Of course it’s always been grueling to care for a newborn. Chinese custom is that a new mom isn’t supposed to have any other responsibilities at all. Ancient peoples routinely exposed newborns when they didn’t have the capacity to care for them. Wealthy people have always hired help for new babies. Grandmas have always come over to help with a newborn. Heck, there’s an argument that the reason humans have menopause is so grandmas have the energy to help their daughters rear children. (Although i don’t know if that explains killer whales, the other mammal that had menopause.)
Toddlers and other children are more work today because we have enormously higher standards for how much time parents should spend with them than in the past, and because we now have work that can’t be done with your kids in tow. But newborns have always been extremely taxing.
I think our difference reflects where we may fall WRT trends in parenting. I am not advocating a return to “spare the rod/seen but not heard” days. (Not to mention - pop out a dozen and then corral them in the dining room. You SERIOUSLY offer such an extreme as ANYTHING approaching a meaningful datapoint?) But I see far too many families in which the dynamic seems to be dictated by the whims of irrational, nonverbal infants, or toddlers/children who do not seem to understand “NO!” Too many parents give children EXCESSIVE choice and agency - when some things just need to be done NOW, and “because I said so” is perfectly adequate. Sure, junior needs their rest, but the world should not be held hostage to an inflexible nap schedule. The amount of expensive gear young parents haul with them astounds me. And then, when they take their little darlings out in public, they seem to believe that the little darlings ought to be able to “experience” things and “express themselves” in a manner that detracts from others’ experience.
I see a lot of young parents - including my own kid - making parenting seem like a hell of a lot more work than it needs to be. Of course, there is the possibility that my wife and I were shitty parents, and that my 3 adult kids all found their careers, independence, and life partners despite our inadequate efforts. :rolleyes:
I never said raising a kid was EASY. Hell, anyone who decides to have a kid w/ the idea that it will make their life easier and less stressful is a fucking idiot. Sure, it is more work to do your grocery shopping w/ a kid (or 3) than alone, but you have to buy groceries anyway, so it isn’t entirely additional effort. We spent TONS of time at libraries and parks - which I found tremendously enjoyable for my own sake, in addition to the enrichment and modeling it provided my kids. Reading and singing, yeah, you probably have to give up some share of your personal reading - at least until the kid goes to sleep, and then you are tired as well. I didn’t golf for probably 6-7 years. So what? We RARELY went out to eat, not only because we couldn’t afford it, but also because we didn’t feel it fair to inflict our kids’ potential moods on other diners. Sure, reading whatever kids’ book 1000 times is mind-numbingly boring. But sitting and reading to a kid is “grueling”?
The “endless games of chase” points to something I feel strongly about. At some point in the past generation or 2, there seems to have developed the idea that the parent is their kids’ best friend and playmate. I’m not saying you and your kid oughtn’t be friends. But your life does not get ENTIRELY put on hold for the stimulation of a toddler. I took the babies x-country skiing w/ me, and as soon as their head could hold a helmet, they were in the bike seat. They exist WITHIN the family. IMO, they do not DICTATE the family. And other than newborns, they are never too young to be taught boundaries, no, public manners, etc. Kids do not get to make EVERY choice and dictate EVERY timetable.
As I recall it, childrearing largely involved bringing the kid along with us as we did whatever needed to be done. So if at home, the kid was in a playpen, bouncy seat, highchair, or on the floor while we cooked, cleaned, whatever. When we ran errands or did chores, the kid was in various car seats, slings, and holders to allow us to do what needed to be done. I remember being astounded at what I could do one-handed while hauling the ever-present kid in the other arm. All the while we talked to the kids.
At the same time, the kids were encouraged to entertain themselves. While in their playpen/crib/highchair, they had stimulating toys, and our ever-present talking.
Yeah, childrearing is boring as hell, and tiring due to being constantly on call. And you ought to agree to put some of your selfish interests on hold for a while - or have an SO or someone else spell you. It can be isolating to be at home w/ an infant, and you can get starved for adult interaction.
But if you AREN’T willing to have one parent stay home w/ the kids, and if you lack the resources to otherwise assist, yeah, it will be tough. I think modern parents present childrearing as “grueling” because they don’t want to give up what is needed to make it less so. And because they (erroneously IMO) think that minute differences in what they say, do, or provide are going to have outsized effect on the child’s eventual comfort, happiness, and success.
