Child Rearing

Child Rearing. The history of child rearing has no exact chronological markings. Stages and cultural traditions blend and overlap, yet changes and trends are perceptible.

Native American parenting struck early settlers as overly indulgent. Tribal parents showered affection on their children and rarely scolded them. These youngsters had far more freedom than did European children. Adolescent boys and girls came of age by engaging in tribal rituals suited to their future adult roles.

During the early Colonial Era, many parents were relatively unself‐conscious about child rearing; survival was paramount. Laws and community beliefs upheld paternal authority. New England Puritans demanded strict obedience from their offspring and often employed a heavy hand, both at home and school, to restrain children, whom they believed to be born in sin. Parents sometimes used the apprenticeship system, sending out offspring in order to reform adolescents’ character or because destitution made it difficult to keep them at home. Southern colonists, by contrast, tended to be more affectionate and indulgent toward children. A high death rate, especially in the Chesapeake region, meant that many children were raised by stepparents or kin. Orphanages and orphan courts in the South looked after parentless children.

Until the twentieth century, children's health proved a major worry for parents; infant and child mortality was high. Because medical caregivers lacked basic knowledge about diseases and their treatment, natural immunities and preventive medicine offered the best assurances of good health. To this end, mothers breast‐fed their babies and often used home cures and folk remedies. Slave children were especially vulnerable to sickness and death; immediately before the Civil War, slave infants and children experienced twice the mortality rates of white infants and children nationwide.

The premodern family functioned as an economic unit; children, especially among immigrants and the poor, contributed to family survival by working in field or factory. As farming declined and public education expanded, laws began to limit child labor, and children's economic contributions to the family gradually diminished.

Child rearing has usually been a shared responsibility. In the past eras, parenting was less intensive than it would become, owing in part to mothers’ demanding domestic chores coupled with an endless cycle of bearing, feeding, and nursing children. In large families, older children often served as deputy parents to younger siblings. Adult slaves, whose primary duty was to their master, often had to depend on kin or members of the slave community to help raise their offspring.

A shift in middle‐class attitudes toward child rearing occurred by the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Parenting became more affectionate and intensive, influenced by Enlightenment ideas, by the ideology of the Romantic Movement and by advice manuals that depicted children as innocent creatures needing to be molded. Parent–child relationships were now more personal and private. With most fathers working outside the home, mothers became the primary parent, celebrated for their domestic role. By the end of the century, mothers and fathers had grown more emotionally tied to their children, for better or worse. With declining fertility and smaller families, child rearing became more self‐conscious; the focus shifted from survival to preoccupation with youngsters’ emotional health and moral well‐being.

Outside agencies and institutions also began to play a greater role in child rearing by the late nineteenth century. The medical and public‐health professions addressed children's health issues. Public and parochial schools offered academic subjects as well as exposure to technical trades, social skills, health issues, and physical education. Sunday schools, nursery schools, athletic teams, and children's organizations also contributed to child rearing.

Less is known about child rearing among the poor than among the more privileged. Parents in destitute households struggled to insure family survival, leaving little time for attentive nurturing. Children who had to work for wages had little extra time for socializing or even attending school. City streets became the place where many immigrant children were socialized.

In the 1950s and after, many middle‐class parents relied upon Benjamin Spock's popular Baby and Child Care (first edition, 1946). Spock urged parents to create a democratic family and treat the children as equals. Initially, he promoted mothers as the principal nurturers, but later editions encouraged fathers to contribute as well.

With rapidly rising divorce rates from the 1960s through the 1980s, more children were reared in single‐parent households, typically with their mother. By the end of the twentieth century, with both parents often working outside the home, experts warned of the implications for child rearing and of the many youngsters who spent hours each day in front of a television or computer screen, lacking adult supervision and acquiring cultural and behavioral norms from sources unconnected to the nuclear family.
See also Education: The Public School Movement; Family; Immigration; Indian History and Culture; Industrialization; Marriage and Divorce; Poverty; Puritanism; Slavery: Slave Families, Communities, and Culture; Social Class.

Bibliography

Edmund Morgan , The Puritan Family, 1966.
Robert Bremner , Children and Youth in America, 3 vols., 1970–1974.
Carl N. Degler , At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present, 1980.
John Demos , Past, Present and Personal: The Family and the Life Course in American History, 1986.
Stephanie Coontz , The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families, 1600–1900, 1988.
Brenda Stevenson , Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South, 1996.

Sally G. McMillen