Jared Diamond, in The World Until Yesterday describes that most societies used to nurse children until about age 3. So women can continue to produce milk for a while as long as the demand continues, and I assume in many cases the job became possible as a mother weaned her own child.
I’m sure some were, but it was common practice, at least in the UK when wet nursing was common for the upper classes for the wet nurse to place her own baby with a cheaper nurse, who may well be looking after her own baby and possibly others as well- or that baby could be placed with an even cheaper nurse.
If you’re wondering how the cheaper nurses manage to properly care for a selection of babies at once, unfortunately the answer is that they often didn’t. The death rate went up the lower down the scale they got.
Who would trust their baby to a woman who can’t care for her own?
Single family, and even the one woman who helped went somewhere else “to her own household”.
Form the descriptions I’ve read, it doesn’t seem to be such a big deal in shared-care societies.
FWIW: in a shared care society, nobody notices if the baby is sick and dying. If the kid’s crying, you pass it on to somebody else. If the kid’s not eating, it’s already eaten with somebody else.
It’s a bit of a no-true-scotsman to say “as long as it’s not neglect”. I mean, neglect is a pretty flexible term. Heck, there’s a long history of giving opiumto babies, for example. These days we do think babies need to have stimulation–to hear people talk, to interact with people, to try different foods, see new things, to be played with. My grandmother had 12 kids. I think pretty much all of them spent toddler hood–that range between being the baby and aging out to being thrown in the yard–in a baby-gated dining room where they were expected to amuse themselves and not bother mother under any circumstances. Physical safety was pretty much all they were provided with. It sounds incredibly sterile to me–I’d call it neglectful. So yeah, if you are willing to raise your kids like that, they get a lot easier to raise. I found a toddler grueling because I felt it was important to spend time taking him to the grocery store, the park, and the library, reading to him, singing to him, playing endless games of chase and all that. Do you feel like that sort of thing–the sort of thing that’s now the standard way we raise kids–is mostly a useless indulgence? That parents that do all that and then find parenting “grueling” are like a fool who puts a hole in the bottom of the bucket and then complains that it’s so hard to fill with water?
I read once that Europeans think Americans are weirdly obsessed with how soon the baby sleeps through the night–we have books and blogs and seminars and specialty doctors, and they have none of that. In the discussion that followed, someone suggested this was an outgrowth of the fact that American parental leave is so crap: both parents often have to be back at work within a few months of the baby’s birth. Staying home with a baby is challenging, but if are working at about 85% of your normal IQ, you aren’t endangering your career and letting down your co-workers. You aren’t going to lose clients or get written up because you made mistakes or ruin a piece of expensive equipment. It’s a big deal to go back to work and show that nothing has changed, that you’ve still “got it”. So when this little force of nature that absolutely cannot be reasoned with makes it impossible to sleep, it’s awful.
So many posts in this thread make me wish for a “like” button.
I’m childless by choice. There was a time I thought I might go there, when I was deep into a relationship with a man who was very vocal about wanting kids. But I came to realize he wasn’t really committed to doing his fair share around the time our relationship was falling apart for other reasons, and now I see that whole situation as a dodged bullet. (Shortly before we broke up, he remarked out of the blue that he didn’t ever want to have to go to any youth soccer games; he wanted to spend his weekends playing golf. He was sure our kids would understand.)
A colleague of mine reminds me of me in a parallel universe. She never felt any particular desire to have kids, but her husband was adamant. She birthed two, but she really has three because that motherfucker is dead weight. He does none of the housework, none of the real work of parenting, and as of a few years ago he doesn’t even have a job. She ran the numbers and decided divorce was more trouble than it was worth, but she might revisit that once the kids are grown. She loves her little girls, but she confided in me she never would have had them if she had known it would be like this.
I see this play out to a lesser extent all around me. Among almost all of the opposite-sex couples I know who are my age and reproducing, he was the one who wanted kids more, and she’s still doing the lion’s share of the work. And even then, the boys just can’t believe how hard it was to get up with the baby at 3 a.m. that one time.
I have to admit, I was relieved when my now-husband brought up kids on maybe the fifth or sixth date to say he definitely didn’t want them. Even with two very involved and committed parents to split the workload, babies are a ridiculous amount of work. And after what I’ve seen, although I know good dads are out there, I don’t feel I can trust myself to pick one out before the meconium hits the diaper.
