Has Child-rearing (and Childcare) Fundamentally Changed Over the Millenia

I know that mothers still swaddle their babies, and that has been going on since Biblical times (Luke 2:7) (and probably long before). Although there was, at one time, a trend away from breast-feeding (at least in the First World), as far as I know the vast majority of mothers the world over* still nurse their babies, as they have done for as long as there have been H. Sapiens on the map.

The only things I can think of that are (relatively) new with regard to childcare and/or child-rearing are:

[ul]
[li]Vaccinations. Obviously these are a technological development and so we can’t necessarily attribute their use to a change in attitudes/philosophy.[/li][li]Private beds/bedrooms. This has more to do with changes in the overall standard of living, I imagine (e.g., families can afford more than one bed; families can afford to pay a heating bill rather than bundling up the whole family in one bed to preserve warmth; etc.). Although there does seem to be a trend toward co-sleeping among some mothers.[/li][li]Trending away from corporal punishment. Based on some of my reading assignments from high school, it seems that some forms of corporal that today would be considered horrific child abuse (even by those who spank) were par for the course. Society seems to be moving away from spanking, although many parents continue to spank, and while many government attempt to put a stop to it. While the spanking debate rages on, I think we can agree that, as a species, we don’t punish our children nearly as severely as we used to, say, 200 years ago.[/li][li]Compulsory Education/Public Education Used to be that the only children who got a formal education were those whose parents could afford to pay for it. Now every child in the First World (and most of them in the Second and Third Worlds) not only have a free government education provided for them, they are required by law to get an education (be it government-provided, privately-provided, etc.), under pain of various penalties for their parents.[/li][/ul]

What are some other ways in which child-care has generally changed over the millenia?

*Are there any numbers available about what percentage of First World moms today breast-feed vs. bottle-feed?

Two big changes have been encouraging parents to be more physically affectionate with children, and to get away from rigid scheduling of very young children’s eating, sleeping, etc. (You know those old movies where all the kids were dressed up to have dinner, spoke only when spoken to, and said ‘yes sir’? There was actually a certain amount of truth in it.

Of course I don’t know whether that counts as a “fundamental change” or whether these are just trends that go in and out of style.

There are tons of changes.

We now expect most of our children to live into adulthood. Previously, you probably wouldn’t even name a kid until it was clear they were going to survive the weeks after birth. For the first few years, you wouldn’t grow too attached to them. Losing young children would still be sad, but it’d also be a normal and expected experience.

The decline of extended family living arrangements means children spend more time around a fewer people, rather than being in constant contact with a whole mess of people. Previously you’d live on a compound with various aunts, uncles, cousins and of course various siblings around. You’d probably spend much of your time being cared for by older siblings or other relations. If your father practiced polygamy, he may not be around much at all.

We don’t expect children to engage in productive labor. Previously, kids would do everything from helping in the fields to selling things in town. They may even be sold or rented to other households for a profit. Chore would not be the token character-builder they are now, they would be an important and essential part of household labor and finances.

Adolescent and teen engagement and marriage are no longer normal or acceptable.

Above all, we give a lot more respect to children and their dignity. Children are no longer seen as a primarily economic investment expected to bring in a return. Physical, sexual and emotional abuse are no longer tolerated. Children are seen as having inherent rights, rather than being the property of their parents. In many ways, this mirrors other civil rights movements.

Very rigid scheduling of “baby’s day” really only came into vogue in the early part of the 20th century and gained prominence during the 1920s. “Scientific” motherhood became this niche topic for middle and upper-middle class women–like home economics on steroids, your home should be a Job with Rules and Regulations and Standards, etc. This faded away during the 30s and 40s, experienced a brief resurgence in the 1950s, and has been steadily fading away ever since as parents go to a much more relaxed “baby will cry when she’s hungry” type of parenting.

This applies mostly to the US and Canada, I can’t speak to anywhere else.

All of this, of course, is highly dependent on time and place. A kid growing up in a farm family in Minnesota in 1850 is going to be experiencing a vastly different world than a kid growing up in a serf family in England in 1320 and even more different from a kid in Egypt in 50 A.D.

