Child- rearing practices in the 1500’s and 1600’s were very different from modern times. During the 1500’s and 1600’s, children were raised in various ways due to conditions such as mortality rates. There was a shorter life expectancy during these times, due to illnesses caused by rodents hygiene, and the disposal systems for waste products, which gave parents a precise reason to make their children grow up quicker than normal. The goal for most parents when raising their children during these times was to raise their young adolescents into mature adults with the help of harsh punishment and religion to get their children to decipher right from wrong.
Children were punished in the 1500’s and 1600’s to grow up so they would behave more like adults at younger ages. In The Domostroi, a Russian manual on household management, it explains a teaching that parents should live by when raising their children. It exclaims that when, “A man who loves his son will whip him often so that when he grows up he may be a joy to him.” This shares with us that when a man beats his own, the child becomes enlightened and educated that with every unacceptable action comes a discipline; so, with painful lashings, children learn how to behave like adults through punishment. When these children grow up to behave like adults, their parents then become appreciative of them since they are able to behave respectably so. In this excerpt from The Domostroi, it is stating that once a child has been whipped enough and understands what is acceptable and what is not, a parent will then be honored by the actions of their child (Document 3: The Domostroi, Moscow. 1550s). Another [parental] example of punishment that guides children is that of King Henry IV. King Henr...
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...e and think about her decisions. Blundell achieved exactly what he was hoping for, the appreciation and a learned lesson by the form of punishment Blundell chose. Blundell being a Catholic gentleman, decided that having his dearest daughter confess her ungodly sins to their father would help her realize her wrong-doings and correct them so she will grow up to become a respectable adult (Document 10: William Blundell, “An Exercise for the Children to Embolden Them in Speaking, Lancashire, England, 1663).
With punishment and religion, the children of these parents raised their own to become adults at earlier ages than normal. Not only lashings, but also discipline in general helped children become aware to any and all actions that would not be considered acceptable. Religion also helped to achieve this goal that parents were trying to reach in the 1500’s and 1600’s.
Using the primary sources in chapter 2, child-rearing in Puritan New England was described as the responsibility of Puritan parents. By introducing their children to the importance of education, Puritan parents agreed that child-rearing is a methods that will help ensure their children’s spiritual welfare (Hollitz, 22). The two main goals Puritans taught their children are reading and writing. It is a system they believed that will properly mold their offspring. Parents also taught basic beliefs of religion and principles of government to their children (Hollitz, 22). Puritans took child-rearing very seriously; by using different practices to help the children’s writing development, they are responsible to write: diaries, journals, letters, histories, sermons, and notes on sermons. Although Puritan husband have the power within the household, other than house chore and wifely duties, the mother is mostly in charge of child rearing and provided their child with the proper education on reading, writing, and spiritual (Hollitz, 23).
Compared to people in the twenty-first century, with all their modern conveniences and technological advances, the life of any early-American seems difficult. However, the lives of children were among the most arduous. Linda Pollock states in her book Forgotten Children that between 1660 and 1800 families -and society in general- became more affectionate, child-oriented, and permissive of uniqueness and unstructured time (67). Although this may be true, many other sources depict the lives of children as taxing and oppressive at best. Children of the time were either forced to abandon education for their family contributions, or had to balance school with a full day's work ("Education"). Even when they were not in school or doing manual labor, their day-to-day lives were uncomfortable and harsh (Kids). Social status, as is expected, was a key factor in determining how hard a child's life would be (Murray 9). Although many children at the time had it easier than others they were all asked at an early age to take on adult responsibilities. The lives of all children in 1800 were mundane and difficult due to family and societal expectations for labor, schooling, and maturity.
The concept of age by extension was quiet different at pre-1700 from today: an individual was deemed an “infant” or “youth” or an “old person” not by virtue of his chronological age but by his physical appearance and habits(Aries(1960). In child mortality, according to Aries, the high mortality rate in the premodern era caused parents to steel themselves against too emotionally to infants who might be died. Aries claim that the Europeans followed Montaigne in assuming that young children had “neither mental activity nor recognizable body shape”; that they were regarded as merely “neutral” being poised precariously between life and death(Aries 1960,39). Besides, a culture of childhood discuss that Aries argue the rise in the affection and attention paid to children has produced a kind of culture of the childhood. As an example, the seventeenth century brought a newfound interest in children's words, mispronunciations, and expression such as the French word toutou and dada(48).
James, Jenks and Prout (1998) argue that childhood is characterised by sets of cultural values whereby the ‘…western childhood has become a period of social dependency, asexuality, and the obligation to be happy, with children having the right to protection and training but not to social or personal autonomy’ (James, Jenks and Prouts 1998 pg. 62). Here, childhood is described in sets of distinguished features and these features imply that the concept childhood may vary from place, culture and time. Therefore suggesting that there is no fixed or universal experience of childhood, for example, childhood in the medieval UK will be extremely different to the childhood in modern UK and therefore it varies over time, place and culture. Since the definition and state of childhood may vary depending on our cultural and historical background, some sociologist claim that childhood is not just biological, but must have been socially constructed for a specific society needs at a particular time. In this essay, I will attempt to explore ways in which childhood is said to be socially constructed by looking at historical childhood and how it has led to construction of modern childhood in the modern society. I will also explore the agency of children as competent social actors able to construct their social world.
