Were Medieval Parents Attached To Their Children?
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- Опубліковано 24 тра 2024
- Infant and child mortality were high in the middle ages. Many children would never reach adulthood. Because of this, you may have heard the idea that parents didn't invest themselves emotionally into their children below a certain age, knowing that there was a good chance the child wouldn't survive. But is this true? Were medieval parents really uncaring toward the loss of their children?
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Works cited and recommendations for further reading:
-Ariès, Philipe. Centuries of Childhood: A social history of family life. Robert Baldick, trans. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962).
-Boswell, John. The Kindness of Strangers: the abandonment of children in western Europe from late antiquity to the renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 1988).
-Classen, Albrecht, ed. Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: the results of a paradigm shift in the history of mentality (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005).
-Cochelin, Isabelle, Karen Elaine Smyth, eds. Medieval life cycles: continuity and change (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013).
-CUER MA. L'Enfant au Moyen âge: littérature et civilisation (Presses universitaires de Provence, 1980).
-De Jong, Mayke. In Samuel's Image: child oblation in the early medieval West (Leiden: Brill, 1996).
-Goldberg, P.J.P., Felicity Riddy, eds. Youth in the Middle Ages (Rochester: Boydell & Brewer, 2004).
-Koval, Matthew. Childhood in Medieval Poland (1050-1300): constructions and realities in a European context (Leiden: Brill, 2021).
-Orme, Nicholas. Medieval Children (Yale University Press, 2001).
-Preston-Matto, Lahney, Mary A. Valante, eds. Kids Those Days: children in medieval culture (Leiden: Brill, 2021).
-Rosenblum, Morris. Luxorius: A Latin Poet among the Vandals (Columbia University Press, 1961).
-Ryan, Patrick Joseph. Master-Servant Childhood: a history of the idea of childhood in Medieval English culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
-Scott, Eleanor. The Archaeology of Infancy and Infant Death (British Archaeological Reports, 1999).
-Shuhar, Shulamith. Childhood in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1989).
All images used in this video are either my own, in the public domain, under fair use, or under creative commons (whence they shall be credited appropriately)
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Outro music: Laid Back Guitars by Kevin MacLeod, CC BY-SA 4.0
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#medievalhistory #medieval #middleages #history #educational #childhood #family #socialhistory #medievallife #historiography
Sorry about the slightly echoey audio at times. I was away from home when recording this one. Anyway, enjoy the video!
Hi! I just found you yesterday! 2 topic suggestions: history of Enameling, it's history and trade with the East. The other is the plague of Justinian. I am particularly interested in population collapse, and how plague might have spared desert cultures. Enjoying your stuff!
You jut earned a new subscriber. I would love to see a video of the Bakhtiari tribe in Iraq. They’re quite a unique group of peoples with ancient ties. They still practice Mithraism despite saying their Muslim. It’s a curious culture for sure. They still practice inbreeding.
Amazing translation of Paul the Deacon at 6:36! I was doing some work while I was listening to this and was like "Man, whomever translated this should be a poet. It's no easy feat to make something rhyme with metre and pathos." I was elated when I read that it was you who translated it, bravo!
I have 3 children. One of them died when she was 5. I still have 3 children, one of them just lives in my dreams now.
I am so, so sorry for your loss.
If you don’t mind me asking, how did she die?
So sad, my sincere and deepest condolences.
@@DeeRizzwhy does it matter??
@@liamevans1508 I’m just asking
I remember in Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations he mentioned having to remind himself that his children might not be there tomorrow when he said good night to them.
The many deaths of his children were one of the prime motivations for him to commit so thoroughly to stoicism. Clearly it bothered parents back then.
Common Marcus Aurelius W
That Mediaeval parents suffered less than we do or felt emotions differently sounds like a story that we ourselves made up, to make ourselves feel better about the absolutely horrid conditions that they lived through. We can't conceptualize what it's like to have 10 children and lose 6 of them in early childhood. And thank God for that!
