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Children in European and American History
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| of the deaths of infants in Medieval England were due to fire – probably occurring because of a combination of busy parents, wooden cradles and linen swaddling, all too close to a hearth. 1.
Over half
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| of European children in Medieval Europe were being cared for by wet nurses – usually for about the first two years of their lives. If families could afford it, they would send the baby to live with the wet nurse for those years, until, about the 12th century, when wealthier families began to have the wet nurses live with them, instead of sending the babies away. 2.
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| “Peasant children’s stark lives permitted little time for play, and the few toys that might be found in a household would have been crudely manufactured homespun items. The games and toys of childhood for the well-to-do were varied and plentiful. The universal appeal of these toys, spanning millennia, is an amazing example of how humanity’s fundamental sensibilities are genetically connected to both the past and the future. There were dolls, doll carriages pulled by mice, toy knights and soldiers, miniature windmills, balls, and additionally, playground equipment such as swings, maypoles and seesaws. Children of the manor, however, most likely had toys made by toy-makers, who began to appear, it seems, during the thirteenth century. By 1400 professional toy-makers had shops in Nuremberg and Augsbury and began to export their wares to Italy and France. Manor children also played chess and backgammon and learned falconry and fencing.” 3.
50 percent
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| of children in Medieval Europe died before the age of five years old. 4.
“A frequently cited diary entry from an Italian visiting England reads as follows:
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| ‘The want of affection in the English is strongly manifested towards their children, for having kept them at home till they arrive at the age of seven or nine years at the utmost, they put them out, both males and females, to hard service in the houses of other people, binding them generally for another seven or nine years.’” 5.
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| “Families, however, did not sever ties with their children; conversely, they always maintained contact with them. English diaries confirm this fact.” 6.
About 30 percent
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| of the slaves in Medieval Florence, Padua, Venice, Sicily, and Naples were children. Women who were enslaved, or the mothers of infants, were sold into slavery, and so were their children. Trying to avoid this fate, women seemed to have frequently abandoned their children: it happened so often that the city of Genoa established a foundling hospital just to take care of the abandoned babies of slaves. 7.
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| In the Middle Ages, "Adolescents still lived and worked around the house. Male adolescents spent time fishing and gathering rather than following the pattern of their fathers in working primarily in the fields or at a craft. Like younger children, and unlike adults, they still had more accidents in the home than in a workplace. When they did move into adult areas of work, they did so gradually, only taking up plowing and heavy fieldwork in their late teens. Even the games of teenagers were ball games and target practice, not archery contests and wrestling. Urban records, particularly apprentice contracts, provide even more convincing evidence for an adolescent life-stage. Apprenticeship in London began at about age 14 in the fourteenth century and increased to 18 in the fifteenth century. Parents putting their children into apprenticeships and masters receiving them made a contract that bound the youth to rules of behavior proscribing 'adolescent' misbehavior. They were not to wear fancy dress, participate in gaming and theater, or waste their master's money." 8.
Some cash, and four to six sheep –
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| the going price for a child servant in the Middle Ages. “Some families made sharecropping agreements that indentured both boys and girls to domestic service, exchanging them, for example, for four to six sheep, in and twelve livres in cash. Children generally were twelve years old when they began domestic service, and by fourteen years of age, such children were expected to pay a poll tax." 9.
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| “Urban children grew up in severely crowded quarters. Nearly half of the homes of craftsmen had only one room. To make more room, infants sand toddlers would be sent out to wet nurses and latent children to schools, and adolescents were apprenticed.” 10.
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| “. . . moments after birth when the midwife placed the newborn on her lap and began molding and smoothing the head and pulling the arms and legs to their full extension, rubbing and shaping them so that the child would grow straight and tall. She then preserved her handiwork by swaddling the infant in bands of linen wrapped tightly around the legs and torso. Another band held the child’s arms straight against the body. Yet another piece of cloth, the stay band, she secured at the forehead and shoulders with additional strips of cloth. The end result was an immobile little mummified package, about the size and shape of a loaf of bread, which could be placed in a cradle or basket or even hung from a peg on the wall. . . .
“Beyond the perceived physical benefits from swaddling, adults believed that, without swaddling bands to keep the legs extended and the back straight, the naturally curving infant body would never grow into an upright human being.” 12.
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| “The swaddled infant slept in a cradle, a term that referred to any bed prepared for a babe, whether it was a wicker basket, old box, chest . . . . What really mattered was that any separate bed was believed better for the infant than being put to sleep with its mother, nurse, or some other older person. Adults, exhausted by hard physical work and commonly dulled with alcohol, could all too easily roll on an infant in the night and smother it. Since ‘laying over’ [an adult sleeping with an infant accidentally smothering the baby to death while asleep] was a highly feared form of infant mortality, the child who slept alone slept most safely.” The cradle was moveable, and went with the parents, in different parts of the house, near the fire, near the parents’ bed, as needed." 13.
