I've seen this argued before; that people in earlier days, with higher rates of child mortality, did not love their children as we do now.
I'm not suggesting that they didn't love their children (with the obvious legendary exception we're talking about) but that children were a necessary commodity that people pretty much had to have. Even if they didn't want kids, which would, I'm totally guessing here, be unusual due to cultural influences, they had to have kids. It was a duty to reproduce. It was necessary to the family business. It was necessary to the eventual declining years of Mom and Dad, given that they had declining years when they were too weak to work and didn't drop on the job. There was still a flavor of commodity somewhere even though they did love their kids.
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Date: 2009-11-11 09:55 pm (UTC)I'm not suggesting that they didn't love their children (with the obvious legendary exception we're talking about) but that children were a necessary commodity that people pretty much had to have. Even if they didn't want kids, which would, I'm totally guessing here, be unusual due to cultural influences, they had to have kids. It was a duty to reproduce. It was necessary to the family business. It was necessary to the eventual declining years of Mom and Dad, given that they had declining years when they were too weak to work and didn't drop on the job. There was still a flavor of commodity somewhere even though they did love their kids.