ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 examines the shift from economies and cultures in which children were expected to contribute to the family economy at the earliest age they could do so to one where it became the expectation, though for boys more than for girls, that they would be at school. In peasant families, the majority across Europe, there were considerable differences in access to land but everywhere schooling where it existed had to be fitted into the less busy times on the land – that is to say in winter. The spread of proto-industrialisation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, followed by the Industrial Revolution, provided opportunities for children to work full-time. Demographic historians have established the main contours of life in these centuries. The prominent features were high infant and child mortality, late age of marriage, considerable levels of abandonment of children to foundling hospitals and use of rural wet-nurses to enable mothers to earn. By the age of fourteen many children were likely to be moving away from the family home as servants or apprentices. Children created a culture for themselves, often drawing down upon them criticisms from adults. The family, nevertheless, throughout these four centuries, constituted the main agency in the socialisation of children.
