All People Mourn Dead Children

In the annals of bad history, few ideas loom with the same mountainous idiocy as the notion that people in the olden days did not love their children, and did not mind much when they died. This is from a review of what sounds like a horrid, stupid book, whose name I will not reveal lest somebody buy it:

The work traces the evolution in how Americans and Europeans conceived of children beginning in the 19th century from economically valuable but unsentimentalized little people to economically useless but socially priceless people enjoying a sacred time in their life. Zelizer writes that in 18th century Europe, “the death of an infant or a young child was a minor event, met with a mixture of indifference and resignation.” She quotes a French philosopher of the time who wrote, “I have lost two or three children in infancy, not without regret, but without great sorrow.” Historians find, for example, no evidence during the period that the English wore or displayed symbols of mourning when young children died and that the French commonly buried young children in the backyard like Americans bury pets today. Colonial Americans called newborns “it” or “the little stranger.” While the death of young children was greeted with sorrow, the next born child often took the name of its departed sibling.

That some philosopher once said something proves nothing about anything. Philosophers are not typical human beings, and they are probably less attached to their children than average -- or at least they used to be when Stoicism was considered a good idea. Plus, they are fond of striking intellectual poses. If we looked around I am sure we could find lots of similar statements from modern people. I have accumulated a goodly store of statements in the opposite vein, like this one from a fourteenth-century Englishman:

And he well knows what year that was because of the death of his son in a well, on account of which his mother was sick for half a year following.

It is certainly true that it is difficult to find such statements from pre-modern societies, which is why I save them whenever I find them. But that does not mean medieval or ancient people did not care about their children. If you exclude certainly formulaic expressions -- courtly love, the hot anger of men seeking revenge -- it is hard to find out much of anything about the emotions of people in past societies. We just don't have many records of that kind.

As for calling new babies "it" -- or "little mouse," my favorite variant -- this was not a sign of not caring. It was a way of protecting the child from malign influences like witches and demons by not drawing attention to it. It escapes me why re-using the names of dead children is a sign of not loving them, any more than re-using the names of your parents or siblings would be. Maybe it meant you missed the child horribly and wanted him or her back. (Maude Gonne famously made her lover have sex with her in the tomb of her dead son, hoping to conceive his reincarnation.) And why is burying your babies in the yard a sign of not loving them? Maybe it means wanting to keep them close. The comparison with pets strikes me as running in the opposite direction, when you consider how modern people dote on their pets and grieve over their deaths.

Consider this: anthropologists have not been able to find a single society anywhere in the world where the death of a child is not considered a terrible, sad event. Innuit mourn their children; !Kung San mourn their children; Yanamamo and Siriano and all the rest of the Amazon tribes mourn their children. Can we really think that an emotional pattern not observed anywhere in the modern world existed just 250 years ago? This is biology, people; elephants, lions and chimpanzees show obvious distress at the deaths of their young offspring. Were medieval people less emotional than lions? The notion that people once had children because they were an economic benefit has also been disproved by anthropological studies; peasant children never pay back to their parents the effort their parents put into raising them. (Which is what evolutionary theory pretty much demands -- parents invest in their offspring, not the other way around.)

I am not saying that all societies react the same way to child deaths. But then, societies react differently to adult deaths. Societies do have different emotional styles, from Nordic reserve to Haitian flamboyance. The Victorians really did go overboard with their cult of child death. But the differences in outward expression do not necessarily mean that what people feel inside is so different.

But didn't people in past societies experience the deaths of their children all the time? Yes. In Medieval and Renaissance Europe, 20 to 40% of babies died before their first birthdays, and another 20 to 30% of children died before they reached adolescence. No doubt some people became hardened to the losses. But not everyone; some mourned extravagantly for every lost child. I think death's presence close at hand had social and psychological effects that went far beyond this particular topic. I think it explains much of the difference between the personalities of ancient and modern people. After all, it was not just children who died. Montaigne remarked in one of his essays that his brother, a bold soldier, died of a lingering illness after being hit in the head with a tennis ball. Death was everywhere, all around, a constant threat. I think this is the reason people used to be more religious than they are now. I think it explains why they cultivated philosophies like Stoicism that emphasized maintaining a calm mind no mater what disasters crashed around them. I think it helps explain heavy drinking and drug use, crazed violence, millenarian cults, and much else besides.

If ancient people delayed naming their babies, or re-used their names, or cultivated a calm attitude in the face of their children's deaths, they did not do these things because they were indifferent. They did them as defenses against the pain of losses that were as terrible for them as for us and all other humans.