She didn’t say all 12 were corralled in the dining room at the same time - she said the toddlers were confined to the dining room.That would be only three or four maximum at a time. My impression is that in the 50s and 60s, it was common for children to be effectively confined to only certain rooms - maybe not the dining room, ( it’s no different if the kids are confined to a playroom or a bedroom, but lots of housing arrangements don’t have space for a playroom) and perhaps not with baby gates for school-aged children but also not given the run of the house at all hours of the day. My mother had four kids in 4.5 years, and we spent plenty of time in the baby-gated dining room - the alternative would have been to have us and our toys all through the apartment because the layout didn’t make it possible to confine us to one of the bedrooms. I seem to recall you being around my age ( I’m 56) - did you really never experience the living rooms with plastic-covered furniture where children were only allowed occasionally?
59 yrs old - 4 sibs <5 years apart. Sure, kids were not allowed to play unsupervised anywhere in the house.
But ANYONE who has 12 kids - over any span - is a freaking outlier. And I’d suggest that the very choice of HAVING that many kids comes close to qualifying as neglect.
The sheer volume of gear considered to be “necessary” for raising a baby these days is a bit mind boggling to me. My kids are in their forties and when I had them I was basically dirt poor and a teenager with little in the way of help or resources so the idea that there needs to be a metric fuckton of plastic baby gear is a bit head scratchy.
I breastfed both kids and got really good at feeding at night without waking up–first kid slept through the night really early, like a couple months old, but kid #2 took almost a year to accomplish the feat so he slept on a mattress next to ours so I could just snuggle him to me and feed him until he dropped back asleep. Having a toddler and a baby both in diapers was pretty taxing but that phase was over fairly quickly and they always had each other to play with so they kept each other occupied.
Car seats hadn’t been invented yet so when they were very small I’d just carry them around in a sling and all I figured I needed to schlep was a couple clean diapers, extra plastic pants to go over the diapers and a wet wash cloth to clean up their bums and maybe a little bottle of water and some plastic keys to wave in front of their faces if they got fractious. Babies tend to be quieter when you carry them anyway so it wasn’t that much of an effort. They learned to sleep wherever they were and ignore noise and bustle and I didn’t much hold with all that autonomy that pretty much translates to listening when a kid says “no.” They learned how to get around and get themselves ready to go and hold hands and pay attention pretty easily–I just trained 'em like I trained puppies!
It certainly wasn’t easy but I think the dearth of resources forced a simplicity that ended up being beneficial to everyone. The biggest hassle was that they’re only 15 months apart and that took a big toll on me, physically. Other than that, they tended to be independent, self reliant and good at self soothing and caring for each other–they’re still best friends and are tighter than most siblings so I guess they did okay with their “deprived” upbringing.
I assure you women have always considered the work that goes into pushing babies out of their body and then nurturing them for those first months of life as very difficult. I have to assume men have thought the same, because they tended to run away from the job until relatively recently. Why would anyone suppose it was ever *not *considered hard work?
It doesn’t requires “luxury” to consider this hard work, and as a mother, I find this notion offensive. If anything, it requires a certain amount “luxury” to even pose the question you have.
Yeah, I think the OP’s question reflects the broader issue of a cultural shift in our perceptions of hard work in general.
Prior to the movements for workers’ rights and humane working conditions within, oh, about the past 150 years, it was taken for granted that most non-wealthy people would spend their working lives doing work that was physically grueling. People who could afford to outsource physically grueling work, whether it was childcare or other forms of manual labor, would naturally do so; everybody else was expected to shut up and get on with the job, rather than whining about such a completely ordinary fact of life.
Labor-rights movements for the forty-hour week and so forth changed social perceptions to the point where it was considered acceptable for even the poorest working people to resent and complain about excessively grueling work. Acknowledging the grueling nature of what was traditionally “women’s work” is just a somewhat delayed development of that cultural shift.
Many people don’t think of domestic work as real work. The OP reflects this bias.
“When in history did people have the luxury of seeing manual labor as being grueling?”
No one in their right mind would ever think to ask this question, because it’s common sense that digging ditches, laying rails, mining coal, and pulling plows is fucking hard on the mind and body. If it wasn’t hard, the rich would be doing it instead of the poor. And people historically have died and become maimed doing this work.