Why would we make up anything to cope for the horrible conditions they lived in centuries ago? I guess you are of the mind that everyone is to blame until the end of time if they're of a certain race or sect in life? Why else would anyone need to lie about anything to make them feel better about their ancestors living in poor conditions?
I believe it was painful to medieval people to lose any child but obviously in modern times we don't expect to miscarry or lose our children in childhood because we have come so far in medicine and science. It still happens, obviously. But to a very small degree in comparison to medieval times. I believe you would expect to lose a small child in medieval times, it was so common, how could you not know that there's a great chance that your child may not make it to adulthood, may even be stillborn?. Also, usually today, if a parent does lose a child, they usually don't lose multiple children, yes it happens but it's RARE. It was commonplace to not only expect you could very well lose one child in his early life, or even before life began for him, but it was also expected you would lose multiple children in your lifetime. That is uncommon now.
So while I do think medieval parents grieved and hurt for their lost children, I just don't believe it's to the degree modern parents hurt for a lost child. You just don't expect to lose a child in this day and age. So when you do, I believe you probably feel a greater deal of hurt. I hate to be cold about it. I think it hurts regardless. But I do believe medievals knew the chances weren't great that they'd see all of their children to adulthood, so they had a certain degree of desensitization to it. But not completely desensitized.
Humans are constant we don’t change we feel the same emotions
I remember hearing that King George III cradled a pillow thinking it was his baby son when he had a fit of madness. Queen Victoria and Empress Maria Theresa both wrote about how the deaths of their children affected them. No parent, royal or pauper, should have to bury their children.
And yet historically it was undeniably the norm and not the exception. Having 7 kids, with 2 or 3 of them surviving to adulthood, would have been normal in the iron age if not slightly optimistic. Parenthood was, inherently, a commitment to losing children as much as it was a commitment to raising them. Probably losing as many as you successfully raise, especially among the poor where food and shelter would have been limiting factors in many cases.
@@petersmythe6462that didn’t mean it wasn’t devastating or traumatic. In fact, it’s more so, because you wake up everyday worrying your children will die and wanting to keep them at arms length because if they die it would crush you but also loving them so much
@@petersmythe6462humans have been humans- you’ve got parents who adoringly love their children and parents who don’t like their kids. I bet it’s quite similar then, too. I think the bigger overarching view here is death itself- people were a lot more aware of death and decaying bodies because they dealt with them more often historically. We live in a very odd time where we are removed from death and dead bodies.
@@petersmythe6462 Don't forget the number of women who died in childbirth. That was normal too.
@@petersmythe6462That doesn't mean it was easier on the mind
I think they definitely cared- but they were also more acutely aware of mortality, given how common death was around them.
They just coped better. Which does NOT mean they didn't feel it.
"Were medieval parents human beings?" Bruh
I mean it's kind of a ridiculous concept in the first place. High infant mortality doesn't mean women stop producing oxytocin and our evolutionary drive to love our infants is just switched off. Medieval women may have been better than modern women when it comes to *coping* with the loss of children and moving on, but just as it is today, I'd assume it impacted individual women differently.
Also! The infant and childhood death rates weren't *that* high (especially outside of cities) we just think they were high because we're so used to them being nearly zero in developed places today. I've been really interested in family history lately and whilst I haven't been able to easily explore the 1500s or earlier, I have got a very solid picture of what my family was up to in the mid to late 1600s. One of my ancestors had 12 children, only 2 of which died before 1 year old, the rest all lived to adulthood. I don't know how much my ancestor mourned losing her 2 babies, but they did both have names and were given proper burials, so she clearly wasn't indifferent about it.
Were they really better at coping, or did they just not have as much time to grieve?
I think it's a bit ridiculous to think people in a certain time didn't care, not that people in general don't, you talk about oxytocin or "evolutionary drive to love" when there are many cases nowadays about parents not loving their children... The problem is the generation not the especificity of the period of time
@@giuliac9735 Some parents don't have that drive, but it's NOT a generational issue. Boomers often talk about how their emotional needs were neglected, which lead to them being helicopter parents to millennials. The Silent Gen brought up how their parents weren't affectionate enough. Gen X parents put their kid in front of an iPad as toddlers because they're overwhelmed. But that is VERY different from not loving their kids.