Children as young as young as five or seven years old worked in dangerous factories. Many times if the children fell asleep while on the job, they would slip and get stuck in the machines, resulting in death. Child labor in the late 1800’s was very unsafe and put the lives of young children in danger. The children worked in very dangerous conditions, most of the time it was factories. The conditions were very poor, the factories were dirty and unsafe for children. The children would work for up to sixteen hours with little to no pay.
In “Rods to Reasoning” Hays states that during the Middle Ages in Europe, if children were not “being fed, drugged, whipped, or tossed, they were often simple ignored (23). This was hardly the case in Industrial America. The view on children was changed from economically useful to emotionally priceless (Hays 32). When my grandmother and her family moved into the hotel, she believed she was fortunate enough to have the best childhood. She was seldom asked to help around the hotel and would often ask if there was anything she could do to help. Unlike the Puritan children who wanted to obey and please their parents so that they would be in good standing with their father to inherit land, children of the Industrial Era wanted to just please their parents to show their love and gratitude (Hays 31). Due to the new focus on childhood, a lot of literature about how to raise and treat a child was being published around this time. Rousseau declared that children would thrive when they were “treated with love and affection, and protected from the corruption of the larger society,” (qtd. in Hays 26). Protecting children from society and maintaining their innocence differed drastically from the Puritans who believed they had to break their children of their sinful nature (Hays 32). Growing up as my grandmother did, she passed down certain teachings and values to her children
The various essays comprising Children in Colonial America look at different characteristics of childhood in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Children coming to the American colonies came from many different nations and through these essays, authors analyze children from every range of social class, race, and ability in order to present a broad picture of childhood in these times. While each essay deals with an individual topic pertaining to childhood, they all combine to provide a strong argument that children were extremely valued in society, were not tiny adults, and were active participants in society.
“Child labor is work that harms children or keeps them from attending school.” Back then in the U.S., children were working between ages 5 to 17. Between the 1800s and 1900s, many children worked in agricultural fields, fishing, mining, manufacturing, and even drug trade and prostitution. Even though child labor laws are still avoided around the world, the effects on child labor in the US, before, was unbelieveable. Children were suffering from health issues, reform movements grew and other countries followed enforced child labor too.
Punishments, such as spanking, and shouting are the major forms of discipline frequently preferred by the parents. The main goal of this style is to teach the child to behave, survive, and thrive as an adult in the harsh society and preparing the child for negative responses such as anger and aggression that the child will face if their behaviour is inappropriate. It is often believed in this style that the shock of aggression from someone from the outside world will be less for a child as the child is accustomed to enduring both acute and chronic stress imposed by
Throughout the decades, parenting has evolved resulting in altered child rearing experiences for adults. It has changed from the 1920s, when children had to work no matter where they lived, to now where you can't discipline your kid and society decides what is right. Punishing your child became customary over time, but today physical punishment is highly frowned upon. Looking into each of the decades since 1920, family life has been focused on the child and influenced by community expectations.
In the late 1700’s and early 1800’s big business began to boom. For the first time companies were developing large factories to manufacture their goods. Due to the new mechanics and cheap labor, factory owners could now produce their goods at a cheaper rate. As big businesses brought wealth and capitalism, it also widened the gap between the wealthy elite and the poor. One class in particular was horribly affected by the growth of big factories. This class was the poor working class. According to the article “Child Labor in the United States” written by Robert Whaples, a big proportion of the labour work force was made up of children: “In 1820 children aged 15 and under made up 23 percent of the manufacturing labor force of the industrializing
The text depicts a historical perspective on Middle Childhood, as during the twentieth century, children were viewed primarily as an economic source of income, in terms of providing for the family. According to the text this happens often in European counties and in parts of the United States. Elizabeth D. Hutchinson, Dimensions of Human Behavior The Changing Life Course 3rd, 2008. In this short review we will look at how this historical perspective in itself is not a question to how, but when these individual give.
Imagine waking up at five in the morning to walk over a mile to a factory where you work until noon where you get a half hour break for lunch, then it’s back to work until nine or ten at night, when you are finally allowed to go home and you are only eight years old. Today that seems unimaginable, but during the early 19th century it was the everyday life of thousands of children whose ages range from as young as five until you died. During the Industrial Revolution many children were required to work dangerous jobs to help their families.
There are proponents of the debate that childhood is disappearing which will be discussed in this section which include Postman (1983), Elkind (1981) and Palmer (2006). In considering these points of view which are mostly American, one must firstly set in context what is meant by the disappearance or erosion of childhood. This key debate centres on Postman (1983) who wrote “The disappearance of childhood” which is a contentious book about how childhood as a social category which is separate from adulthood is eroding. He defines a point where childhood came into existence, which was treated as a special phase in the middle ages based on the work of Aries in his book “Centuries of childhood” (1962, cited in Postman 1983). According to Postman, a major influence on how childhood was perceived differently to adulthood was the invention of the printing press and literacy in the mid sixteenth century. That is to say children had to learn to read before the secrets of adulthood in particular sex and violence was available...
The following family life education Program will emphasize on Parent Education and Guidance. The project will likewise focus on varying child rearing styles and practices; how parents treat their kids can influence their present and the future life, and also the program will concentrate on parent/kid connections and child rearing styles. Parents will get to be mindful of diverse styles and the circumstances and end results.