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| “Babies outgrew both swaddling clothes and cradles by the end of their first year. Long petticoats helped to keep infants warm and effectively foiled any attempt the baby made to crawl. Parents and physicians alike viewed crawling on all fours, not as a natural stage of human development, but as a bad habit that, if not thwarted, would remaining the baby’s primary form of locomotion for the rest of his life. As late as 1839 . . . many American mothers still prohibited their little children from crawling.” 14.
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| “Infancy represented such a precarious existence that parents regarded it essentially as a state of illness. Babies needed to be protected assiduously and pushed beyond infancy as quickly as possible. Growing up meant growing strong and gaining sufficient autonomy to be able to take care of oneself.” 15.
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| “Between 1670 and 1790 the number of foundlings admitted to the Hotel-Dieu in Paris increased over tenfold from 700 per year to 7,500 per year. Between 1771 and 1773 the Hotel-Dieu recorded mortality rates between 62 percent and 75 percent. French church registries of the same period show that in the private sector the death rate among infants was only 18 percent. The Hotel-Dieu policy of contracting infants outside the hospice to wet nurses additionally contributed to infant morbidity and mortality. . . . One wet nurse was given twelve infants to care for over a twenty-year period. Not one survived.” 16.
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| Of the 21,000 babies born in Paris in 1780, 19,000 of them were sent out of the city to be raised by wet nurses. 18.
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| “Meneurs ferried three to five infants in baskets hitched to the backs of donkeys. These trips sometimes took up to a week. There was no nutrition for the infants, except a rag soaked in watered wine for hydration. Infants were known to fall out of the bottoms of baskets; many died and casually were discarded on the roadside. Empty slots in the baskets quickly were filled in the next town en route, since meneurs were paid by the number of infants delivered to the hospices. . . . A law in 1773, however, did not outlaw such trade. Instead, meneurs were ordered to use plan-bottomed wagons lined with straw and covered in canvas and to assign an accompanying nurse, both to nourish infants and to ensure that none fell out of the wagons.” 19.
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| “[Renaissance] guild apprenticeships that had been so respected . . . in time became an anachronism. . . . less-lengthy training courses evolved; they were called fellowships or journeymanships, and adolescents were schooled in relatively short periods of time in trades such as carpentry, tanning, dyeing, and basketry. Since only one in ten journeymen attended school to learn reading and writing, journeymen could be productive immediately, even as they grew in experience.” 20.
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| “Mostly, families, and pointedly, children had to turn to factory work and semiskilled labor, such as brick making, in order to survive.” 21.
One-half
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| of all British girls, and one-third of the boys, aged five to nine years old were working full time in 1861. Full time in the 1860s was 12 to 15 hours a day. 22.
As young as three,
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| children were working in British and American cotton mills and other factories of the 1700s. Children were sometimes flogged if they couldn't keep up with the work. 23.
Almost 100,000
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| children under 15 years of age worked as domestics in 1700's London. 24.
Almost 50 percent
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| of all deaths in London in 1741 were children. Of these, one-third were children under the age of two. "The figure went up to 43 percent when children three years old to ten years old were counted, and an additional 3 percent when ten to twenty year olds were added . . . . ‘Consumption’ or pneumonia was responsible for 25 percent of these deaths; ‘fevers’ caused another 25 percent; 15 percent died of confirmed tuberculosis, and 5 percent from smallpox . . . . In England overall, from 1730 to 1749, 74.5 percent of child deaths struck children under five years of age. That figure dropped to 63 percent in the years 1750 to 1769, and further still, to 51.5 percent from 1770 to 1789.” 25.
88 percent
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| of deaths in Dublin in the mid-1700s were children. In that period, children were 60 percent of Barcelona's deaths, 45 percent in Paris, and 40 percent in Florence and St. Petersburg. One of the main causes theorized for the high death: feeding the children with a solution that that was five percent opium. 26.
About 800,000
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| children three to 12 years old were listed as urchins in the 1851 English census. That was 20 percent of all children counted in the census. 27.
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| “The cruelty and horror of violence in the young republic were especially visible in big cities, where postrevolutionary executions were celebrated by bloodthirsty crows. it was not unusual for children to witness either executions or their aftermath – beheaded bodies transported in open carts across town. During the Reign of Terror, between May 1793 and June 1794, 1,255 were guillotined publicly in the Place de la Revolution. Over the next two months, and additional 1,270 lost their heads. So inured were children to the events and so calloused the populace that miniature toy models of “La Sainte Guillotine” were sold shamelessly in the streets, together with living sparrows as victims. . . Children were the most innocent of victims in a country filled with despair and poverty. Urban orphans of war and revolution, ‘street-wise’ and precociously hardened children, often became street urchins and vagabonds, gamins who worked as messengers, street vendors, acrobats, and scavengers who collected wood, glass, rags – anything that could be sold. Metals picked from streams paid best, at five centimes per pound.” 28.
