Why was infanticide so popular in history if mothers bonded with kids like they do now?

[Mighty_Girl]

@TokyoBayer

The emotional bonds between parents and children are enormous. Stories after stories after stories tell of how surprised people are with the attachment they have toward their offspring.

I was one of those mothers who was confused by not feeling what I expected when my daughter was born. I was handed over a screaming poop burrito that I had never met before, and I couldn’t say I loved her, because we had just met. But I can tell you that, while I didn’t “love” her right away, I would have run into a building in flames to save her the first second I saw her. Love came later, but what I felt was primal and out of my control.

My mom lost a child that only lived about an hour, she mourned her the rest of her life, even when she had me, and bore two more children after that. She told me that the worst part was hearing “at least you have one”, or “you can have more”, as if children were interchangeable.

[md2000]

@AK84

md2000, did you seriously (except Incas) think modern day countries and societies still operate on the same principal as societies hundreds of years ago?

Since those were traditional practices… yes.

Priests did not direct weddings in ancient Greece. Instead, a set of rituals was followed, after which the couple would live together. The rituals started with baths. The groom then would go to the bride’s house in a chariot or a cart. A feast may be held at the bride’s father’s house, after which** the groom would take his bride back to his parents’ house.** They were greeted at the door by the groom’s parents and led to the hearth. There they were showered with nuts and fruit. The couple then retired to their bedroom. For the wife to be fully accepted into the groom’s family, a child had to be conceived from their union.

Rome:

. During wedding ceremonies the bride and groom often sacrificed an animal and asked the gods for a blessing.[9] Gifts were given to family and friends, and sometimes the bride and groom exchanged presents of money before the wedding. On the wedding day, the bride went with a procession to her new home, while the bridegroom went ahead of the bride to receive her. With her, the bride brought a torch lit from her family’s hearth, and was offered another torch and water, symbolizing the aquae et ignis communicatio. She was then carried over the threshold by her attendants, not her husband

Viking:

The adoption of Christianity saw many of the pagan traditions replaced or borrowed by the new faith. The ceremonies the Christian Viking’s undertook were a mixture of the two faiths and over time the pagan elements were slowly removed. The journey of the bride to the wedding venue and on to her new home, is a focus that continues to this day.

Ancient China:

Chinese marriage became a custom between 402 and 221 BC. Despite China’s long history and many different geographical areas, there are essentially six rituals, generally known as the three letters and six etiquettes (三書六禮). Unfortunately for some traditional families,** the wife’s mother cannot go to her son-in-law’s family** until one year (according to the Chinese lunar calendar or Chinese Lunar New Year) after the wedding has elapsed. However, during this one year the **daughter can go back **at any time.
…
Wedding procession: The wedding procession from the bride’s home to the groom’s home consists of a traditional band, the bride’s sedan, the maids of honor’s sedans (if there are maids of honor), and bride’s dowry in the forms other than money.

And so on…

[TokyoBayer]

@doreen

But I suspect ( although neither you nor I can possibly know) that losing a child in a time and place where 1 in 3 children die young is a different experience than losing a child in a time and place where few children die young. Just like losing a child is a different experience from losing a parent and losing a parent when you are 8 is almost certainly a different experience than losing a parent when you are 50

Yes. You suspect that.

But, while you say that it’s unknowable how people in the past felt, I disagree. Although I don’t have any superpowers, we do have access to the aforementioned journals and the pain contained there is terrible. Granted, if one has never read such accounts then it’s easy to discount them.

@Mighty_Girl

But I can tell you that, while I didn’t “love” her right away, I would have run into a building in flames to save her the first second I saw her. Love came later, but what I felt was primal and out of my control.

Having experienced that feeling first hand and then the pain of losing it, I just can’t see how those strong of emotions could have evolved in humans in the last 100 or so years since modern medicine has reduced infant mortality and whatever the number of years since reliable birth control has been available.

[doreen]

@TokyoBayer

But, while you say that it’s unknowable how people in the past felt, I disagree. Although I don’t have any superpowers, we do have access to the aforementioned journals and the pain contained there is terrible. Granted, if one has never read such accounts then it’s easy to discount them.

You are so focused on wanting to believe that people are saying it wasn’t painful that you can’t even read what I wrote. I said (neither you nor I can possibly know) that losing a child in a time and place where 1 in 3 children die young is a different experience than losing a child in a time and place where few children die young". I didn’t say it wasn’t painful then. What I said was it was likely a different experience. Just like having a miscarriage at three months is a different experience from having a stillbirth at six months and I suspect (although I don’t know) having a child who lives for only a few hours or days is different from either of those.

