I haven’t crunched the numbers, but I question whether it is more cost effective to raise a bunch of children as farm hands or simply hire farm hands. And don’t forget, you can’t fire your children if you can no longer afford them.
You can’t fire them (your children), but you can send them elsewhere to work which was done quite frequently. And even in societies that no longer had legal slavery, you could usually sell unwanted children informally.
I lived with my grandparents on the farm in the 1960’s. The original house I lived in was an old prairie house built in 1890. It did not have central heat or indoor plumbing. Heat was provided by a giant cast-iron cook stove in the center of the house. It had a lot of thermal mass, so you would cook on it (and heat water for baths in the portable galvanized bath tub that hung on the wall when not in use). After supper, the stove would keep the house warm enough until bedtime, at which point we’d climb under about 10 lbs of blankets. Wearing wool socks to bed was a good idea. And sometimes ear muffs or toques, and even mittens.
One luxury we had was a hand pump that could draw water from the well without having to go outside to get it. The bathroom was an outhouse, But we had a little privy closet in the house with a chemical toilet we were allowed to use on the coldest winter nights.
That situation lasted for a few years until my grandfather could afford to build a new house, which was a typical 1970’s bungalow with modern hardware and plumbing. It was a fairly unique situation. Most other farms in the area had already modernized their houses long ago, but it was a Mennonite community so a combination of poverty and tradition/resistance to change kept some farms like ours unimproved for a long time. The first tractor I drove was an old Farmall from the depression era. Open air metal seat, crank to start it, etc. The things were unkillable, so poor farmers in the region used them even in the 1970’s when everyone else was driving modern tractors with cabs, air conditioning and stereo systems.
No regrets. I have very fond memories of that life, and almost no bad ones. Little kids can put up with a lot if they have a loving family around them.
I mean, in the long run, the net economic value of the average human has to be positive (creates more value than consumes), otherwise we’d have all died out long ago. So, yes, it is generally more cost effective to raise farmhands than hire them.
That starts to be less true when your grown children move away and don’t help support you, which is one reason rich countries where kids move out of the household at adulthood tend to have fewer kids. Kids are much more expensive when you have to pay for all the rearing without getting much of their output in return. They’re only really net producers in their teen years, and that’s only if you discount all the sass.
And if you had a special-needs child, they were often shipped off to an institution.
One of my prime annoyances is the way childbirth is portrayed on TV and in movies, which is almost entirely inaccurate. For many of us it is not at all a “horrible painful excruciating experience.”
Huh… My first delivery went so smoothly that the maternity nurse exclaimed, “this is the delivery we all dream of having” but it was pretty painful. My second baby was breech, and as I pushed his bum out, I remember thinking, “now I know how you can die from pain”. Fortunately, it didn’t last too long, but then I still had to push out the head…
I mean, these weren’t crippling experiences or anything. Both went fast, too. But yeah, “excruciatingly painful” is a decent first order description.
Our first slept through the night immediately. He stopped napping at 2, right before his brother was born. Son number 2 never slept more than 2 hours at a time until he was 2, and even then he got up at 4:30 or 5. Ms. P and I shared one job until both were in school, so I experienced being a stay at home dad every other day. It was definitely tiring, but I would trade it for anything. Lucky for us, kid number 2 did nap. As a young adult, kid number one does nap when he needs to. Kid number two has no trouble sleeping until noon now. His college job has him getting up at 7 or so on Fridays, though. Heh, heh.
Childbirth is often depicted as extremely painful right until the baby pops out. High drama, high intensity. But when labor ends and the baby enters the world crying, so does the scene. Fade out and them cut to mother peacefully holding a healthy cooing baby, both calm, clean, and comfortable, looking longingly into each other’s faces as if all is well and perfect. You don’t see the state of her body under the blanket or how much pain she’s in. Because it’s not relevant to the story anymore.
The audience is left with the impression that childbirth is always excruciating, yes. But I don’t think that’s more unrealistic than completely leaving out the less dramatic but equally difficult aftermath of childbirth. While the majority of women probably come out of it just fine, a lot have complications like vaginal tears that require stitches, hemorrhoids that take weeks to resolve, and incontinence that never goes away. And debilitating post partum depression.
If young women nowadays are put off getting pregnant due to fear, I think it’s probably from more exposure (online) to the stories of women who have experienced the more traumatic effects of childbirth. TV has always relied on the huffing, puffing trope of labor; nothing new about this at all.
There’s a wikipedia page with a list of the postpartum confinement customs of various groups. here Leviticus 12 is evidence that the practice is old. The post-partum woman is ritually unclean for 1 or 2 weeks (depending on if it was a boy or girl) and then can’t be purified for touching anything sacred or being in a sacred place for 33 or 66 days.
Childbirth was seen as dangerous. Both the mother and child were weak and susceptible to killing fevers.