90% of us adore our children. Sure, parenthood is difficult sometimes, but I 1000% love my daughter more than my husband-it's like this deep primal love. She's a baby and didn't do anything to "earn" it. It's just there. It's so insane to me that we assume that because infant mortality rates were very high in the past, those mothers and fathers were not absolutely devastated when their babies died.
That’s another thing that makes it SEEM high. Most children passed away before the age of 1! After that the odds of living to adulthood were far from slim 🤷🏻♀️
And the idea that our ancestors were better at coping with it is the most logical. If you had several children who passed away and you knew most people did as well it made is easier
@@fluffylover1231 They really be acting like medieval parents were all subscribed to r/childfree
In the mountains of Appalachia, Ozark, Ouachita high infant mortality was still a thing all the way into the 70's. They greived over the death but had to deal with.
After 9 months, we went to the hospital so my wife could give birth to our son. He died. Let me tell you: that pain is eternal.
Only the unfeeling and inhuman could believe love to be a modern invention.
I am so sorry for your loss.
@@SnazzyArcade me too. Thank you
I’m sorry for your loss. I pray you find healing and help in your grief.
Sorry for your loss. But don't forget that me, you and all of us are modern humans having modern feelings mediated through modern culture. Imagine living in the XI century for example, having 10 children and losing 7.
@@josecipriano3048 hello. You have autism
Those epitaths are heartbreaking. Thanks for your hard work in translation.
I am not a big fan of all these historical theories that posit that humans of ages past were in some way fundamentally psychologically different from us.
Culture can change one's emotions and reactions to things, to a certain extent, of course. But I think historians are often much, much too quick to look at past civilizations and assume that to cope with their life or culture they must have felt completely different from us. In a way, it serves to alienate us from the "backwards" or "barbaric" people of the past.
But this misses that there are fundamental things that make us human. That the people of the past were much more like us than we would like to think.
Strong attachments to family members and close friends are one of the most fundamental aspects of human psychology. Parental attachments to children, in particular, are completely necessary to our evolutionary survival.
To pretend otherwise is to deny the humanity of the people of the Middle Ages.
Everyone has an agenda, nobody tells the truth and time dictates the zeitgeist of each age, keeping this in mind I've come to realize much of history itself is wonky as fuck.
This is one of those questions historians still squabble over, when literary historians knew the answer long ago: read Pearl and tell me that parent is not deeply, deeply mourning the death of their daughter.
If we can watch corvids grieve a death there's zero logic a higher intellect being would not.
Who is pearl? I looked it pearl author and got pearl s buck. Is that who you're talking about?
Yeah I want to know too!! Which book please please please 🙏🏽🥺
@@huberticusrexYou may have already found it, but Pearl is a medieval poem about the loss of a child. I didn’t know what it was until I looked it up. Maybe try searching medieval pearl poem
@savannahastings6807 oh cool thank you!
I think when considering history, we can only think of numbers or general movements. The notion that every fallen solider left a void in multiple people’s lives, and that every widow’s grief was real and visceral is too much to actually consider. It seems tempting that we would console ourselves with the thought that people of earlier times were cut from a different cloth. They were somehow harder and less affected by their experiences.
I really can’t think of a greater insult than to dehumanise them like this.
12:09 in the traditional culture of my country a child who died before baptism was believed to become a creature named “potercha” or “stradcha” (depending on the region name could differ). According to beliefs, those creatures used to linger between material and spiritual worlds and could let their presence be known to a random stranger wondering at nighttime. To release this creature from suffering a person could read a prayer and give this spirit a christian name, thus allowing it to go on in it’s journey to heaven. Yeah, quite orthodox christians we Ukrainians have always been 😂
That is fascinating and beautiful thank you for sharing
This is the first video of yours I've seen and I'm definitely subscribing. I'm not old, but I still remember being taught in school that our ancestors were all filthy, dimwitted and entirely cruel. I'm happy to see perceptions are finally changing.
