How do you think the past would have unfolded differently if our ancestors parented more like we do?

[hereidrawtheline]

I have wondered this for my whole life really! I read shedloads of history. Non-fiction and fiction. I actually dont read anything contemporary!

I know from my extensive experience of first hand memoirs, biographies etc that parents loved their children the same as we do now - for the most part. Many mothers and fathers I could name who I have read much about were utterly and totally in love with their children and suffered much hardship for them, just as I would for mine. So I am not taking away from that.

But nevertheless there were a lot more parents back then who schooled themselves to be distant. They were raised like that and they passed it on to their children. There are also countless examples of this. The Hanovarian Georges were famous for hating their heirs. I am reading the last book of the Wideacre series - fiction granted but well written and there are a lot of really shitty parents in it. Parents who were aristocrats who were happy to have their children raised by staff and see them at Christmas and never more, and parents who were paupers who would sell their children into slavery and then buy gin.

Now I hasten to add, I really am not ignorant!! I understand the circumstances that these people were in, and the level of education they had, compassion they had been shown when they were children, and opportunities available to them. So no one tell me to put my judgey pants away, and please re-read my second paragraph! Although certainly some parents past and present I would judge! Sometimes things are black and white. But that is a whole other thread and one I darent start...

I am hypothesising what the world would be like had more past parents been more like present parents. So... more modern levels of "normal" childcare. Lots of love and attention. Unconditional. Showing emotions. Not getting whipped for offences. Not being sold for a start. Instilling confidence and love and humour before fear and etiquette.

So would women's rights have come about sooner? Because women would have been seen sooner as individuals to be loved and valued and not used and sold? Would men be more in touch with their feelings and would rape and domestic violence be less prevalent now? Would medical science have advanced faster? Would poverty in parts of the world already be eradicated?

Or is the opposite the case? Did we need to go through an emotional dark age for some reason? Are we indeed still coming out of that dark age? Clearly the world is not "sorted" so we have a long way to go but I look at my son and I am grateful, even when he is driving me up the wall with fury, that he is mine, and that I have been able to love him as I do, and not pushed by society to fit me and him in a box I dont want us to be in.

I actually got to this question by contemplating child labour. Which of course is sadly still happening. I should say that although I know a fair amount of the history of the poor I know a hell of a lot of aristocratic history. Firstly because I find it fascinating, but also of course because more is written about it, for obvious reasons. So some of the questions posed above apply more to the rich than the poor but I thought I would open the conversation up anyway.

Well, I suspect Tudor history could have been completely different !

It's something that I've often wondered too, TBH. "Bad" parenting can have huge repercussions on a person to the extnet of causing personality disorders and some childcare practices common in historical times must have been pretty damaging.

yes that is right! I mean think of the constant deprivation of love many children grew up with. And the knowledge that their worth lay in what they could provide for their family - that goes for rich and poor.

Catherine the Great's husband was a total psychotic as was their son but a lot of that can be traced to beatings that their tutors thought appropriate for them.

but the level of parenting you can provide, and the length of it, seems largely economically driven - children are still sold now in poorer countries by poorer parents. we are so rich in this country, in this time, by comparison.

i used to wonder so much what made so many people so eager to join the army for the First World War - then I read Akenfield by Ronald Blythe and of course the answer in many cases was the chance to eat three decent meals a day. it's hard for me to recapture the prevalence of hunger as a fact of life and a motivation.

I do wonder at situations such as the Eton that Gladstone attended - where the scholars were simply locked up at night without adults - Lord of the Flies had nothing on it apparently.

but then i look at parenting in my own family - my father's upbringing, in a rich and privileged family, was something you would think any parent would walk over broken glass to avoid, and yet it was entirely normal for my grandparents' circle, and he always talks about it as a good childhood (I think he's damaged by it myself).

[rambles]

you are right about a lot of bad parenting being economically driven but what about the ones that werent/arent? What about the ones who sold their children in marriage without a backward glance or thought for if they would be happy or safe? Or even plotted to kill their children for various reasons. Or were just totally ambivalent towards them? You just see parents like that a lot in history, and yet I know that we as humans have not changed overmuch in the last couple of hundred years. We have the same capacity to love, and indeed many people in history did love as we do now. So I just wondered where education and love met? And how things would be different if they had met sooner? And why they dont meet more naturally to everyone?

