How now, how does the child...Unswaddle him, undoe his swaddling bands...wash him before me...Pull off his shirt, thou art pretty and fat my little darling...flea-bitten, for the black spots are there yet, is there any Fleas in your Chamber (Nurse)?...Now swaddle him again, but first put on his biggin (bonnet) and his little band with an edge, where is his little petticoat? Give him his coat of changeable taffeta and his satin sleeves. Where is his bib? Let him have his gathered apron with strings, and hand a Muckinder (handkerchief) to it. You need not yet give him his coral with the small gold chain (for teething) for I believe it is better to let him sleep until the afternoon.'
Peter Erondell In the Nursery, dialogue 5, quoted from M. St. Clare Byrne ed. The Elizabethan House discovered..., revised ed. 1930
When the child was born it was washed and generally oiled as a protection against the cold and rashes. Roesslin advised annointing with oil or acorns, Guillemeau with fresh butter, oil of roses or oil of nuts (Eucharius Roesslin, The Byrth of Mankynd, newly translated out of Latin by R. Jonas, 1540; Guillemeau, Childbirth or the happy delivery of women...2nd ed. 1635)
Rubbing with salt was also recommended. Oils and wine, which is antiseptic, were used on the baby's skin rather than water for the first few months, that is, if the child was in a well off family. Guillemeau advised bathing regularly in lukewarm water and wine.
Infants were then swaddled; wrapped from head to toe in bands of cloth. These, it was advised, should be changed often 'for the Piss and Dung'. Guillemeau says children were generally changed at 7am, noon and 7pm but advises doing it more often if necessary. It must have been tempting to leave the child as long as possible as swaddling was very time-consuming. Pictures of swaddled babies show them looking like little chrysalids. In the 16th century, under the influence of adult fashions, a small ruff was sometimes added.
There are very few descriptions of swaddling, probably because it was such a universal practise that it was assumed everyone knew how it was done. After the first few weeks the hands were freed and swaddling could be combined with other clothes.
At about four weeks according to Guillemeau 'He cannot well keep his hands swathed in, and hid any longer...Then must he have little sleeves...and then the Nurse shall begin to carry him abroad to sport and exercise him.'
Swaddling was probably primarily intended to keep the child warm, not easy when windows were still the 'wind's eye', being, mostly, closed with ill-fitting wooden shutters when they were closed at all. The peasant hovel might enjoy a primitive form of central heating when the cows were stabled at one end, but castles, Tudor stately homes and the homes of merchants and artisans must have been cold, draughty places in which to rear a young baby. Doctors also frequently warned of the danger of binding a child's limbs crooked:
'Furthermore when the infant is swaddled and laid in cradle, the nurse must give all diligence and heed that she bind every part right and in his due place and order, and that with all tenderness and gentle entreating and not crookedly and confusedly, the which must also be done oftentimes in the day: for in this it is as it is in young and tender imps, plants, and twigs, the which even as you bow them in their youth so will they evermore remain unto age. And even so the infant if it be bound and swaddled, the members lying right and straight, then shall it grow straight and upright, if it be crookedly handled it will grow likewise, and to the ill negligence of many nurses may be imputed the crookedness and deformity of many a man and woman...' (Roesslin The Byrth of Mankynde, 1540)
Roesslin's treatise, Rosengarten, was translated into English at The Byrth of Mankynde in 1540 and dedicated to Catherine of Aragon, first wife of Henry VIII. Maybe interest in child care was stimulated by Henry VIII's attempts to rear a son and heir.
Giraldus Cambrensis made some revealing remarks on the practises of the Irish in the 12th century which are worth quoting for the light they shed by implication on English practises:
'For appart from the nourishment with which they are sustained by their hard parents from dying altogether they are for the rest abandoned to ruthless nature. They are not put into cradles and swathed; nor are their tender limbs helped by frequent baths or formed by any useful art. The midwives do not use hot water to raise the nose or pres down the face or lengthen the legs...'
(Giraldus Cambrensis, The Topography of Ireland, Character and habits of the Irish, Chapter 10, quoted Lloyd deMause History of Childhood, 1974)
Another reason for swaddling may have been to keep the child quiet and immobile. Swaddled babies are more passive, sleep more and cry less. By the 16th century doctors were becoming concerned about this. Guillemeau recommended that until the child was two he should be allowed to sleep whenever he wished and till he was three or four should spend more time asleep than awake. But he should not sleep more than half the day or he would become dull.
