When in human history did people parenting a newborn begin to have the luxury of considering it really hard work? It feels like a fairly recent thing - I doubt mothers and fathers in the middle ages or even pilgrim and Oregon Trail days spent a lot of time complaining about how little sleep they got and how much work a newborn is, but I also get the sense that advice like “sleep when the baby sleeps” that suggests it’s really difficult predates the last 40-50 years when a lot of women joined the workforce. Did this attitude spring up instead when people began having fewer babies?
I dunno; ancient texts that talk about parenthood all seem to take it for granted that it’s a lot of work.
Just a really wild guess here, but perhaps when men started to do more than about 10% of the work. So about 1974ish…
Considering in the Middle ages ladies would Hire wet nurses so they didn’t have to deal with feeding their kids I would assume even back then they thought parenting would be better if you could get out of the terrible parts. My guess is you’re looking at at least a 1,000 years ago.
Day 1.
My thinking is that it started to seem as grueling when working outside the house (on a farm or office or factory) was worse. Now that most outside jobs aren’t very challenging, dealing with a baby seems arduous by comparison.
I recall reading that up until the late 1700’s - early 1800, people generally slept in two segments a night. They’d sleep from a couple of hours past dusk for about 4 hours, wake up for a couple of hours and then go back to sleep. How little sleep someone gets depends on what they are doing besides taking care of the newborn - a woman who is doing non-time sensitive household tasks and who can sleep during the day when the baby does will not be nearly as sleep-deprived as one who has to get up at 6 to go to work, or care for slightly older children and then pretty much stay awake until evening.
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Yes, and the hiring of wetnurses goes back to ancient times, not just the comparatively recent medieval era. Cf., e.g., the recommendations of the medical author Soranus of Ephesus in the 1st/2nd c. CE:
So the care and feeding of an infant was considered physically taxing to the extent that women who could afford the cost routinely outsourced it to adult professionals, for whom the care of one child (or even the shared care of one child, if multiple nurses were employed) provided a living. That sounds to me as though infant care was consciously recognized as a big and demanding job.
Remember also that ancient (male) writers tend to take the grueling labor of all working-class and slave employees, particularly the female ones, for granted as an unremarkable feature of ordinary life. The fact that surviving texts don’t express a lot of sympathy about the burdens of childrearing doesn’t mean that it wasn’t recognized as burdensome.
I’d guess it started around the time that factory work became common, and mobility created the “nuclear family.” When everyone in the family worked at home - as farmers or piece workers, and when multiple families (parents, adult siblings, and their families) shared a household, the work of caring for a child was shared among multiple people, but when Dad goes off to the factory for 12 or 14 hours, and grandma and two aunts no longer are around to help out, the job gets a lot harder (and there’s no one to talk to about it either). Also big families create a lot of older siblings to help out as well - if you have a fourteen year old, a 12 year old, twin 10 year olds, a four year old and a baby, the work isn’t six times as bad as caring for one baby is - because the older brothers and sisters can help.
I couldn’t tell you when it started, but it’s gotten more difficult over time.
We now have fewer children, and we invest more time and resources into them. (Sometimes to incredible lengths, re worst helicopter parent stories of adult children.) Basic tasks like walking to school have become delayed (and that’s assuming you live close to school, which is not a guarantee) so the parents have to walk with the kids or drive them everywhere… and you don’t dare let them take public transit because that means you’re a “bad parent” who are letting your children face risk.
Children have become more expensive. Every kid needs their own room, their own smartphone, maybe their own laptop. Because some parents schedule their kids lives, those kids are going to camps, piano lessons, after-school clubs, etc. Many of these things cost money. You need to save up for the kids’ education, and maybe you’ll let them live with you rent-free after they’ve entered the workforce.
Not true.
As evidenced in the whole concept of the wetnurse. Those quotes take it for granted that it takes the nursing of multiple women to raise a single child… and yet, all of those wetnurses are nursing a child of their own in addition to the wealthy kid. How were the nurses’ children supposed to survive?
At the risk of expanding the OP, ISTM that it is not just infants, but all aspects of childrearing that have increasingly presented as more demanding. At the same time, more and more of young adults’ shortcomings seem attributed to parental choices/actions/inactions.
Of course, in olden days, more infants/kids died young… But absent neglect by the parents, or unusual health issues w/ the kid, I think babies/kids are tougher than they are given credit for, and the range of acceptable parental effort pretty broad. I think increased wealth and leisure play a large part in the increased emphasis placed on childrearing. I also think that 2-income households mae clear how much work raising a child (ad maintaining a household) is.
I am sure that Mrs Ugg in her cave thought that raising baby Uggs was hard work; waking up every few hours to feed the little blighter has always been a requirement unless some other lactating female was able to help out.
Of course, she didn’t have social media to publish her problems on, and she would also have an extended family around to help out with any babies that actually survived past infancy.
Might I also add, that even today, not all babies are tremendously hard work. Our two were sleeping 6 or 7 hours a night from a few weeks old. Our granddaughter did much the same.
I think it has always been hard and taxing. What I think has changed is that venting about it openly has become socially acceptable. I was fortunate enough to know my great grandmother. She lived in a rural area and gave birth to all of her children at home with the help of only a neighbor. Even then, the neighbor was only there for the birth of the child, as she had to get home and tend to her own household. My great grandma talked about how she delivered all of her kids in the morning and still managed to have supper on the table when great grandpa got home. Back in those days, women were just expected to do it all and not complain.
More to the point, the often rich, educated or at least well off, in other words the cohort whose works are most likely to have survived and who would be most inured from child-raising and its problems, both in space and in the sense of being able to afford sufficient help.
I think that’s the telling sentence… Prior to the 1970s, most women were homemakers and stay-at-home moms, so raising babies and children was in a sense, considered to be their job, at least in terms of contributing to the family unit.
But after the 1970s, more and more women have participated in the workforce in more and more professional and responsible capacities.
So when you’re a full-time employee, and you’re suddenly thrust into caring for this little lump who cries, craps and pees on a schedule, and then at random as well, it’s not unsurprising that this disruption to their “normal” schedule would make them complain about how difficult it is.
I thought that wetnurses were generally mothers whose own children had been weaned or whose children had died (which was common enough in those difficult days). But I could well be wrong about this.
(About segmented sleep / wakefulness in the middle of the night in pre-industrial societies.)
That’s an interesting study.
This article talks about the studies and the book that asserted that sleep was segmented in those societies.
(I don’t care either way, I just wanna get some sleep.)