The natural economy for human beings involved hunting and gathering. Most of the history of the species has been wrapped up in a hunting and gathering economy, and this means that the initial ideas and practices directed at childhood were formed in this context as well. Our knowledge about hunting and gathering societies in the past is limited, beyond the fact that hunting and gathering bands, usually with 60 to 80 people from two or three extended families, featured men specializing in hunting while women collected seeds, nuts, and berries. Childhood fits into this context, but we have few details; most evidence comes from material remains plus observation of some of the hunting and gathering societies that have persisted into modern times. Assessing childhood in these societies is important nevertheless, because traces of hunting and gathering habits linger today, even in very different economies, and because some of the natural or inherent aspects of childhood shine through as well. People in hunting and gathering societies, for example, were responsible for the fundamental adaptations to prolonged dependency in childhood, which differentiated them from their ancestors and cousins among the other primate species.
This chapter also deals with the first great revolution in human conditions, the replacement of hunting and gathering with agriculture, among many of the world’s peoples, in the millennia after 9000 BCE. Huge adjustments in the treatment of children were involved in this shift, though we lack detailed information about the transition itself, including the extent to which adults were aware of how much they were redefining childhood. Most world history, from the advent of agriculture until a few hundred years ago, involved agricultural societies, so getting a fix on the ways in which this new economy determined novel but durable qualities in childhood is extremely important. Basic features of the conditions of childhood in agriculture can be drawn from many regions, particularly in Africa, Asia and Europe, from agriculture’s inception about 8000 BCE.
Direct evidence about childhood in hunting and gathering societies is very sparse. The most obvious point involves the tremendous constraints on childhood as a result of frequently limited resources and the need to travel regularly in search of food. Among other things, it was very difficult to carry more than one fairly small child per family, as a small band moved to a new location to find game, which placed definite limits on the permissible birth rate.
Few families, in fact, had more than four children during their entire reproductive span, because of the prolonged burdens each child placed on the available food supply. Children could and did undoubtedly help with women’s gathering of seeds, nuts, and berries, but their needs regularly outstripped what they could contribute; and until their early teens, boys were of no real use on the hunt at all. Most hunting societies developed significant rituals for the introduction of boys to hunting, and some cave paintings depict adult men bringing older boys, undoubtedly their sons, on the hunt for training. Demonstrations of hunting prowess are central to coming of age rituals in some hunting and gathering societies even today, and they were surely widespread in former times. Their importance was more than symbolic: the point at which boys were old enough to provide for themselves and assist their families was crucial in the demanding conditions in which hunting bands operated.
Evidence from contemporary hunting and gathering societies suggests, similarly, that children often played little role in economic life until they were in their teens. One group, where children went on foraging trips with women, actually was less productive than when adults worked on their own; children simply got in the way. Other bands simply did not try to make children consistently useful until age 14 or so. The limitations on children’s utility shaped these societies in distinctive ways; this may help account, also, for the relative infrequency of representations of children in primitive art. At the same time hunting and gathering children had rich opportunities for play, mixing different age groups. The most obvious impact of the limitations on children’s practical functions, however, was on the numbers born.
Restriction of birth rates occurred through various means, but above all by prolonged lactations – up to four years or beyond – during which time the mother’s capacity for conception was limited by her body chemistry. The method was not foolproof, but it had wide effects. Further limitations resulted from deliberate infanticide – there is archeological evidence of this from the Americas, Australia, and India. A few societies, for example some American Indian groups, also experimented with plants that would induce abortion. Many families surely found themselves torn between sexual desire and the need to avoid too many children. Disease and malnutrition played a role in reducing the numbers of conceptions, by limiting women’s fertility; and they also affected survival rates of those children who were born. Long lactation did not encourage abundant nutrition, and mortality around the weaning period would add to the death rate. Other diseases attacked children, and some, such as malaria, could also limit the fertility of adults. Many mothers died in their twenties – life expectancy generally was short – which further limited the per capita birth rate.
Revealingly, on the eve of the introduction of agriculture in Europe, most hunting and gathering bands did not always bother to bury children who died before the age of five. This must not be taken to mean that parents did not care about their children’s deaths; but there was clear awareness that the survival of too many children was a threat to family and community, and that death was to be expected. In point of fact, given the various measures taken to keep children’s numbers down, the populations of hunting and gathering societies grew very slowly, if at all.
The importance of constraints, and the fact that children must have been seen as a burden to some extent, particularly in contrast to what would come with agriculture, should not overshadow the opportunities for children in hunting and gathering societies. In the first place, while work was vital, it was not boundless even for adults. Many hunters and gatherers labor, on average, only a few hours a day. This leaves considerable time among other things for play with and among children. In many contemporary hunting groups, children and adults often play together, limiting the space for children by themselves but providing great opportunity for wider interactions. On a second point: many hunting and gathering societies began fairly early to provide some extra treats for children in the families of leaders – the first examples of the use of children to express social distinctions, a practice that obviously continues, though in quite different ways, to the present day. The graves of some older children in preagricultural sites contain decorative jewelry, carved bone weapons and colored ornaments. One child skeleton in Europe was found with a flint knife at the waist, and laid on a swan’s wing. This kind of preferential treatment most obviously suggested a family’s special status, using childhood even in death to demonstrate wealth and importance, but it may also have reflected a real affection for the children involved. Finally, while childhood was undoubtedly a time of play and occasional work assistance, adulthood typically came early: once the hunting rituals were passed, a boy became a man, and many girls were introduced into marriage and adulthood in their early teens as well. The notion of a prolonged waiting period, between childhood and maturity, common to subsequent societies both with agriculture and with industry, was usually absent in this original version of human organization.