In a family that large, that’s surprising. My grandmother had 11, which meant that there was always some older sibling or other who wanted to play.
In families that large, the younger kids are cared for by their siblings.
I think it was like from 12 month to 3 that they were in the dining room. Later they were let free to roam. Little toddlers really aren’t that fun to play with for older kids. They can’t talk, can’t share or take turns, can’t follow rules or directions of any complexity. They can’t physically keep up.
Getting rid of unwanted children via exposure was well known in classical times.
Weren’t able to raise a baby? Take it out in the wilderness and leave it. This was not something people did for fun. Raising (esp. feeding) the kid was going to be too difficult.
A famous example of something like this was Oedipus who was taken out to the wilderness to die of exposure (after getting his ankles pierced). But due to a prophecy rather than hardship. OTOH, the shepherd who raised him may well have assumed that hardship was the reason. That shepherd apparently did not know of Oed’s royal background and therefore did not know about the real reason for the exposure.
Presumably exposure went back a lot farther, we just don’t have written sources documenting it.
Two parents and a baby is a nightmare and I’m thinking it always has been. The baby’s cry acts on the human brain like putting your hand down a hot stove. Or stepping on a Lego brick. Magically, getting just one person to help out transforms the whole dynamic. That can be a grandparent, an aunt or uncle, neighbor, brother or sister. History seems full of ways to take the stress off the couple. In western society though, the US anyway, we seem to expect couples to raise their first kid by themselves, which doesn’t seem to be how it is supposed to work.
When I was in Japan, we had a maid that took care of me a baby during the day. My Mom said she either had a baby or young child of her own. Never asked how that worked, the baby/child definitely wasn’t at our house. The way I see it, caring for someone else’s baby is a job like any other, especially if you gotta do, what you gotta do to make a living.
As for being a burden. One of my co-workers who as very well off and didn’t have to work, had a babysitter who, if she (the co-worker) worked later than she planned to, would pay more for the babysitter than she earned that day!
I told a friend that I thought children were a burden (thankfully, I have none), and he said they’re not. This from a guy was divorced and saw his kids one day on the weekend, and later remarried, had a kid and divorced, then fall back on his child support payments. :smack:
But weren’t wet nurses mostly for the rich?
Fortunately, most parents selectively forget the grueling part of the first few months of child rearing, otherwise no one would have more children. You tend as parents to remember the good parts.
As far as people have very large numbers of children, that’s primarily due to the lack of birth control, and/or religious reasons for not using birth control once that it became more available.
I always thought so too, but it mentions in Wikipedia’s article about them that in 18th century France in France 90% of babies were being cared for by wet nurses :eek:
Also wasn’t child rearing more communal in ancient times? Lots of aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, etc involved in the child care and child rearing activities?
:dubious: Only if what you mean by “most women” is “most middle-class women in wealthy societies for about the previous hundred years”.
The vast majority of women in general throughout history performed various types of livelihood-dependent work in addition to being “homemakers and stay-at-home moms”. Whether they worked for income or produced resources for direct use within the family, their work was much broader than the cooking/cleaning/childcare tasks that we now associate with “homemakers and stay-at-home moms”.
The idea that women’s proper “sphere” is confined to caring for her home, husband and children and shouldn’t involve being an economic producer is quite a recent development, and has never applied to the majority of the world’s women.
Dolls are even less capable of all of those things, and yet children still play with dolls. And yeah, most of the play with babies is similar to play with dolls, but it’s still stimulating for the baby.
I used ladies in my post to refer to nobel ladies. So, yes, I meant the rich. But just because something sucks for the rich doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck for the poor it just means that the rich have a way to escape the suck. So its still proof raising a child was enough of a suck that if you could you paid someone else to deal with it.
In reading the other post responding to you, I had no idea it was that prevalent. I guess that implies that the service wasn’t very expensive or possibly that breast feeding is and was harder than they tell new moms today.
Woman’s rights seem to factor into this, before women had semi-equal status as men they didn’t have the choice, it just was what it was. So no use in complaining as it would go nowhere if you did. Women’s opinion was not given weight. Now that it is different and more equal those complaints are now heard more and more people (men) have to acknowledge it.