I'd guess a lot of the better off parents never really bonded with their children as it was standard practice to use wet nurses etc. Children were brought up in their nurseries and may have had little contact with the parents so it would have been emotionally easier to marry them off or use them as political pawns.

Perhaps the bulk of parents in antiquity did a reasonable job but they were never going to ever feature in a history book! Although Thomas More seems to have had a fairly "normal" (by modern standards) upbringing.

but many people now clearly do plot to kill and neglect their children. No we haven't changed much, but the discourse has changed. Now it is a given in the general culture that I am familiar with that the greatest experience you can have is the love you feel for your children, and people talk in those terms whatever their actions towards their children actually are. In the past, that sort of extreme transcendent love was more likely to be described as love for God IMO.

I think it is very hard to track any of these cultural viewpoints without regard to which country, exact timepoint and cultural group we are talking about. Do we talk about early 19th C European Romantic viewpoints (the famous divide between Rousseau's promotion of 'natural' childhood and his dumping of his children in an orphanage) or the late 18th C as experienced by Jane Austen's family, where children were routinely sent out to live with other families from some ridiculous age (I've blocked out the details - was it a few months old to seven years old???? surely not) or even the 50s in this country, where I have read that most people responded to the question 'who would you most want to survive, your partner or your children' by saying, 'my partner, I can always have more children'...

am very muddled now!

we would have starved

I reckon that having children by choice - instead of as an annoying side-product of sex - has made a big difference. Queen Victoria hated pregnancy and childbirth, didn't she? And was very ambivalent about the resulting children. But she had no choice but to keep on producing "like a cow".

If we had parented as we do now then we would never have been allowed to have 12 childrn in the house on our own - it would have been against health and saftey and the older children would not have ben allowed to look after the younger children whilst mum and dad went to work therefore no work would have been done cos little children of 8-9 were left to look after the babies whilst mum did the laundry for the street to earn some money.

The rich may have faired much different but the paupers were the great unwashed and they were far more in abundance. They did love there children but didn't have the time to be able to look after them in the way we do today.

Vaccinations would have been snapped up especially for scarlett fever and pox which killed a good many childre. Have seen where mum and dad buried one on Monday, another on Wednesday then next on friday and the fourth on the following Monday - it was hard and they did suffer, to then see the same family baptise another baby the following year was pleasing but not so good when you saw them at the graveside again with that child.

Very good point, mrstittlemouse.

Ivy - why do you think we would have starved? I was thinking the opposite really. Surely a greater love and value of the human life would have led to more humane farming and working conditions? Your paragraph about vaccinations was so sad, I have been to cemeteries like that.

Hereisdrawtheline - I find it interesting after the first Black Death epidemic, wages for labourers went up afterwards (many tenants did quite well as they were able to take over their landlord's farms) but after the second wave of deaths less than a generation later, wages were pegged to stop the same thing happening again. yet the same situation had occurred.

hmmm Simplysally, I dont know why that happened like that! How strange. Could there have been a lot of other factors that determined it parallel to the Black Death?

Well the Battle of Britain would have been like one of those Armstrong and Miller sketches with the WW2 fighter pilots - here So we would have lost.

(Sorry if this was meant to be a serious thread).

It was Kathy, so you shall now be whipped with a wet noodle as per MN etiquette.

Working time directives, health & safety assessemnts, methods statements and so on.

oh god no simplysally not you too! Right, wet noodles all around! I was talking about corn riots and uprisings and wars on foreign soils whatnot!

Well the battle of Hastings was partly lost as the English soldiers were waiting for the Cheshire contingent to march from York (where they had been having a minor ruck with the Scots) to Sussex. They took a bit longer than anticipated and William went ahead anyway without waiting for the whistle.

Jolly unsporting, what.

Harold should have had his eyeprotectors on though.

