t get me wrong, they had plenty of stories about sleepless nights and restless days, but none of those taxing situations depleted their batteries because they knew they could count on others to step up when the crying got too loud.
Importantly, Clarissa isn’t the only one benefiting from her village. According to her parents, Clarissa has given some members of the village a new purpose and opportunity to be a part of a cause larger than themselves. In an age marked by an epidemic of loneliness, Clarissa’s role as a point of connection for adults across a wide swath of Oklahoma and Texas is worth celebrating and emulating.
A village-approach is a win-win-win-win…you get it…situation. One underappreciated win is the role village formation can play in tapping into an underused resource, the wisdom of an aging population. As our nation becomes older (and it’s graying quickly), there’s an opportunity to call on that experience to help raise our toddlers and teenagers so that they will, in turn, become valuable parts of a village down the road.
To realize the full potential of the village-approach, we will have to upend traditional limits on who can join the community, for instance, by inviting participation by members beyond our family trees. This is a big ask. Parents have every right to question the character and intentions of those who want to play a role in the life of their child. But there’s no reason we cannot develop ways to assuage those concerns and bring in members of our communal shrubbery.
Many of us have become comfortable riding in other people’s cars and staying in a stranger’s home. Given our willingness to extend our trust further in certain contexts, it seems possible that similar systems could be developed to recruit members into a child’s village. One easy way to start would be to canvas retirement homes for volunteers. My hunch is that more than a few folks would raise their hand if asked to help mentor and guide a little one.
Imagine the good that would come about by ensuring that every child had at least two grandparents, through blood or by being recruited to a child’s village, to call on for assistance and instruction. Just those two additional villagers would help parents and children alike reach their full potential.
A child isn’t the only one who needs a village. Parents rely on them. And community members yearn for them.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.