At about one year the child was usually unswaddled completely.
'
Saturday, 27 December 2014
Sunday, 7 December 2014
History of Childhood: Babyhood pt. 1
'Tell me daughter Juliet
How stands your dispositions to be married?'
Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet Act 1 sc. 3
Early records of the lives and doings of children in early British history begin to appear from around the 14th and 15th centuries. Children appear briefly in romances written for adults; there were no story books written specifically for children. Children appear in idealised lives of the saints. Upper class children appear as stiff little figures in formal portraits and as more lively figures in books for teaching young children proper manners. They appear in the records of schools and they appear in legal records of births, baptisms, deaths, marriages and divorces. If marriageable age is considered as childhood's end these records place it as around 12 for girls and 14 for boys. This in medieval times was the age at which they could consent to or repudiate marriages arranged for them. It would be misleading to conclude from this that most people married around the age of 14 but an Elizabethan audience would have seen nothing unusual in Juliet's mother saying to her thirteen year old daughter:
'Younger than you
Here in Verona, ladies of esteem,
Are made already mothers
By my count
I was your mother much upon these years
That you are now a maid '
(Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet Act I sc.3.)
Marriage, then is childhood's end. What other landmarks were there in the lives of children at this time? The 13th century poem Ratis Raving divides childhood intro three periods; babyhood, infancy, from three to seven, and seven to fourteen.about childhood's beginnings? (Ratis Raving and other moral and religious pieces in prose and verse, edited by J. Rawson Lumby, EETS,1870)
Many people have pointed to the practise of apparently dressing children in scaled down versions of adult costume as evidence for the theory that they were regarded as miniature adults, but this is an over-simplification. It seems clear that children, appart from the children of the poor, did undergo a period of training for adult life during which they were not treated or regarded as adults were. The apprenticeship period extended from about the age of seven to fourteen, bug could vary considerably, especially for children destined to receive some kind of academic training. Although people frequently went to university much earlier than they do now the age at which they attended also varied widely. hugh Latimer, later Bishop of Worcester, went up to Cambridge at fourteen in 1504, John Holles, later Earl of Clare, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury, both went up at the age of twelve, one to Cambridge in 1579, one to Oxford in 1595. On the other hand, William Paston was writing Latin hexameters at Eton at the age of nineteen in 1479. (Paston Letters, 1422-1509, ed. James Gairdner, 1910, letter 827, William Paston junior to John Paston, 23 Feb. 1479)
It is common knowledge that upper class children, especially boys, were usually sent away from home aged about seven as part of their education. New-born babies could also be sent away to the care of a wet nurse; upper class mothers did not usually nurse their own children. From the late 16th century doctors began to recognise the connection between wet nursing and high child mortality. They often condemned non-nursing mothers but the practise continued right up to the 19th century, maybe even till the invention of powdered baby milk, though in the 18th century it became more common for the wet nurse to live in where she could be kept under closer supervision. Just how many stories of changeling children were based on wet-nurses substituting another baby for their charge?
Parents then as now often found themselves with a howling, puking, crapping, apparently uncontrollable infant who would not conform to early theories of proper behaviour. One solution was to rationalise the his saying the child was a changeling, left in place of their own sweet baby which had been spirited away by fairies or witches. The Mallem Maleficarum, 1487, says that changelings could be recognised because they 'always howl most piteously and even if four of five mothers (wet nurses) are set to suckle them they never grow.' According to Martin Luther 'They often take the children of women in childbirth and lay themselves in their place and are more obnoxious than ten children with their crapping, eating and screaming' (Quoted in DeMause, History of Childhood)
The practise of hiring wet-nurses goes back to antiquity. One of the Roman Gracci family, returning to Rome from the Punic Wars in the 2nd century BC, is said to have greeted his nurse with more affection than his mother, saying: 'I know that you bore me nine months in your womb, yet that was out of necessitie, because you could do no otherwise, but when I was borne you forsooke me, and my Nurse-mother willingly entertained me, carried me three years in her armes, and nourished mee with her own bloode' (milk was believed to be re-constituted blood: Jacques Guillemeau. Childbirth, or the Happy Delivery of Women. 1612)
The wet nurses were usually peasant girls living in comparative poverty. such girls might have just lost a baby of their own or, if they had plenty of milk, they might try to support two babies. Of course they would be expected to put their little charges before their own babies and many peasant babies may have been deprived and died like Susan, child of the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet:
'Susan and she - God rest all Christian souls!
