Infanticide was still common for female babies, but illegitimate children were sometimes added to the father’s
household. To counter the pattern of infant exposure and abandonment, orphanages appeared, the first being established in 787 at Milan.
By the early fourteenth century, there were two hospitals in Florence that accepted foundlings, and in 1445 a separate foundling hospital, the Innocenti, was established. Other foundling hospitals appeared in Rome, Bologna, Pavia, and Paris by the end of the fifteenth century.
During the course of the Middle Ages, opportunities for schooling expanded from the limited possibilities offered by palaces, monasteries, or nunneries. Schools began to appear in the major cities of Europe; many of them, such as the grammar school at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, which was revived by John Colet early in the sixteenth century, were founded for the express purpose of training boys in business.
Most medieval children left home fairly early. Girls entered the work force at around age eight as servants, and boys typically were apprenticed to learn a trade. In effect these children traded their labor for their upkeep in their new households. The death rate for children in the medieval world was extremely high—from 30 to 50 percent of children did not live to maturity. Besides disease, infanticide, and wet nursing, accidents claimed a great many children. There was little supervision of young children.
Newborn children were swaddled (tightly wrapped with strips of cloth so that they could not move about or even move their limbs). Older siblings might provide some care, but most children were left alone; many of them suffered accidents, such as falling into an open fire, as a result.
European living patterns in the medieval and early modern period are comparable in some ways with traditional Japanese households. In traditional Japan the household was a residence as well as a legal, economic, affective, and ritual unit. In it children were regarded as treasures, although only one child would remain in the household as heir (the heir could be either male or female). The other children became apprentices or spouses or servants or remained in the household as dependents.
The successor inherited all the assets of the household and was responsible for the continuity of the household and its reputation. The household was child-centered and stressed socialization into traditional roles. In recent times, as a result of the modernization of Japanese society, the process of socialization has changed. Japanese children do not remain in the traditional households, and younger families move to cities, where schools and other institutions have replaced the household as the primary agent of socialization because new occupations require different forms of preparation. A similar transformation occurred in the Muslim Middle East.
Ironically, it began with a reemphasis on the traditional household, which had been devalued by Westerners since the modern colonial period began in 1798. The family became a point for resistance to colonialism and strengthened paternal authority at a time when Western families were becoming more democratic. As the nations of the Middle East gained independence in the last half of the twentieth century, these traditional households began to give way before the process of modernization. And, casino.fr as was the case in Japan and early modern Europe, schools and other institutions supplemented the family as agents of socialization.