Is there a specific place or time period you’re looking at, or a specific type of child-care? Because while there are generalities about child care (babies get breast-fed by someone, they get cuddled by someone, kids get into trouble when not supervised and punished), there’s really way too much variance to say definitively what has changed. And more to the point–our society right now is not the apogee of Life on Earth. All cultures have not been developing towards creating The Miracle of Us. We just have a different lifestyle and way of living, and in 300 years people will probably be mystified at what we did, too.

-apollonia, who holds a Master’s degree in Canadian history with a focus on family, domestic, and youth history

Whenever this rigid scheduling of children comes up, I always get a chuckle remembering some friends of mine from college. Their children eat supper at 6:30. And by “6:30” I mean, not 6:29 and definitely not 6:31. On Mondays they eat pork chops and baked potatoes. And by “pork chops and baked potatoes” I mean, not pork chops and french fries or pork chops and mashed potatoes, and definitely not chicken breasts and baked potatoes. Each pork chop will have been seasoned with exactly .5 tsp of salt, .25 tsp of pepper, etc. Each mashed potato will have exactly .25 ounce of Land-o-Lakes butter (not Carnation or any other brand), etc.

These people take their schedules seriously.

Formal education itself is something relatively new. While the original Lyceum and Academia are from Ancient Greece, institutions dedicated to the education of children and adolescents are relatively new (many European countries had the equivalent of* Universities or even Postgraduate Research Centers way before having primary schools); the notion of government regulation of such to ensure minimal standards, even newer.

  • I say “the equivalent of” because the original title may have been something else. For example, 13th-century Toledo’s “School of Translators” was more akin to a postgraduate research center than to a “place where people learn how to translate”, but a lot of the people pooling their knowledge and books there didn’t have any kind of “degrees”. Training yes, diplomas no.

Foundational dates of several religious Orders which are heavily focused on education:

Jesuits: 1534 (founded by seven Sorbonne students)
Ursulins: 1535
Escuelas Pías (I never remember the name in English): 1597
Company of Mary: 1607
Salesians: 1845

Some practices we might think of as worldwide (such as physical punishment of children) are extremely variable across cultures and probably always have been.

I believe that the dramatic reduction in infant mortality is a major reason why statistical life expectancy has jumped dramatically in the past hundred or so years. When we say that at such and such a time and place in the middle ages the life expectancy was 35, that doesn’t mean that the average person dropped dead in their 30’s - the average person that made it to their 20’s could easily make it to their 50’s or 60’s. The problem was that a huge percentage of all the children born didn’t make it to age 10 and that drove down the statistical average. Nowadays, the vast majority of children in first world countries make it to age 10.

This is true, and thank you for pointing it out. We have always had old people. Average life expectancy being 35 or so in, say, 1600s New England, is directly attributable to high infant mortality rates. Anyone who lived past childhood and its attendant dangers (sicknesses we vaccinate against or find trivial today because of modern medicine–measles, mumps, chicken pox, whooping cough, rubella, scarlet fever, etc) had a pretty darn good shot of making it to a ripe old age, 50s or 60s. Barring other sorts of problems, though–being kicked in the head by a horse, catching pneumonia, being hit by a falling tree, etc.

The other very high contribution to skewed mortality rates is death in childbirth. Childbirth is not a zero-risk effort even today, and the day of birth was the most hazardous day in life for both mother and baby. Given a lack of modern contraception and a need for large families, giving birth 6-8 times becomes not unreasonable and quite likely, making the rate of death in childbirth skyrocket.

But I digress!

Although child mortality had a significant effect on life.expectancy stats, there was significant mortality all through life. My grandmother, for example, died of a stroke at 50 in 1952; I’ve had normal blood pressure since my doctor found mine was above 180 and put me on medication. My grandfather and his brothers died of heart problems early due to scarlet fever by 70; my dad is pushing 90 and has had a stent, but is still going strong… However, go to, for example Black Creek Village pioneer graveyard in Toronto and so many gravestones indicate deaths in their 30’s or 40’s.

So the biggest change is that early death, whether of the child or those around them, is rare.what impact that has psychologically, who knows?