But birthing and raising children is “natural”, so it gets put in a different category. It’s automatically seen as no big deal, and the complaints of modern day parents are regarded as privileged whining. What is ignored is that the rich rely on the poor to do a lot of the heavy lifting in early childrearing. And also ignored is that women and infants used to die and suffer all the time because of the difficulty of this work. That they don’t to the same extent anymore is because of medical advances and greater awareness of postpartum depression. And more supportive partners. But the work is hard as fuck, just as it always has been.
The correctness of the OP aside, I would suspect that a large factor (which I don’t see mentioned yet) would be the number of children that people used to have.
These days, you will generally have a couple of children, within a couple of years of one another, and then stop.
In “olden times”, every once in a while, Mom would get preggers and that was that.
About 30% of the children wouldn’t survive past 5 years old, but those children would still have existed and been part of the family for that period of time. Based on a quick google, it looks like 4-5 children is regarded as a fairly common average - as a snapshot of a family at any given moment - and 9-12 children wouldn’t have been terribly uncommon.
If you’re having children somewhat regularly over the space of 15-20 years, then the older children will have a chance to practice in helping to raise them. By the time Mom stops producing new babies, the eldest daughter will start to produce her own, quite possibly never having had a point in her life where she wasn’t dealing with a baby or toddler.
I would expect (speaking from no experience) that taking care of a baby was still an effort. But anything that you’ve been doing from your youth is, probably, not going to seem so terribly oppressive.
My expectation would be that the hardship of baby raising is a malady that mostly affects those who never had a baby to take care of when they were young (outside of a plastic toy in the shape of one). And, I would expect that to fall somewhere around the middle of the 20th century, for most, based on tales of life from the beginning of the 20th century, which sound pretty similar (in this regard) to much older times.
Apologies for my having missed “newborn” in the OP.
Yes, “raising” (caring for?" a newborn would always have been inherently demanding. Combine the after effects of the birth, the draining effect of breast feeding, hormonal changes, and disturbed sleep patterns - how could it be anything else?
Honest question - how long is a child a “newborn”?
Society has made some changes that make it a lot more grueling to be a parent.
We don’t have extended family living in or around the home anymore to help.
We don’t have trusted neighbors as much as we used to.
Instead of working in or around the home, we’re expected to go elsewhere and be apart from the kids for 40+ hours a day, then come home and resume parenting. The cost of living demands it.
If the child has a fitful night sleep or illness, it’s a scramble to cover that and cover the missed work as well.
Child care has always been hard work, and now we’ve made it even harder by adding more outside work while subtracting the support systems that make it easier.
:dubious: There are plenty of counterexamples to your “expectation”, such as the remarks by one of the centenarian Delany sisters (can’t remember which one) to the effect that she had so much to do as a child in the early 1900s helping care for her younger siblings that she was happy to forgo having babies herself.
What changed around the middle of the 20th century was the availability of birth control. Hundreds of millions of women, both ones who had “had a baby to take care of when they were young” and ones who hadn’t, voluntarily limited or eliminated their obligations of childbearing and child-rearing. That’s because they were well aware that “baby raising” really is a significant hardship, not that they merely imagined it from not having had enough practice in the art as children.
In fact, your “expectation” sounds to me like just another rehash of the traditional male attitude that caring for babies isn’t really that hard, it’s just that the women who complain about it are simply not as strong/unselfish/prepared/mature/noble as their legendary foremothers. Ragging on women for expressing reluctance about the burdens of childcare (that the men themselves would be completely unwilling to deal with) is a very old male custom.
“My expectation would be that the hardship of picking row crops in 100 degree weather is a malady that mostly affects those who never had to do this when they were young.”
– Person who has never picked row crops in 100 degree weather
Not directly relevant, but I thought I’d post that a book I’m currently reading, Everyday Life in Early America (Freeman Hawke), quotes John Locke for the proposition that the “children of plain people should begin useful work at the age of 3.”
Actually kind of relevant, as the autonomy level of older children affects the amount of work involved in taking care of them. (Of course, teaching them to be successfully autonomous also involves a lot of work.) Doesn’t apply directly to newborns, though.