I came to comment exactly this! First video I've watched, and so well done. Will be subscribing!
The fact you are "not old" may explain why you were taught that though it applies almost exclusively to those of European ancestry. Self-hatred is blatantly encouraged for certain groups these days.
@@anonz975what the fuck are you talking about
I stumbled on your video. I watched and enjoyed. Was emotional at the epitaphs (got a bit embarrassed as my two daughters (23 and 17) were wondering why their father was responding to an academic video about Medieval parental attchments to their children!
Bravo
Tony
It was a bad call to watch this while nursing my baby. I'm crying at every epitaph
Ive always been a cry baby but its been worse since i got pregnant for the first time 7 years ago. Hearing about the parents greiving for their 3 year old got me. I was about to ugly cry at the park until he said the boy lived.
@@dezbiggs6363 Both Joys and Sorrows deepen as soon as pregnancy starts
It wasn’t until I had a child of my own that I started to question the way my father interacted with me and my siblings.
Why is that?
def shouldve reflected on that before it was too late
People who try to claim that human emotions have ever been any different between now and at least 60,000+ years ago are either willfully ignorant of even the most basic concepts of anthropology or are trolling almost as hard as flat earthers.
I’m pretty sure it’s ignorance.
If you haven't already done it, I'd love to see one about spouses loving each other
"In Ramah is heard the sound of sobbing,
bitter weeping!
Rachel mourns for her children,
she refuses to be consoled
for her children-they are no more"
I thought of the same. That text is almost as old as the ability to write is, and there are so many similar stories in the Tanakh
Mammals are emotionally attached to their children. They have to be to be willing to sacrifice their own well being to raise young to maturity. If a mother seal will charge the orca that killed here baby, why is it difficult to believe humanity has loved its young, understanding there are always outliers. There is a mummified Egyptian young child at the Berlin Museum. She was around 4 when she died and no one has conclusively determined cause of death, likely either a blood cancer or respiratory illness. My point? She was buried with not only considerable care and pomp, but from the inscriptions and items included, she was dearly loved. No one with a heart could read the translations attached to her crypt and not become tearful, despite her passing 4 millennia ago. John Adams, one of America’s founding fathers lost a daughter as a toddler and never recovered fully. When his adult daughter became ill with breast cancer in her thirties, her father insisted on nursing her himself. She was every bit still his baby as when she was young. For a good parent, their job never ends. It’s just that simple.
Reading this made me tear up, beautiful and tragic.
@mueezadam8438 Part of the reason it has always stuck with me is that my mother is a NICU nurse and when they were doing the bulk of the medical study of the mummy, it was a common topic in neonatology periodicals and conferences. At the time, I was of a similar age as the dead child and my mother still can’t speak of that little girl without crying. My mother is incapable of viewing that child without thinking of her own (now grown) child. That’s why I find it so ludicrous that people think logic outweighs atavistic instinct. We are programmed to love our offspring, those who are incapable are defective, as survival depends on it. There’s another case study of a Neolithic hominid, not homo sapien. He lives until his late teens and apparently as born mental retardation and congenital birth defects. Despite this, he lived much longer than expected, and also showed signs of being much loved and indulged. Apparently, he was fed large quantities of the only sweet available at the time, honey, which was probably done because he was loved, but it rotted his teeth and left signs for the archeologists. Children exist to be loved.
@@Catmom-gl5ntI remember a case of a Bronze Age woman who had spina bifida and never walked, but was cared for completely and lived well into her 20’s, with cavities from being fed dates. Her burial was beautiful and she was clearly loved so much.
Beautifully said.
Once again you bring up something, I never thought about, but see reasoning on both opinions. Being a father has been my greatest achievement accomplishment. I was on the business end of my daughters birth, she was just a head when her eyes opened for the first time. In that first blink, my life changed. I can't see how any parent could not be 100% devastating by a lost child.