[TokyoBayer]

Yes, you say it could be a different experience. And you say that we can’t know these things.

Did you read the post above about the poem by Martin Luther and the pain he felt upon losing one of his babies?

Have you read any accounts of people in the past losing babies? If not then I can see why it’s easy to speculate that somehow we who live today somehow have a different set of emotions.

If your theory is correct, does it hold for all situations? If a country is in constant war and there is a really high chance of sons getting killed, would the parents feel less pain knowing that this happens to everyone?

[doreen]

NM

[zweisamkeit]

TokyoBayer, as someone who has been reading along, I want to say, with gentleness, that yes, you do seem to be misreading what others are writing. The point isn’t that past generations wouldn’t grieve or feel intense sorrow at the death of a child.

What you’ve gone through is heart-wrenchingly awful. But I think perhaps it’s unintentionally distorting people’s posts for you.

[Mighty_Girl]

@zweisamkeit

TokyoBayer, as someone who has been reading along, I want to say, with gentleness, that yes, you do seem to be misreading what others are writing. The point isn’t that past generations wouldn’t grieve or feel intense sorrow at the death of a child.

What you’ve gone through is heart-wrenchingly awful. But I think perhaps it’s unintentionally distorting people’s posts for you.

It’s entirely possible that what has changed since is the manner by which grief is expressed and not the depth of the grief itself.

[Little_Nemo]

@TokyoBayer

I think people were less vocal about it, but I can’t see how it would be something that one “accepts” without feelings. Then or now.

I didn’t say that.

[Nava]

@doreen

It’s not a matter of accepting without feelings. What I think Little Nemo is talking about is the difference right now between losing a child and losing an 80 year parent. You will grieve either way, but on some level, you expected the parent to die pretty soon and on some level , you always expected to outlive your parent. No one expects to outlive their child, no matter when the loss occurs. It seems to be a disruption of the natural order of life- and that’s the part that becomes different when 1 out of 3 children die young. There will be grief , yes, but more similar than to the grief one feels after the loss of a parent. Not the utter devastation that comes with losing a child now - it is not uncommon to hear people say " I will never be happy again" years after losing a child, while I never hear that said about the death of a parent.

Lines like “a parent should never outlive their child” aren’t exactly new, the feeling is as old as parenthood. Then again, I’ve never heard someone claim they’d never be happy again.

[ftg]

One thing to keep in mind is how big a change our culture has gone thru regarding children in the last 100+ years. To people raised on Leave it to Beaver and Happy Days it’s quite a shock to see how children used to be raised.

For example, it used to be a very common belief that children should never be praised. That the Christian way to raise children was to only criticize them, with frequent beatings of course. Otherwise they’d grow up “soft” and be susceptible to the Devil. I’ve known people raised this way who tried to raise their children that way as well.

The old maxim “children should be seen but not heard” was often generous. For many better off families the children ate separately and were generally expected to stay out of sight.

If you were really well off, then it’s full time nanny and off to board school as soon as possible. Among the well-to-do in the UK in the 1800s some even sent babies off to horrible facilities to raise them. The death rate was so high in these places that everyone knew that this was basically just a way to get rid of the kid permanently.

And those were the well off. If you were poor and living in a city, kids were all too often a major burden. So investing a lot of time and money on them couldn’t always be done. You took what life gave you and if gave you nothing then tough.

Way too many people think the recently created culture goes back forever and has always been the “natural” way of doing things. Nope.

[MandaJo]

@ftg

One thing to keep in mind is how big a change our culture has gone thru regarding children in the last 100+ years. To people raised on Leave it to Beaver and Happy Days it’s quite a shock to see how children used to be raised.

For example, it used to be a very common belief that children should never be praised. That the Christian way to raise children was to only criticize them, with frequent beatings of course. Otherwise they’d grow up “soft” and be susceptible to the Devil. I’ve known people raised this way who tried to raise their children that way as well.

The old maxim “children should be seen but not heard” was often generous. For many better off families the children ate separately and were generally expected to stay out of sight.

If you were really well off, then it’s full time nanny and off to board school as soon as possible. Among the well-to-do in the UK in the 1800s some even sent babies off to horrible facilities to raise them. The death rate was so high in these places that everyone knew that this was basically just a way to get rid of the kid permanently.

And those were the well off. If you were poor and living in a city, kids were all too often a major burden. So investing a lot of time and money on them couldn’t always be done. You took what life gave you and if gave you nothing then tough.

Way too many people think the recently created culture goes back forever and has always been the “natural” way of doing things. Nope.