Were of an age. Well, Susan is with God;
She was too good for me...'
Romeo and Juliet Act 1 sc. 3
About a third of all infants generally died in their first year and two thirds before growing to maturity. In periods of plague the rates must have been far higher. So normally infants would be baptised as soon as possible as unbaptised babies would not go to heaven if they died. Often two children would be given the same Christian name, as in the Paston family the two eldest boys were both called John after their father, in this case both survived childhood.
How stands your dispositions to be married?'
Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet Act 1 sc. 3
Early records of the lives and doings of children in early British history begin to appear from around the 14th and 15th centuries. Children appear briefly in romances written for adults; there were no story books written specifically for children. Children appear in idealised lives of the saints. Upper class children appear as stiff little figures in formal portraits and as more lively figures in books for teaching young children proper manners. They appear in the records of schools and they appear in legal records of births, baptisms, deaths, marriages and divorces. If marriageable age is considered as childhood's end these records place it as around 12 for girls and 14 for boys. This in medieval times was the age at which they could consent to or repudiate marriages arranged for them. It would be misleading to conclude from this that most people married around the age of 14 but an Elizabethan audience would have seen nothing unusual in Juliet's mother saying to her thirteen year old daughter:
'Younger than you
Here in Verona, ladies of esteem,
Are made already mothers
By my count
I was your mother much upon these years
That you are now a maid '
(Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet Act I sc.3.)
Marriage, then is childhood's end. What other landmarks were there in the lives of children at this time? The 13th century poem Ratis Raving divides childhood intro three periods; babyhood, infancy, from three to seven, and seven to fourteen.about childhood's beginnings? (Ratis Raving and other moral and religious pieces in prose and verse, edited by J. Rawson Lumby, EETS,1870)
Many people have pointed to the practise of apparently dressing children in scaled down versions of adult costume as evidence for the theory that they were regarded as miniature adults, but this is an over-simplification. It seems clear that children, appart from the children of the poor, did undergo a period of training for adult life during which they were not treated or regarded as adults were. The apprenticeship period extended from about the age of seven to fourteen, bug could vary considerably, especially for children destined to receive some kind of academic training. Although people frequently went to university much earlier than they do now the age at which they attended also varied widely. hugh Latimer, later Bishop of Worcester, went up to Cambridge at fourteen in 1504, John Holles, later Earl of Clare, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury, both went up at the age of twelve, one to Cambridge in 1579, one to Oxford in 1595. On the other hand, William Paston was writing Latin hexameters at Eton at the age of nineteen in 1479. (Paston Letters, 1422-1509, ed. James Gairdner, 1910, letter 827, William Paston junior to John Paston, 23 Feb. 1479)
It is common knowledge that upper class children, especially boys, were usually sent away from home aged about seven as part of their education. New-born babies could also be sent away to the care of a wet nurse; upper class mothers did not usually nurse their own children. From the late 16th century doctors began to recognise the connection between wet nursing and high child mortality. They often condemned non-nursing mothers but the practise continued right up to the 19th century, maybe even till the invention of powdered baby milk, though in the 18th century it became more common for the wet nurse to live in where she could be kept under closer supervision. Just how many stories of changeling children were based on wet-nurses substituting another baby for their charge?
Parents then as now often found themselves with a howling, puking, crapping, apparently uncontrollable infant who would not conform to early theories of proper behaviour. One solution was to rationalise the his saying the child was a changeling, left in place of their own sweet baby which had been spirited away by fairies or witches. The Mallem Maleficarum, 1487, says that changelings could be recognised because they 'always howl most piteously and even if four of five mothers (wet nurses) are set to suckle them they never grow.' According to Martin Luther 'They often take the children of women in childbirth and lay themselves in their place and are more obnoxious than ten children with their crapping, eating and screaming' (Quoted in DeMause, History of Childhood)
The practise of hiring wet-nurses goes back to antiquity. One of the Roman Gracci family, returning to Rome from the Punic Wars in the 2nd century BC, is said to have greeted his nurse with more affection than his mother, saying: 'I know that you bore me nine months in your womb, yet that was out of necessitie, because you could do no otherwise, but when I was borne you forsooke me, and my Nurse-mother willingly entertained me, carried me three years in her armes, and nourished mee with her own bloode' (milk was believed to be re-constituted blood: Jacques Guillemeau. Childbirth, or the Happy Delivery of Women. 1612)
The wet nurses were usually peasant girls living in comparative poverty. such girls might have just lost a baby of their own or, if they had plenty of milk, they might try to support two babies. Of course they would be expected to put their little charges before their own babies and many peasant babies may have been deprived and died like Susan, child of the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet:
'Susan and she - God rest all Christian souls!