Id think grief is grief no matter how expected the death.
I think historically and contemporarily there are a range of attachment types of personalities; there’s probably no historical consensus because there was no historical norm; some women who came from a line of women with difficulties producing live children or having children reach adulthood could either reserve their emotional attachment to see if the child lives, or she could cherish her children and love them deeply, knowing their time on earth could very well be limited. The amount of grief a woman allows herself to feel is a survival mechanism, as well. Extreme grief and prolonged mourning is bad for the health and can shorten one’s lifespan, there are typically “acceptable” periods of grief from loss, which generally are roughly based upon the healthy norm in terms of what is good for a person and what is unhealthy, based on their very early understanding of biology and neurology and anything specific about the brain or how it works really. But if you look at people today, there are both birth mothers and birth fathers who have no interest in their children, they’re just something that happened to their own lives. They’re not required to love them.
I think parents would always invest emotionally in their children. 9 months of pregnancy, a lot of effort into feeding, housing, and educating them, etc, being wasted on a kid who dies is bad for the adult. Yes, it would've been almost a universal experience to lose children, but it would have been universally considered bad. The difference is probably that it would also be an expected outcome and not seen as some horrible unthinkable but something you pray to who or what ever you believe in happens as little as possible.
It's a complicated debate, but to put out a blanket statement that Medival people did not care about their children is ridiculous. Our understanding of childhood developed over centuries and how generic childhood is now is also supported by things like free, mandatory education and different jobs that allow for people to start working later in life. But a lot of those cultural changes are fairly recent, like child labour laws, or child protection laws. People were selling their children during the Great Depression and even later (hoping they might survive the war for example), and children in rural settings were still put to full on work at an early age as late as the times of my great grandmother (and I don't mean helping, but doing it instead of school, etc). In many parts of the world, those are still the truths of life. Queen Elizabeth of York despared when her married 15 year old son Prince Arthur died. Henry VII could've wept for the stability of the succession, but both parents wept and had to console each other. Henry and Catherine of Aragon grieved together after their firstborn son died suddenly. And not medival, but a Renaissance (second half of 1500s) poet from Poland - Jan Kochanowski wrote multiple 'laments' after his young daughter died. Grieving father of Rosalia Lombardo encased her in a glass coffin when she died in 1920. All those behaviours existed through history on a 'love your child' spectrum as they do now.
Just like with modern times, some parents cared about their kids and would do anything for them, and some just could care less and would sell their kids for another hit of meth.
This is one of those really dumb questions that can be lumped in with the same pot as have humans always enjoyed music or told dirty jokes, ever since Adam was given a soul man has loved and grieved and danced and cried.
Thank you for providing some research on the subject of parental attachment over the ages. In the animal kingdom of which we are all members there is sometimes (often? hard to say) deep attachment of the mother to a dead baby. It is also interesting to theorize on the depth & expression of love between adults over the course of the more than half a million (we think so far) years species homo has existed. Observation suggests each case was unique, bowing to social norms that changed throughout time & societies.
Why wouldn't they? Contrary to popular belief, people during the medievel ages were also... people. Just like us. Same brain. Same emotions. They loved their children just as much as people do nowadays. They made jokes, wrote satirical books, got mad when the neighbors wife talked shit about them, had crushes, owned and loved pets, played games... very regular human things. The way they expressed their love might have been different, but the same thing is true for my grandparents generation. Values and social norms change, but fundamental emotions and desires stay the same.
I hope in another 700 years people aren't going to think of us as unemotional and joyless creatures, like many do about medieval folks.
This doesn’t just apply to the medieval times but any historical time period before the
20th century,
a lot of historical films, games, and stories would be so much more interesting and lively if the people did the things you mentioned above.
One thing that never clicked for me with this "people didn't care much about their children in the Middle ages until they passed the test of child mortality" view was, "Well, hold on, does 'people' include 'mothers' here?".