Well, that’s one set of models from the past. There are others, too. It’s also worth noting that the rules indicate what people don’t do as much as they do. In the 18th c. John Locke bemoaned indulgentparents:

The great mistake I have observ’d in people’s breeding their children, has been, that this has not been taken care enough of in its due season: that the mind has not been made obedient to discipline, and pliant to reason, when at first it was most tender, most easy to be bow’d. Parents being wisely ordain’d by nature to love their children, are very apt, if reason watch not that natural affection very warily, are apt, I say, to let it run into fondness. They love their little ones and it is their duty; but they often, with them, cherish their faults too. They must not be cross’d, forsooth; they must be permitted to have their wills in all things; and they being in their infancies not capable of great vices, their parents think they may safe enough indulge their irregularities, and make themselves sport with that pretty perverseness which they think well enough becomes that innocent age. But to a fond parent, that would not have his child corrected for a perverse trick, but excus’d it, saying it was a small matter, Solon very well reply’d, aye, but custom is a great one. 51
§ 35. The fondling must be taught to strike and call names, must have what he cries for, and do what he pleases. Thus parents, by humouring and cockering them when little, corrupt the principles of nature in their children, and wonder afterwards to taste the bitter waters, when they themselves have poison’d the fountain.

I don’t think the expected loss of a parent at 80 is a good analogy for the predictable loss of a child in the pre-modern era. Losing a parent as an adult is really different than losing a parent at, say, 12, not just because you expect it but because generally speaking, by the time you are an adult your parents have shifted from being your primary emotional connection to part of a web that includes your parents, but also often a spouse, your own children, and even very close friends. And I strongly suspect that adults for whom their parent is their primary emotional relationship take the “predictable” death of that parent very differently than others.

[brossa]

The loss of a wanted child was probably as emotionally wrenching back in Ye Olden Dayes as it is today. But why assume that every pregnancy and every child were wanted back then? The same is not true today, and it wasn’t in history either. People have known about and used abortifacients for a very very long time (not all were actually effective, and certainly few were ‘safe’, but that didn’t stop people trying). If the peacock flower or pennyroyal or silphium didn’t work, then infanticide follows.

Also, consider a worldview in which a child’s congenital abnormality, or hair color, or sex, or whatever was not a medical issue or unexpected recessive trait or absolutely value-neutral as we might see it today, but rather represented an obvious curse from the gods, or the mark of Satan, or a dreadful shame on the family’s whole bloodline, etc. Maternal-infant bonding is not a magic spell that hits with 100% effect and overrides all other considerations. And that’s assuming rational choices, too - but postpartum depression/psychosis and pregnancy denial were present in the past just as they are today.

[Marcus_Flavius]

With the infant/child mortality rates being what they were in pre-modern times, I’d imagine that parents would be driven mad with grief if they were as sentimental and emotionally attached to their children as parents are today. In fact, people in past times probably had a far more ‘matter of fact’ attitude towards death in general than we do. How could they not? Death was all around them.

[md2000]

Desperation -

Found this from an earlier thread -
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-251278.html
http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2707&context=greatplainsquarterly

FIG. 2. An engraving published in Frederic Lacroix, Les mysteres de la Russie (Paris: Pagnerre, 1845) depicting wolves attacking a Russian peasant woman as she is about to throw
one of her three children to pursuing wolves. The description in The Englishwoman in Russia
(1855) corresponds precisely to this visual representation: a single peasant woman, a sledge
shaped much like a boat drawn by a single horse instead of the typical Russian troika, and a
village in the distance.

As I understood it, this Russian story is the origin of “being thrown to the wolves”?

Plus, I think it was Bruno Bettelheim’s analysis of fairly tales - they were pretty old gory stories, and one suggestion was that they were morality tales for the whole village. Hansel and Gretel, for example, pointed out that it was OK to abandon children (as the parents did) when you could not feed them, but never OK (based on the punishment for the “witch”) to eat children.

[TSBG]

TokyoBayer, I respect you for sharing your story. Though I don’t know you personally and probably never will, it grieves me because I have come to know you through your excellent, informative posts and I don’t wish suffering on anyone.

I do disagree with your analysis of what historical writings show us though. We know the pain of parents in ages past who lost small children because they took the trouble to write it down. What record do we have of of parents who thought “this is a pity, but my child was only an infant after all”? Perhaps none, because it was not thought worth recording.

I don’t think there’s any good way to know how masses of people felt before the era of wide literacy. But still, absence of evidence is not, etc.

I think we can see in the past century an evolution of attitudes about a different kind of death–being killed in battle for one’s country. Death in war was grieved over but seen as necessary and even noble. Men were shamed for not going off to war to risk death. I think in general people in the U.S. (where I am) still respect the sacrifice of soldiers and their families, especially those who don’t return, but there’s no longer a culture-wide expectation that young men “man up” and face death with equanimity.