Were of an age. Well, Susan is with God;
She was too good for me...'
Romeo and Juliet Act 1 sc. 3
About a third of all infants generally died in their first year and two thirds before growing to maturity. In periods of plague the rates must have been far higher. So normally infants would be baptised as soon as possible as unbaptised babies would not go to heaven if they died. Often two children would be given the same Christian name, as in the Paston family the two eldest boys were both called John after their father, in this case both survived childhood.
History of Childhood: Early British History
The tother eild, I understand
Is fra three year to 7 leastand
Sa lang havis child wyl alwaye
With flouris for to Jape and playe
With stikis, and with spalys small
To byge up chalmer, spens and hall;
To make a wickt hort of a wand
Or brokin breid a schip saland
A bunwed tyll a burly spere
And of a feg a swerd of were
A comly lady of a clout
And be rycht besy thar about
Ratis Raving (13th century) EETS original series Vol. 43 ed. J. Rawson Lumby, 1870.p.56
Children are just shadowy figures in early British history, not surprising since much of the early history of the British Isles before the Norman Conquest is obscure. During the Roman occupation hitherto unheard of standards of civilisation and literacy were brought to the remote islands at the furthest edge of their empire and we know a little of the lives of the people living here. After the Romans withdrew in AD 410 there followed a long period of chaos, civil war, invasion and settlement by the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings and the Danes.
All the pagan people who settled these islands were extremely warlike. Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Danes, all admired and cultivated above all other virtues courage, endurance and skill in fighting. Life for small vulnerable children in such societies must have been extremely hazardous and tough.
It seems likely that the invaders would have imported the customs of their native lands. In Lloyd deMause introduction to the History of Childhood (1974) he tells us that in the pagan societies of Northern Europe it was customary to harden infants by bathing them in icy water or rolling them naked in the snow, which sounds a bit like Scandanavian post-sauna. Pagan societies commonly abandoned unwanted infants to die of exposure or be eaten by wild animals. Examples of this are found in pagan myths and legends, usually telling how the child surviving against the odds to fulfil whatever prophecy led to the child being abandoned. In fact exposure may have been regarded as an efficient method of family planning.
All these societies were patriarchial and the choice of whether or not an infant would be brought normally lay with the father. Male children were more highly valued than females , among the Vikings, for instance, it was apparently usual for only one female to be reared in a family.
Human sacrifice was practised by at least some of the pagan settlers of Britain, and is recorded in the accounts of the Roman conquerors. Captives, slaves and children made excellent, disposable, sacrificial victims. For instance, in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of England, attributed to the time of Vortigern, about the 6th century BC, the sacrifice of a motherless boy is required to strengthen the foundations of a bridge. The same story appears in Nennius' Chronicle c.828.
Infanticide and human sacrifice were suppressed by the Christian church but with great difficulty. Infanticide was only legally defined as murder in 374 AD but although no longer legal almost certainly continued to be common while the care of abandoned children became one of the traditional offices of the Church.
Christianity was less quick to condemn slavery, endemic in pagan Europe, especially in the Mediterranean regions where the new religion first spread. Captives and children were particularly vulnerable. It was Pope Gregory's admiration of some handsome fair-haired youths from remote Britain in the Roman slave market which is said to have led to his sending the first Christian missionaries to the island. Giraldus Cambrensis records that Anglo Saxon children were carried into Ireland by robbers and sold there. (The Historical Works of Giraldus Cambrensis, or, The Topography of Ireland, 1187, ed. Thomas Wright, London, 1863 p. 215-6)
The landing of St. Augustine in 597 is a major landmark in British cultural history; Christianity brought new moral values to bear on a pagan way of life and the conflict between the two dominated cultural life. The impact of Christian philosophy on pagan culture must have been quite extraordinary, bringing entirely new values; 'Blessed are the merciful', 'Turn the other cheek', 'Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth','Suffer little children to come unto me for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven'. These warlike people treated such sentiments with derision and incomprehension, mixed with admiration for the personal bravery of Christians facing imminent death. The mix of the 'Might is right' philosophy with Christian values produced modifications of both viewpoints, and uneasy compromises.