Because mothers had just as many (or rather, few) children per pregnancy as they do now, and pregnancies were just as long... but they were much more risky. Not just child mortality was higher, maternal mortality was higher too.
So viewing your offspring as just a numbers game, as if we were ants, is way easier when you're not the one literally risking their life at each attempt...
So I wonder how ordinary, unconscious, sexism played a part in modern historians such as Ariès ascribing to that view.
Totally agree, I think when the word "people" is used, what is actually meant is "aristocratic men".
Jesus Christ wokism infests everything...
Go away.
The other thing that we must remember was the probable ever growing number of children arriving without any well known birth control. In present families there had to be a sweet spot . Suns, yes, the more the better, daughters a couple to help out with the household chores and with younger siblings. But remember they would need some sort of dowry. Every surviving child was another mouth to feed and body to house and clothe. It was quite common for presents to sell excess children at hiring fairs. Or in other countries into slavery. However, this doesn’t mean that their parents did not love them as much as today. Just that society, and culture was rather different from today.
@@biosparkles9442
Even then, the video gave examples of the snootiest of noblemen commissioning poetry to share how devastated they were by the loss of their children.
I'm not sure how I got here, but your impressive works cited list makes me excited to stay! 🎉
All throughout history there are good and bad parents. There are parents alive today who would give their life for their children, and there are parents who pop out kids JUST to collect benefits - they don’t see them as human. Just a number.
People can sometimes loose sight of the fact that these people were individuals too.
Really enjoyed this breakdown, and was delighted to see you had a works cited in your description. So many people talk about history and have zero citations. Instant subscribe
Mans woke up and decided to start spitting facts. Medieval defenders vindicated again. Actually imagine being an enlightenment stan RN #Sad
What is an enlightenment Stan? Thank you kindly for any responses 😊
@@pennyforyourthoughts1 fans of the rennaisance period
I’ve been pondering this question for two decades since I had my first ultrasonic exam through my abdomen and I saw the tiny fetus with the giant head. I saw the mouth open and swallow the fluid. Long before Quickening. But the nausea and seeing that tiny figure was astounding and I wondered if it would assist with bonding. The movement especially in the last half of the pregnancy made it clear that I had a separate person in me. A person who woke up for music he liked. Who tensed up when I was nervous. However many times that happened to me, I can’t imagine myself detached from it. Unless I feared infants death so I would guard my heart 💜 until the baby was older and immune strong.
Sir, I have now binge watched most of your videos, and Sir! you are NOT a UA-cam content creator. No background music, no flashy animations and no yapping, with coherent communication, you might be a year or two younger than me, but you are a teacher, at least you are attempting your best to be one. A genuine love for knowledge and a zeal to share it. Thank you my man.
Great video, keep it up!
greatly enjoyed this.
Me, 18 minutes ago: "Oh neat, a fun little video about medieval history!"
Me, now: (sobbing over children's epitaphs from centuries ago)
Wonderful video! I especially loved the poems. Another aspect of the issue may be that the loss of a child could have been so painful, that it created a sort of taboo brought on by a level of grief too deep to talk about. I know that certainly exists today, and humans are humans no matter when they lived.
Cultures and practices change throughout time, but people have always been people, and people have always felt love and empathy.It's human nature to love our children and grieve their passing. I can't imagine it ever being any different
All good parents love their children and familial love and bond has always been an important part of our existence.
Very interesting. Subscribed.
the detached parent theory is foreign even to modern livestock animals. cows cry loudly every time farmers take their newborns away to sell for meat or raise for dairy production, and this happens for 5 or 6 years before the mothers are sent to slaughter. sometimes its true a cow becomes so traumatized that she rejects her calf at birth, but this is a trauma reaponse to having every single newborn snatched away from you.
Interesting video!
first video from this channel and wow! instant sub. loved this!
Second video for me, subbed on first lol. Algo did good.
I’m a new subscriber and have recently binged all your videos and you have quickly become one of my favorite creators. I especially loved this video and the ones on medicine- your dedication to thorough research is commendable, and everything you make is so informative while still engaging and entertaining. I would watch 2 hour versions of any of your videos! Keep it up!!