Another side effect of this limited production of children is that each is more precious and so more spoiled. It’s a culture of scarcity… This is what I think brings on the tendency to overindulge kids with material possessions, to ban corporal punishment, to boost self esteem I.e. no failing in school, every child is above average, slow ones are “special”. We have helicopter parents and total strangers sticking their nose in to tell you how to raise your kids.

Another big change is tv - or more specifically, individual entertainment, tv Internet, even movies from the earlier 1900’s. while we’re at it used to be that families spent a lot of time together, simply because there was no choice. Similarly, they interacted with a large extended family or their village society. Now we have our own rooms, the Internet, and the age groups tend not to mix. Social interaction with adults is an opportunity for adolescents especially to learn how to be adults. When children instead socialize only with each other, hide in basements in a Wayne’s World existence - they are not learning socialization.

Not only do children not work, often they cannot. At an age where they might be married with family 500 years ago, today even 18 or older they are too young, too uneducated or inexperienced to be productive.

The biggest demographic change is a result of the fact that the richer society is, the more children is a cost not a benefit; people have children despite this, only because they want them regardless. Of course, this additional rarity contributes to the over protectiveness we see today.

No, actually death by fire - cooking accident was actually more of a hazard when cooking was performed in an open hearty [long skirts, fire bad, m’kay?]

Though my maternal grandmother died in her mid 30s as a result of a house fire [my aunt lit a freshly filled kerosene lamp without noticing that the kerosene had dripped on the outside and table - covered with an oilcloth table covering and catching the kitchen and subsequently house on fire.] Similar household accidents were not uncommon - many household items were hazardous. Oilcloth, household chemicals like arsenic based cleaning and anti-vermin agents, assorted toxic chemicals used around the house and farm for various things [naptha home dry cleaning agents are particularly dangerous around kids.]

Okay, yes, I was hardly saying that childbirth was the ONLY dangerous thing women and babies went through. But the fact remains that it was the single most dangerous and life-threatening event they both experienced–a woman’s chances of dying in childbirth were much greater than her chances of being killed in a cooking fire accident on any given day. And–it may still even be true, I’m not 100% sure–a child’s chances of dying as a newborn were much much higher on the day of birth than any other day.

Childhood has been incrementally increased from perhaps around 12 yrs to 16 to 18 to 21 to even older. While there is no hard and fast age (though 18 and 21 come closest due to legal standards), there seems this trend of ever pushing up adulthood.

Makes me wonder if this trend continues if the only adults will be retired folk :wink:

Hygene.

Much more important.

One of the more interesting changes is happening in China. After decades of a “1 child” policy, we have not only the demographic shift - a LOT more old people than youngsters in the pipeline - but also a situation where 4 grandparents have only 1 grandchild to spoil; children grow up without serious extended family - no cousins, no uncles or aunts… I have read that China is thinking of relaxing the 1-child rule if both parents are from 1-child families.

This is part of my point above - social interaction with the entire family, extended family, and community (of all age groups) has been replaced by a mainly either the whole family staring quietly at the idot box or the children collecting mainly in peer groups with no adult oversight or interaction. Where children used to learn social interaction by watching adults (listen and learn, little grasshopper) those opportunities are far fewer.

Also, children much more rarely encounter death, or birth, thanks to demographics; and since they tend to socialize with their peers and siblings are very close in age, and encounters with extended family are rarer thanks to greater mobility, they see less of babysitting siblings, less about feeding and diaper changes and other lessons of parenthood or child care.

If we go back farther, then perhaps the other major change was school. Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock, suggested that schools were a device to teach us time regimentation for factory (and office) jobs. You must be at class at exactly 9 and you get lunch at precisely noon, bedtime is exactly 9PM, etc. - because that’s how a factory job works. A common complaint for anyone dealing with true third-world individuals is that they don’t keep real time - they show up when they feel like it, stop working if nobody’s watching… because the need to work in a box according to a schedule eludes them. The cows or goats will let you know about when its time to milk them, the crops need to be watered this week, not exactly at 9AM, etc.