Christian religion also brought new concepts of 'sin' and 'innocence'. Pagan tribes in northern Europe had acknowledged that children too young to carry arms were 'innocent' and not acceptable victims in the formalised blood feuds which decimated some noble families. Christianity, however, created the image of 'pure and innocent' children. Youthful martyrs were particularly popular figures and the 14th century miracle plays developed the apocryphal Massacre of the Innocents into an important episode in the early life of Christ.
This attitude was often in conflict with the actual treatment of children and, too, with the concept of original sin. The point at which 'innocent' children became sinful was generally held to be about the time they became sexually aware; considered to be about the age of seven. To Christians, of course, sexual pleasure was associated with the original sin which lost mankind the Garden of Eden. Marriage and procreation were, at least theologically, seen as considerably less desirable than celibacy and dedication to God. The 13th century homily Hali Meidenhead, a piece of propaganda for recruiting virgins to convent life, represents motherhood and children as the unpleasing alternative. If she failed produce sons, she would be considered a failure by her husband and his family. If she succeeded:
'In the gestation is heaviness and hard pain every hour; in the actual birth is of all pains the strongest, and occasionally death; in the nourishing the child many a miserable moment. As soon as it appears in this life, it brings with it more care than joy, namely, to its mother: for if it is a misshapen birth, as often happens...it is a sorrow to her...If it is well shaped and seems likely to live, a fear of losing it is instantly born along with it...and often it occurs that the child most loved and most bitterly purchased, sorrows most and disturbs his parents last. Now, what joy had the mother? She had from the misshapen child sad care and shame, both, and from the thriving one, fear till she lose it for good...And what are the other nasty offices and matters about the bosom? To swaddle and to feed the child for so many unhappy moments...Thou shalt be rich and have a nurse, thou must as a mother care too if akk that the nurse belongeth to be done...Little knows a maiden...of the pain nor of the foul incidents in the gestation and parturition of a child nor of a nurse's watches, nor of her sad trials in the feeding and fostering....'
Hali Meidenhead. 13th century, MS Cotton Titus DXVIII Fol 112c. Ed. Oswald Cockayne EETS original series no. 18, 1886
There is a pleasanter picture of the 13th century mother with her child in the Ancren Riwle'...the mother with her young darling: she flies from him, and hides herself, and lets him sit alone, and look anxiously round, and call Dame! Dame and weep a while, and then leapeth forth laughing, with outspread arms, and embraceth and kisseth him, and wipeth his eyes.'
Ancren Riwle ed. James Morton, early 13th century, Camden Society 1st series vol. 57, 1853 p. 231.
Most of the extremely scanty evidence for the period relates to the upbringing of upper class children. the basic pattern of their lives, and of adult attitudes to them, does not seem to have changed radically from the establishment of Christianity to the Renaissance. The same is probably true of the children of commoners.
Monday, 1 December 2014
Introduction to the blog
When I worked in Birmingham Reference Library I enjoyed the librarian's privilege of browsing in the closed access stacks. I read diaries, memoirs, histories, statutes, and of course the books in the Parker Collection of Children's Books, Birmingham. This blog is about and childhood in Britain and the USA, what children's lives were really like, and how adults see childhood and their children. I call it the Looking-Glass World:
'Nor shall I thinke this labour lost, though I doe live: for I will make it my owne looking glasse wherein to see when I am too severe, when too remisse, and in my childe's fault through this glasse to discerne mine owne errors'
Elizabeth Joceline, The Mother's legacie to her unborne child, 1625
Children's upbringing has always reflected adult attempts to mould their children. Children have been seen as limbs of Satan, to be purged of mankind's original sin, and as primeval innocents, to be protected from the corrupting influence of the everyday world. Boys have been educated to become fighting men or classical scholars, or left completely uneducated, as day-labourers. Girls have been educated to run large households, to be decorative symbols of their husbands' wealth, occasionally as intellectual rivals, or to earn their livings with their hands or other parts of their bodies, depending on what class and family children were born into.