Thanks! This means a lot
Nicely supported and presented, as usual. Thanks! Perhaps someday we'll hear you explore the prejudices and agendas of certain historians popular through the ages.
I came across this video not long after seeing photographs of a very beautiful ceramic flower crown that a little girl was buried with in Ancient Greece. Obviously we can never know for sure why she was buried that way, but it sure feels like someone loved her very much and wanted to do one last thing to make her spirit happy.
Love this! Greetings from England. 🌿
Before watching I’d just say yes obviously. Mourning for dead children was just as wild and dramatic even if more often back then. And people deeply loved their children… think Mores letters to his daughter, or surviving grave stones and poems
many laymen ideas about the past (the Middle Ages between them) are solely based on the belief that people lack our humanity rather than on clear evidence.
Also, related to Philipe Ariès' work, it is impressive how many "renowned" historians and academics that have become popular in popular culture base their work in a handful of cherry-picked sources than then more rigorous historians and academics need to refute doing an actual academic investigation... just to be ignored by the laymen who keep believing on the earlier dodgy work.
Right now I'm reading the classic Debating the Middle Ages (published in 1998, although with a couple of chapters from the 80s), and it is impressive the amount of chapters that are basically a debunk of previous work based on cherry-picked sources.
great content, keep trudging along the youtube slog. hopefully the algo blesses you soon.
This fasonates me. I am particularly interested in the history of family life. There are so many examples ampled of parents carong for their childre but it often gets mosunderstood
Just found your channel, instant sub
L'accent québécois m'a surprise haha (j'entends rarement mes compatriotes sur UA-cam)
Merci pour l'excellent vidéo 🎉
the fact anyone put weight into the notion that a high infant mortality rate meant people cared less about the death of children is just so stupid, those people spent most of a year waiting for the kid to finally arrive, even if the kid was a d.o.a. the investment and attachment was already there. the only major difference i'd really expect between then and now is the scale of the funerals, they had a lot more of them to attend while we of modern era may only attend as many if we work in a funeral home or adjacent field.
By 2:00 I was like "oh hell no parents availed terribly their child(s) death!"
I can't see parents expending all the effort and resources necessary to raise children if they didn't actually care for them.
maybe you're not looking the right way. effort and resources could be translated into help around the house, cheap labor or maybe even an investment to cash in later. Maybe like this. do we kill the baby girl or keep her and marry her off to the rich farmer down the road. that doesn't sound so far-fetched because it happens every day all around the world.
other than, perhaps, the modern sensibility of familial expectations and accountability for loss of life. given how we thought it was normal to remove the concept of empathy from peoples it clearly applied to, im not sure why there couldnt be some hint of modern sensibility that forced people into doing things. im sure there was some societal reaction to people who chucked their kids in a river lol
@@colorblockpoprocks6973 Anyone who's had teens has been tempted to throw them into a river. So there may be exceptions.
Believing that children were small adults at 3 years old is crazy
Seeing how attached people are to other members of their family, it is insane to me that people believe parents didn't wholly love and cherish every moment with their children and didn't mourn them for the rest of their lives. Sure, they "had" to move on, but it showed in other ways.
I love my neice and nephews so much, I can only imagine what love their parents have for them. Families will always love each other if it is healthy.
Bro, that’s an understatement of the cosmos
Of course they were attached to their children… just as much as we are today…
I am sure all parents, regardless of class and status, were extremely sad and upset when their child died. No question in my mind! Even if they lost their 10th or 12th offspring, it would've been tragic
nobody is irreplacable
So interesting, and never heard in schools.
