What were the typical circumstances of children’s lives? Some scholars have claimed that high mortality rates prevented parents from forming emotional attachments to young children. With a reasonable expectation that a child might die, some scholars believe, parents maintained an attitude of indifference, if not downright negligence. Most historians now believe, however, that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century parents did love their children, suffered anxiously when they fell ill, and experienced extreme anguish when they died.

In a society characterized by much violence and brutality, discipline of children was often severe. The axiom “Spare the rod and spoil the child” seems to have been coined in the mid-seventeenth century. Susannah Wesley (1669–1742), mother of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism (see "Protestant Revival"), agreed. According to her, the first task of a parent toward her children was “to conquer the will, and bring them to an obedient temper.” She reported that her babies were “taught to fear the rod, and to cry softly.”5 They were beaten for lying, stealing, disobeying, and quarreling, and forbidden from playing with other neighbor children. Susannah’s methods of disciplining her children were probably extreme even in her own day, but they do reflect a broad consensus that children were born with an innately sinful will that parents must overcome.

The Enlightenment produced an enthusiastic new discourse about childhood and child rearing. Starting around 1760, critics called for greater tenderness toward children and proposed imaginative new teaching methods. In addition to supporting foundling homes and urging women to nurse their babies, these new voices ridiculed the practice of swaddling babies and using whaleboned corsets to mold children’s bones. Instead of dressing children in miniature versions of adult clothing, critics called for comfortable clothing to allow freedom of movement. Rather than emphasizing original sin, these enlightened voices celebrated the child as an innocent product of nature. They viewed nature as inherently positive, so Enlightenment educators advocated safeguarding and developing children’s innate qualities rather than thwarting and suppressing them. Accordingly, they believed the best hopes for a new society, untrammeled by the prejudices of the past, lay in a radical reform of child-rearing techniques.

One of the century’s most influential works on child rearing was Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, or On Education (1762). Rousseau argued that boys’ education should include plenty of fresh air and exercise and that they should be taught practical craft skills in addition to rote book learning. Reacting to what he perceived as the vanity and frivolity of upper-class Parisian women, Rousseau insisted that girls’ education focus on their future domestic responsibilities. For Rousseau, women’s “nature” destined them solely for a life of marriage and child rearing.