Though the way in which adults see children constantly changes, children themselves have changed little. Children as revealed in a thirteenth century poem, or in a Puritan autobiography are immediately recognisable to modern eyes; wayward, naive, playful, living under the constraints put on them by adult ambitions.
One of the difficulties facing anyone chronicling changes in attitudes to children is the enormous diversity of practises at any one time. For every writer who advises cold baths and plain diet there will be an opponent to ridicule that view. At no time were all well brought up British or American children handed over to wet-nurses, given a strict religious upbringing, or denied fairy tales. Many parents followed the fashion of the day, but others chose to suckle their children themselves, cherished and indulged them when informed opinion advised the opposite, and paid only lip-service, if that, to religion.
But certain overall trends can be perceived. Family relationships became generally less formal after the mid 17th century and closer ties between children and parents developed. From the Medieval period onwards there has been a slow but steady trend towards greater permissiveness, what might be called an insidious growth of child-power. Religion was of great importance to many people but perhaps the most significant trend of all has been the steady lengthening of childhood.
The upbringing of a child depends very much on its parents' place in society. The upbringing of a child from a poor background differed radically from that of a child born into the middle or upper classes. The backgrounds of children growing up on the American continent from the 17th to the 19th centuries were particularly diverse, for their parents came from many parts of the world and belonged to a number of totally disimilar cultures. Even among the settlers from Europe there is an enormous variety of childhood experience, from Puritan New England to the Southern plantations, from city life to remote log cabin.
Changing views of childhood are reflected in art. 17th century portraits show children dressed as mini-adults but by the 19th century childhood was being idealised and sentimentalised and this trend is reflected in children's portraits.
'Nor shall I thinke this labour lost, though I doe live: for I will make it my owne looking glasse wherein to see when I am too severe, when too remisse, and in my childe's fault through this glasse to discerne mine owne errors'
Elizabeth Joceline, The Mother's legacie to her unborne child, 1625
Children's upbringing has always reflected adult attempts to mould their children. Children have been seen as limbs of Satan, to be purged of mankind's original sin, and as primeval innocents, to be protected from the corrupting influence of the everyday world. Boys have been educated to become fighting men or classical scholars, or left completely uneducated, as day-labourers. Girls have been educated to run large households, to be decorative symbols of their husbands' wealth, occasionally as intellectual rivals, or to earn their livings with their hands or other parts of their bodies, depending on what class and family children were born into.
Though the way in which adults see children constantly changes, children themselves have changed little. Children as revealed in a thirteenth century poem, or in a Puritan autobiography are immediately recognisable to modern eyes; wayward, naive, playful, living under the constraints put on them by adult ambitions.
One of the difficulties facing anyone chronicling changes in attitudes to children is the enormous diversity of practises at any one time. For every writer who advises cold baths and plain diet there will be an opponent to ridicule that view. At no time were all well brought up British or American children handed over to wet-nurses, given a strict religious upbringing, or denied fairy tales. Many parents followed the fashion of the day, but others chose to suckle their children themselves, cherished and indulged them when informed opinion advised the opposite, and paid only lip-service, if that, to religion.
But certain overall trends can be perceived. Family relationships became generally less formal after the mid 17th century and closer ties between children and parents developed. From the Medieval period onwards there has been a slow but steady trend towards greater permissiveness, what might be called an insidious growth of child-power. Religion was of great importance to many people but perhaps the most significant trend of all has been the steady lengthening of childhood.
The upbringing of a child depends very much on its parents' place in society. The upbringing of a child from a poor background differed radically from that of a child born into the middle or upper classes. The backgrounds of children growing up on the American continent from the 17th to the 19th centuries were particularly diverse, for their parents came from many parts of the world and belonged to a number of totally disimilar cultures. Even among the settlers from Europe there is an enormous variety of childhood experience, from Puritan New England to the Southern plantations, from city life to remote log cabin.
Changing views of childhood are reflected in art. 17th century portraits show children dressed as mini-adults but by the 19th century childhood was being idealised and sentimentalised and this trend is reflected in children's portraits.
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