It’s hard to imagine people who watched people getting mauled to death by lions and bears for fun would mourn in the same capacity that we do today. I feel like we experience higher levels of empathy now
I think our attitudes towards death and entertainment are definitely different today, but not THAT much. In today’s society we still consume violence and death comparibly. Look at video games, TV shows, movies (horror movies in particular), there’s tons of extreme gore and violence we eat up today. But there’s a cognitive dissonance between death for entertainment’s sake and death of someone close to our hearts. Even if the death and bloodshed is fictional. It’s easy to imagine a society thousands of years from now thinking we’re all barbaric today because kids play FPS games and we all watch Evil Dead and serial killer documentaries.
@@Sappysappyyy that’s fair. Makes me think of how huge squid games got when it’s just an entire show based on slaughter lol. But watching it in person feels different.
When/why did people stop including children in the family unit in more modern times? I remember that in Victorian times for example it was unpopular to have “love” in a family or for aristocratic parents to spend any time with their children until they grew up. Similar to the ideas in the 50s that you should be detached from your children.
No. They were simply not human. The laws of human psychology and evolution did not apply to them.
French pronunciation is on point 😮😍
We are humans. Same now as we were 2,000 years ago. To think people only a few centuries ago didn’t love their kids or mourn them is just a really weird idea.
While I can imagine parents were numb or dissasociated to a degree from the deaths of thier children, that doesnt come from a place of callousness. You become numb when death is so common to remain sane. They had birth control methods and ways to end a pregnancy, children could be planned. No one wants to loose a child they planned for or were happily surprised by
Had me at exactly 00.31
Didn’t even think this was a question people had, like of course they were, it’s not like they were a different species.
"Modern people have lots of pets they don't care if they die"
Who could think that women didn’t love their children back then? There are texts over thousands of years old describing women mourning even their miscarriages. Of course they would have desired to have and loved their children
So he literally took a dead baby joke as evidence people didn't love their children
I don’t see how this kind of question can ever be resolved since there are societal norms (which are unwritten) and then there are different individual circumstances and predispositions. I recently read the Book of Margery Kempe and it’s shocking to a modern reader her apparent lack of concern for her children. But then she strikes me as a narcissist- much of her life and the book are attempts to be regarded as a saint doing the kinds of things which qualified at the time.
Damn I'm crying
Cobras are one type of snake that unlike most snakes form pair bonds a mating pair &!raise their young together & are very protective, cobras are like the birds of the reptiles. Love & nurturing is not just in mammals & birds. Cobras are more loving to their babies than many south of the equator humans are
I know we should avoid applying our ideas of what's natural to past times, but I feel like it's pretty obvious that most people loved their children always. I feel like it's a pretty visible universal that parents love their children.
Orcas grieve their children. Elephants grieve their children. Medieval people weren't any different than western peoples now, they were just desperately, horribly, poor.
Any person with a liberal arts education will have read classical literature and poetry lamenting the death of children. Poetry in particular has many many examples of heart wrenching accounts of the death of children and babies. The notion that high infant and child mortality somehow caused parents to love their children less than modern parents is absolutely asinine as any student of history will tell you.
It is interesting that people even wonder goddamn crocs care about their babies
I don't understand how you'd make this misconception, all you'd need to avoid it is empathy
Did humans human in ancient times? Yes, humans have always human.
Imagine if in the future historians use the Simpson or Family Guy as serious exemple an acceptable education from our time
Whoever seriously asked this probably thinks medieval people were living in caves.
Thanks for this, you reminded me I left my kid In the car for 7 hours
😂😂
@@forgottenpalace4472 you laugh but it actually happened so I guess that makes you a POS
Some historians are very stupid, they imagine some alien race with no human feelings and think people in the past are that.
What a weird belief about ancient times.
but didn't watch i just skipped through it
Nah bro why do u even have only 90 views???????
Bugmen theories.
Toi t'es québécois c'est certain 😅
Es-tu Québécois???
un accent familier en effet.
@@grandsome1 la façon qui dit "imaginaire" et "Molière" sont vraiment familiers!!!
“problematical”
How simple-minded do you have to be to think basic human biology is a modern phenomena.
I wonder if there were folks who would buy the corpse for surreptitious medical training
Illegal throughout much for Europe for much of the Middle Ages.