121,000
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| To stop them from an early loss of innocence, Victorian parents fed their children plain, bland, simple foods (believing spicy food might stimulate them too much), had them wear clothes that wouldn’t lead to accidental genital stimulation, wouldn’t let them play games that would lead to problems (ride a hobby horse), wouldn’t engage in activities that would lead to intimate situations, etc. 30.
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| Children were now sleeping in cribs – from infancy to toddlers. The idea was now not to prevent them from walking, but it was to keep them in a safe environment. The young babies/kids were isolated from adult activity in the home, kept in “swings” (indoor swing seats they couldn’t get out of, be it a baby or toddler) – or the nursery (which was a playroom / bedroom) with cribs and regulated schedules, etc. (Except for dinner – in the US, the kids usually ate with the adults, but they ate the bland puddings while grown-ups ate grown-up food; in Europe, the kids wouldn’t have eaten with them either). When the American kids got older, they got their own rooms, because getting their own room was a start of their individualism. (In Europe, even wealthy families, had the siblings sharing rooms.) 31.
Over 100,000
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| children at work in New York area factories in 1873. 32.
25,000
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| The number of New York street children sent to the West by the Children's Aid Society by 1873 – sending about 3,000 a year for 20 years. The society had another 9,000 in night school in New York. 33.
12,000
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| “The popularity of educational toys [begun in the 1770s] continued and expanded in the twentieth century, but what was really new was the acceptance and encouragement of a fantasy world for children. Colonial and Victorian parents shunned make-believe as the propagation of falsehood. At best, make-believe confused children; at worst, it was lying . Only with the gradual acceptance of the mischievous child in the twentieth century did middle-class parents accept fantasy as a harmless pleasure for children. To the traditional stories of children facing moral dilemmas now were added the stories of Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh, The Wizard of Oz, and the tale of Beatrix Potter. Soft cuddly Brownies, Kewpies . . . and, of course, bears, filled the playroom. These were the first stuffed toys, and the tactile pleasure the toys offered their little owners brought a sense of comfort and security. . .. Children live in a world where everyone is bigger, stronger, and smarter than they. They therefore can find relief and delight in the company of someone smaller and weaker than themselves whom they can dominate or protect. . . Soft toys have remained popular throughout the twentieth century and beyond and have become such a commonplace of childhood that we tend to forget how very modern the concept actually is. 35.
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| By 1903, the New York Foundling Hospital had been in operation 30 years: it had had to find homes for over 40,000 children, while in New York, the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children took in as many as 15,000 children ("in many cases cruelty on the part of their own parents, in others on the part of those in whose custody the children have been left by parents unwilling or incompetent to take care of them.") in one year. 36.
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| “Separate children’s rooms remained important, but by the last half of the twentieth century few parents believed that it was possible to isolate their children from the realities of the world in order that they might remain carefree and innocent as long as possible. . . . The modern home became permeable to knowledge . . . . The protected child was once again the child who has been prepared to cope successfully when faced with the adult world. What Victorian parents sought to preserve as innocence in their children, modern parents feared as ignorance that put a child at risk.” 37.
Pink and Blue
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| didn't really start being used for baby clothes until the 1950s. Before that, their clothes didn't saying anything about their gender: all children, boys and girls, wore white. And there really wasn't a historical gender difference between children's clothing. Instead, their clothes were interchangeable: baby boys wore dresses until the Depression. Later, as boys were wearing shorts and pants, girls gradually adopted those clothes as their own – but boys never emulated the girls in the same way. 38.
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| 8. Barbara Hanawalt, "The Child in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance," Beyond the Century of the Child: Cultural History and Developmental Psychology, Willem Koops and Michael Zuckerman (eds). University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA., p. 33 et seq. (2003), pp. 32-33. Available through: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0812237048/qid=11237763November sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-0887680-4192712?v=glance&s=books
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| 32. ________, "The Little Laborers of New York City," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. xlvii, no. cclxxix, pp. 325-332 (August 1873), p. 322-327.
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| 33. ________, "The Little Laborers of New York City," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. xlvii, no. cclxxix, pp. 325-332 (August 1873), p. 325, 327, 330.
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| 34. ________, "The Little Laborers of New York City," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. xlvii, no. cclxxix, pp. 325-332 (August 1873), p. 330.
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| 36. Ida Husted Harper, "Right of the Child," The North American Review, Vol. 176 p. 106, et seq. (January 1903), p. 109.
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