Children in the 17th century
This is a large subject, so I'm not going to deal with education or childbirth and baby-care - interesting and controversial subjects - but will try to cover those aspects of child-rearing in which the people of the 17th century differed
most from our own.
THE DUTIES OF A PARENT
There was an idea popular in the late 1970s that because of higher child mortality in the past parents were somehow less attached to their children. This, it was thought, explained the rather formal relationships between parents and
children of older generations. While there may be a grain of truth in it with respect to babies under a year who were the most likely to succumb, (the Lakota Indians say "After a year we know that they want to stay") it is undoubtedly
silly as a generalisation. Parents may well have felt that any child who survived its infancy was more precious. It is pretty safe to assume that parents of the past were at least as doting as we are; but their concept of their job as
parents was different. They felt that, having decided, usually in accordance with religious and social tradition, on the best pattern for their children's behaviour and manners, it was their task to make them follow it obediently. The
present cosy friendship between parents and children (very recent, as anyone over 50 knows) would, in the 17th century, have been regarded as an unnatural abdication of their duty to produce obedient, hard-working, God-fearing and
THE DUTIES OF A CHILD
Children were obviously inferior to adults, and they were made to know it. The first duty of a child was to obey its parents as they would obey God. This, reinforced by scripture ('Honour thy father and mother'), was part of an ingrained
appreciation of hierarchy that we may now find hard to understand. A disobedient child struck at the foundation of order, and was as bad as a renegade citizen or one of the fallen angels because he was going against God's will.
Because their parents gave them life, children were regarded as the possessions of the parents. As Hannah Wooley puts it when talking about marrying against parental wishes, "…Children are so much the goods and chattels of a parent that
they cannot without a kind of theft give themselves away...".
There was no cosy concept of childhood in the 17th century; that didn't arrive until the 19th. Children were small, undeveloped and unruly savages who, naturally wayward because of the Fall and Original Sin, had to be tamed and civilised
before they could be saved spiritually or admitted socially.
"Spare the rod and spoil the boy" was a belief commonly adhered to both for boys and girls, especially in the matter or learning which seems to have been literally beaten into some of them. Nor was it only men who did the beating: women
commonly beat girls for misdemeanours, both their own children and young maids.
In poor families where every mouth was an added burden, children were put to some sort of simple work as soon as possible; sometimes as young as three. Little fingers could tie threads and pick up fiddly pins and buttons.
There were many small jobs around house and fields to keep older children busy. Both sexes picked stones from the fields and scared rooks with wooden rattles and all members of the family helped with the harvest.
In large families the care of the smallest children was usually given to the oldest girl. A seven- or eight-year-old might be found shepherding her small siblings about, humping the baby on her hip. Such very young girls often bore the
responsibility for the survival of toddlers,keeping them out of millponds, lakes, cowbyres and fires and saving them from being eaten by pigs (true), occasionally, as in the case of Thomas Tomkins with tragic results.
Children still must have had plenty of time to play, as the smallness of the houses of the poor and the largeness of families made it necessary for them to be outside most of the time.
Boys, not having household duties like spinning, seemed to have an easier time of it altogether and "being boys" could go off playing one of 