The one I’m not sure of is the erosion of authority. Certainly as children become individually more valuable or precious, they have more influence overall; we have seen a lot of old fuddies mourning the loss of discipline, decrying the tendency of children to disrespect their elders, to violate the “rules” such as children should be seen but not heard; talking back to authority; questioning rules, etc. To some extent the right to speak up when there is abuse is a good thing, but is less discipline a good thing in the long run?

(The opening of The Gods Must Be Crazy has a bit about bushmen children, “…of course their parents never scold or punish them, as a result they are polite and well behaved…”)

I disagree. My experiences in rural Cameroon were not too far off from what you’d expect from an agricultural society centuries ago. In rural Cameroon, kids aged 3-10 roamed the streets in great packs. Adults were way too busy and had way too many kids to give them all the one-on-one time kids get today.

As soon as they are big enough to wander off (and sometimes before- it wasn’t unusual to see a five year old toting her baby sister tied to her back), kids would spend the vast majority of their time running around with their peers. They spent their time with typical summer-vacation stuff- playing street soccer, making home-made toys, playing hopscotch and generally just wandering around. There would be little to no adult supervision, and kids would basically return home for meals and sleep.

As they hit their pre-teen years, they would start taking on real adult responsibilities- helping with the housework, working on the farm, taking animals out to pasture, selling things in town, etc.

Another change in the last hundred years or so has been the advent of child psychology. As textbooks say, before the twentieth century children were seen as very small adults. The idea that their brains might work in fundamentally different ways was a revolution… and hucksters have been publishing psychologically-based how-to childraising books ever since.

Childhood has certainly changed even over my lifetime. When I was growing up in the 40s, my daily life included playing loads of street games (weather permitting). Curiously, the games we played on my street were totally different from those they played on my grandmother’s street two blocks away (I spent lots of time there too, especially in the summer). When I got home from school, I threw my schoolbag inside my house and went out to play until it got dark or I was called for dinner. The street games were dependent on the fact that few people owned cars and, during the day, they were not parked on the street as people used their single car to drive to work. Also cars coming through the street were rare. By about 1950, though, this was changing and both parked cars and moving cars were increasing. Also that was the year I went to HS and I guess I stopped playing street games then.

With my kids it was different. Too many cars. There is a playground nearby, but they rarely used it. What they did when school ended was go to a friend’s house (often to play computer or board games) or have their friends come here. In any case phone calls home were required. But they still did this on their own initiative. Now with my grandchildren, I see that even this degree of spontaneity is a thing of the past. They are usually driven to and from school (only about 1/2 mile away and across only one dead end street) and the mothers arrange play dates. In the school my kids went to, we used to ridicule the one parent who drove her kids to school. Now 30 years later it is the rare child who walks to school by himself. In fact, it is actually dangerous, given the heavy traffic around the school.

Of course there have been other changes. When I was growing up, mothers were in the throes of rigid scheduling, as described in a couple posts above. Infants were fed exactly every four hours, no matter how much they cried (well that was the theory, at least, the practice was often different). They were put to bed on a similar rigid schedule. Very few were breast fed. I remember going through sterilization procedures with my sister’s bottles (she was 11 years younger) that wouldn’t have been out of place in the biology lab I worked in 6 years later. My kids were raised on a much more flexible schedule and breast fed for a few months. My grandchildren were all breast fed, a couple of them until they lost interest around 2 years. But they were held constantly as infants. So it seemed anyway.

I have discussed only the past 65 years, but with this much change in that period, how much it must have changed in a millennium. Read Dickens for an idea of 19th century childhoods in England at least. Kids were sent out to work at a very young age. And a recent New Yorker article mentioned a tribe in South America in which a six year old took on many adult tasks that we could not imagine children doing.

I wonder though, how much they did see adult interaction? They were obliged to spend the evenings at home? Meals?

The “lesson on being adult” quote I recall, was about teenagers in particular. In your description, this would be when the kids would be obliged to work, probably in tasks that brought them in constant contact with quite a few adults. The fellow contrasted this with North American teens still running in isolated packs, barely even getting interaction with adults during meals; they spent those years in basements palying video games with peers. The closest they came to adult interaction was a 1-on-30 classroom time with their teachers, where likely they got no interaction unless they stood out in a good or bad way.