I dont think we have a greater love for our children or value for life than our ancestors.

There is a french writer, I cant place his name, he wrote how the English did so love thier children so much and pu so much value on their offspring. it is in some ways a misconception that children were not loved as much by their parents in generations past.

As for value on life, it is still low now and then it would have been harder through politics to change. The men and woman of England and Wales were still denied the vote until 1928, change did come but it has been slow.

As for starving this was due to the fact that parents today do have life easier (some may not think so agreed) and if you put them back in time to parent in 1809 their children would starve as they floundered to parent in a much harder time, food and life was different and our skills today as parents would not be of need, putting food in childrens mouths and leaving children at home to work the fields would be needed.

I don't think that it would have been possible to be todays sort of parent in the past. Women had so many children and the majority lived in poverty. Just getting a roof over their heads and enough to eat took all their time and effort. Children had to grow up quickly, the older ones had to look after the younger ones as soon as the next baby came along. When they were strong enough they had to work, the family needed the income.
I think that we are immensely privileged these days.

One of the biggest differences would be school - schools are really very new at 134, so how we parent today centers mainly around schooling for 12-13 years, whereas our ancestors didn't go to school.

That depends Ivy - the upper classes/aristocratic children would have had some education in their teens albeit perhaps living with another family to learn the protocol of their society and/or make useful alliances/contacts. There would have been Dame schools in lots of villages as well (how good the education actually was is probably open to debate).

I read somewhere that it wasn't until the Victorian age that females were considered to be feeble and unable to cope with life and so weren't educated as such. Before that, there were some pretty rebellious strong-minded women around who presumably enjoyed the benefits of some schooling.

But any type of schooling had to be paid for and when it came to food or scool - in the underclasses and there were 90% underclass and 10 % any way above underclass, from working to royal - food would be the winner and schooling was in every village usually one day a week though so this would leave six other days free from school.

There was a hugh gap between the underclass/ paupers and the upper classes, a large proportion of history books cover the upper classes and not so many books concentrate on paupers lives, there is far more information abailable to research on the weel to do than the paupers and they former make far intersting reading material.

there are though some books which cover less fortunate persons and thier lives or if you look in the outdoor releif parish records you can find much about the poor living in the parish and the few crumbs they were given or later the workhouse records. Schooling was set up in the workhouse but the children were apprenticed as soon as possible to lessen the burden on the workhouse or out door releif/poor relief of the parish.

So from a young age a child would not be living with a parent if they were poor but would be in charged to a master to learn a trade and this was not sexist either it was both girls and boys as they both had mouths to feed.

SimplySally Georgian women (aristocratic at least to some extent as much as ever the poorer ones) had huge levels of freedom and independence, compared to Victorian women. It did indeed go backwards.

There is a great Antonia Fraser book called The Weaker Vessel which examines the true role of women in the 17th century. Through various classes of society. That is really enlightening.

I agree that parental love on the whole hasnt changed. As I said in my OP most of the (women) I read about had huge amounts of love and dedication and sacrifice for their children (men as well but I mainly read about women's history). But there was, undeniably, a larger element of (lets just simplify and call it western, or European) society, that looked at children as tools, things to be beaten, used, sex objects, etc etc. Not valued objects of love in their own right.

Just think about this one aspect to the question - all the royals and aristocrats who had wetnurses feed their babies, what if just that one thing was changed, and the mothers themselves fed the babies. I think I am not explaining myself very well but what I mean is, if more bonding, more love, more attachment was to be had between parent and child from the beginning, then the child would presumably have better odds of growing up a happier, kinder individual. Now if that child had a vote in the house of Lords - would that have affected their vote when it came to tax relief for the poor?

I know this sounds bonkers and far fetched, its really just a very very tiny example of what I am trying to express. (and by the way nothing to do with BFing!!! LOL) I just feel that loved, secure children, tend to grow up to be loving, secure adults. Which tends to create more well balanced societies. Do you see what I mean? Magnify my example x1000 and you will get what I am thinking of.

I would imagine that the children wetnursed formed a parental-type bond with them instead of their biological parents.