Raising farmhands is cheaper than hiring them, unless hired hands will work for only room and board. Five or six years of small feeding, and then they can take over progressively more chores as the farmer and his wife get older and slow down. The son will work for free until he gets the whole farm when dad is too far gone (one way or another) to work. Hence the old saw that children were the pension plan in the good old days.
(The daughter will work for free until she goes off to be some other farmer’s wife and even then, may end up being the old-age caretaker).
But yes, nowadays children are financially only a drain. Even when I was young, there was delivering papers and caddying, and even bagging in grocery stores. I worked for a few teenage years as a page in the library after school. There seem to be a lot fewer such jobs available to kids today. It’s the lemonade stand or nothing. (It’s not that my family needed the money, although I’m sure some did. It’s just that it made for plenty more spending money, growing a sense of responsibility and appreciation of the cost of things, etc.)
My ancestors include several large polygamous families. Several wives and 22 to 25 children range. If a farmer could afford multiple wives, they often became richer because of all the free help. That happened to one of my gr-great grandfathers. Unfortunately, the wealth isn’t divided among all of the children.
Daughters can really be a burden in many cultures as it costs money when they are married.
Yes, I was thinking in the more traditional, heavily settled areas like Europe and much of the third world. North America’s history was about a shortage of labour and abundance of land, so big families worked well. For places like rural England or Germany or Italy, extra hands beyond a certain point were a cost, not a burden (Heir and spare?) Land can only produce so much, no matter how much work you put into it. Then again, too many sons creates either very small fragmented farms or a class of second and third and later sons with no land. As you mention, the cost of daughters - no surprise the imbalance of male preference seems to be strongest in the areas with more expensive dowry traditions.
Fairly recent IMO. Back in the day, 1970’s and prior to, mothers stayed at home to raise their children, that was their job, and they knew so prior to tying themselves down to marriage, etc. Additionally, folks back in the day weren’t readily interested in keeping up with anyone other than themselves, so they got by with and made do with, and they borrowed little and/or nothing.
Fast-forward to today’s generation, where daycares raise peoples children (don’t even think about getting me started on that), and newbies in life want it all yesterday. New homes filled with the best, brand spanking new, top of the line vehicles, world holidays, and the list goes on, so naturally good-old-fashioned traditional childrearing doesn’t figure in. There’s no time for that, but yet people want it all. All-out marriage ceremonies, 2, 3, or more kids, and on and on it goes. So much of it, if not all of it calls out to me an says… LOOK AT ME!
The way I see it, our world is producing some of the laziest people in history today. “Poor me” seems to be the general standard of today, because this is too hard, and that’s too hard, or I can’t.
Gosh, I remember my mom bent over the edge of the bathtub washing diapers by-hand back in the late 60’s, her hands so red and raw, yet she never complained, and she never missed preparing 3 meals a day, 7 days a week for us, and that included when she was sick. Our clothes were pressed, the house was clean, the bills were paid, the banking was done, the kids taken care of, and then some.
Heck, there are mothers today (many of them) that cry over not being able to afford diapers for their babies, and I think to myself, REALLY? Has society lost that much ground where mothers of today have no concept of reusable cloth diapers? It’s as if the only thing available is disposable diapers, and in the absence of, the general consensus seems to be, WHAT AM I GOING TO DO?
NO WONDER RAISING A NEWBORN IS GRUELING FOR TODAY’S GENERATION!
You have some strange ideas and I won’t be subscribing to your newsletter. :rolleyes:
I’m not disappointed, just as I don’t want you being disappointed in me for not smelling your wort. 
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Many women worked outside the home, not only in the 1970’s, but for many years before that.
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For women in previous eras who didn’t “work outside the home” in the modern sense, most of the time “their job” wasn’t only raising their children. It was sharing in whatever the other work was that was done by the household, whether that was farming, clothing production, or whatever. Many men in previous eras didn’t “work outside the home” in the modern sense either – the home itself was a production unit.
Cite please?
That attitude most certainly wasn’t invented later than 1970. It’s probably as old as humans – though in some societies it takes the form of ‘being able to give away more than one’s neighbors’, instead of ‘being able to accumulate more than one’s neighbors’.
Even if you’re talking specifically about new cars – it was a Big Deal, to a lot of people in the 1950’s and 1960’s (and probably some places earlier) to be able to have a New Car Every Year to show off to the neighbors. Before people showed off their new cars, they showed off their fast horses.
I am sorry for your mother; especially if that’s what the rest of her family thought she ought to prove her virtue by doing. My mother had a washing machine by approximately 1950.
Before washing machines, people who could afford it hired (or enslaved) somebody else for that job.
I’m certainly not saying that it’s more virtuous to make a slave wash the diapers than to do it oneself – it’s not. (Though I think other family members should have helped your mother, presuming any were old enough and abled enough to do so. “Female enough” doesn’t count.) But wanting to get out of the job, or for that matter succeeding in getting out of it, is in no way a brand new phenomenon.