The analogy isn’t perfect, but I think we do see that feelings about a certain kind of death have evolved rather quickly.

[Mijin]

Murder in general was much more common in the past. It was just tougher times all round.

And being able to override our instincts is what makes us human; being sat in an office chair writing up powerpoints is also overriding your instincts: to run around some meadow punching things…I think that’s what we used to do.

Granted, a mother’s love for her child is a pretty strong instinct to override, but put it in a context where infant deaths are commonplace anyway; during birth, or later unexpectedly, or as part of a long drawn-out illness.

Imagine that latter scenario: you have a baby, but it has some kind of strange illness. No-one has the first clue what the cause is. All you can do is pray, but it’s ineffective. And generally-speaking most babies born with such serious illnesses in your experience will croak before adolescence. And your family is very poor: you’re not sure you even have the resources to provide for a healthy child (who can eventually help with farm work) let alone a sickly one (that may never be able to). So what do you do?

I’m not saying all cases were like this, it’s meant to be an illustrative example. Nor am I saying I would commit infanticide; it’s hard to know as I live in a different world with completely different values.

[eburacum45]

[QUOTE=AK84]

Archeologists have found grave of small children correct. They could have been killed in sacrifices. Or it could merely be a burial place for those who died young.
[/quote]

@Little_Nemo

There are inscriptions.

Note that not everybody accepts that the Carthaginian mass graves were connected with sacrifice.
Study Debunks Millennia-old Claims of Systematic Infant Sacrifice in Ancient Carthage

But I’d be very interested to read the inscriptions you mentioned. Carthage is a bit of a closed book nowadays, and any extra information is welcome.

[TokyoBayer]

I wonder something. If we could back in time, several hundred years ago and give a glimpse of the future to those people.

Would they wonder if we loved our spouses less, if there wasn’t as much heartbreak when a marriage came apart because these future people are so different. Look at those people in 2017, more than half of the marriages end in a divorce. It’s so common, an everyday occurrence. It couldn’t be as much of a tragedy. They must not allow themselves the luxury of an attachment since they know that the odds are that they’re will not work out.

I question this logic, that somehow having something terrible happen frequently makes the pain less. Certainly this analogy isn’t perfect, but we all know the pain of losing a first love or getting a divorce. Yes, it hurts like hell, and just because losing the love of a partner happens to everyone, doesn’t make it easier.

I met Japanese people who were the children of WWII. They grew up in households with a philosophy which many posters in this thread are undoubtedly picturing when they think of how people used to be when infant deaths were common.

These people saw their older brothers, cousins, fathers and uncles go off to war. The nation had been told for decades that to lay down one’s life was the greatest service a son could give his emperor.

The father of one girlfriend had been a Zero pilot, survived one of the most bloody air battles in the Pacific and was slated to become a Kamikaze.

There are documentaries on TV and books written about this generation. My ex-FIL lost six cousins, my ex-MIL lost more.

Worse are the stories of the Japanese settlers in Manchuria. People who raised up large family and worked the kids on the farm. Many, many of the babies died on the frontier.

When the war ended, they had to flee back home. Many were completely broke and without food. There were many who had to abandon their small children and babies because they just couldn’t take them back.

This was a generation of Japanese which had given the ferocious fighters of the Pacific.

If anyone had the ability to turn off their feelings for the babies, it would have been these people. And yet, the raw pain still evident decades later gave testimony of the horrible choice they were forced to make. Denied the ability to outwardly mourn, these mothers kept up brave faces in public. Yet, you could see the pain in their eyes as they were interviewed.

I believe that desperate people do desperate things. Things which we cannot conceive of and what we would recoil away in horror. People also do things because of social pressure. Even terrible things.

But I don’t believe that the pain is less. It may be masked. Desperate people hurt so much that they may be numb. Humans have a number of psychological defense mechanisms such as denial and disassociation.

However, the bond with your child is so strong and the only way that there would be less pain for people in the past is if the love weren’t as strong.

This is my major objection. It’s human nature to divide people up into “us” and “them” and then to deny that “they” are the fundamentally the same people. Somehow “they” must not feel pain like we would. I don’t buy that. People of loved and mourned their children for eons.

People are resilient. My wife went from wanting to die to be with our son in heaven back into one of those individuals who love life more than anything else.

When we first went into the support group, it would take everything to not cry from the beginning to the end. There were those who did.

You think that the world is going to open up and swallow you. You want it. But it doesn’t and eventually you become better. You then are there for those who are still in shock.