Gender distinctions among children in hunting and gathering societies were complex. Young boys and girls were under the care of women and joined in similar games. In later childhood boys, knowing their destination to the hunt, tended to pull away, forming separate games and groups. But opportunities for division were limited by the fact that hunting bands were small and there were relatively few children in any given group. Furthermore, while the work of women was different from that of men, it was at least as important economically, which reduced opportunities for huge status distinctions between boys and girls in growing up.
Studies of contemporary hunting and gathering societies also reveal tremendous variation from one setting to the next, in the specific kinds of personalities encouraged among children. Because bands were small and fairly isolated, diverse approaches were inevitable. Take anger, for example. Some hunting and gathering groups encourage quite a bit of anger among children, with parents setting the example in their own approach to discipline. Others, for instance the Utku Inuit group in Canada, refuse to acknowledge anger in children beyond the age of two – even lacking a word for it, and assuming that children will avoid direct expression entirely, in favor of crying or abusing pets. Various specific patterns of childrearing seem to be functional in hunting and gathering situations, beneath the basic frameworks imposed by resources.

The Advent of Agriculture

Agriculture began to replace hunting and gathering about 10,000 years ago, providing a dramatically new economic system with major implications for childhood. Agriculture spread slowly across the world, and did not convert all regions. Hunting and gathering pockets have persisted even to the present day, and an alternative economic form, nomadism based on animal herding, developed as well. Agriculture gained ground, however, both by diffusion and by separate creation (there were at least three distinct “inventions” of agriculture, in the Middle East/Black Sea region, in the rice growing areas in southern China and Southeast Asia, and in Central America). Increasingly, agriculture became the most common framework for the human experience – and therefore, for childhood.
The most obvious change that agriculture brought was a reconsideration of children’s utility in work. Much more clearly than in hunting and gathering societies, useful work became the core definition of childhood in most agricultural classes – including those devoted to craft production and home manufacturing. Of course there were still costs associated with young children, particularly before some work could begin at age five or so. Children would not fully earn their keep until their early teens, but by their mid-teens they could actively contribute to the family economy through their labor in the fields and around the home.
We have no idea exactly how quickly agricultural families realized that children provided such an essential labor force. We do know that the birth rate began to go up fairly rapidly, which expressed the expanded food supply agriculture made possible but also the new realization that children could and should help out, beyond the casual assistance in food-gathering. Families undoubtedly increased the birth rate primarily by reducing the period of lactation, often to 18 months or so, which (assuming at least consistent sexual activity) automatically increased the number of children born per family to the six or seven that became the common average among ordinary people throughout the agricultural centuries.
It’s worth noting, as a vital sidelight, that this new birth rate was hardly the maximum achievable. We know, from the example of the Hutterite religious group in Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that when a family really wants to breed to the fullest, starting when a woman first becomes fertile and extending to menopause, it will average 12–14 children; few agricultural families ever did this and even fewer wanted to, because the burden on family resources would be too great. So most families continued to use lactation to limit family size; often, they also discouraged sexual intercourse immediately after puberty (even in married couples) and typically they slowed sexual activity during the parents’ thirties and forties, in part to keep the number of children within bounds. Most agricultural societies also saw the wealthier classes have more children than the masses of the population, because they alone had the means of support. Despite the continued need to balance birth rate and resources, agricultural societies brought huge change: childhood became a more important part of society both economically and quantitatively.
Agricultural villages, as a result, were full of children. Relatively high birth rates and fairly low average life expectancies positioned children and youth as almost half of the total population (41% average). The contrast with hunting and gathering societies, and with modern industrial settings, is dramatic: agricultural societies may not always have treated children well, but they were child-centered to a degree we may find hard to imagine. There is some reality to the notion that whole villages raised children – responsibilities were not those of parents alone; and this in turn was partly because there were so many youngsters involved. Children gained notice in wider societies as well: legal codes, like those in Mesopotamia, mentioned obligations to children. In both Egypt and Mesopotamia, couples who were childless were regarded with suspicion (if one could not have children directly, then a family should adopt, which was another way to spread both labor and property around). A childless Egyptian scribe was denounced: “You are not an honorable man because you have not made your wives pregnant … As for the man who has no children, let him obtain an orphan and raise him.”
Childhood also became more identifiable to children themselves. There were more siblings to interact with, and agricultural villages, with several hundred people rather than the 60 to 80 of hunting bands, were filled with potential companions as well.
Agricultural societies, at least as they began to become somewhat more complex with some cities as well as rural villages, raised some new warning flags as well. Early legal codes, from Babylonia in the Middle East, insisted that parents did not have the right to disavow their children unless they could prove (presumably in a court of law) legitimate causes: they must continue to support their offspring otherwise. This was an important state intervention on behalf of children, but it also suggested that, in contrast to the tight hunting and gathering communities, social discipline had become somewhat looser, creating new possibilities for bad parents. This is a problem that governments continue to grapple with – for example, concerning the obligations of divorced fathers.
Death remained a constant companion of childhood. While nutrition probably improved for some children over hunting and gathering, famines were frequent. Contagious diseases such as measles or smallpox became a greater problem for agricultural societies than had been the case for hunters, and disproportionately affected children and the elderly. Sickness, accidents, and death loomed large in agricultural childhoods. Few children would fail to see at least two siblings die before reaching adulthood, and overall 30 to 50 percent of all children perished before age two in the average agricultural society. Here was an obvious source of sorrow, but all agricultural societies had to adjust to the inevitability of children’s deaths, and along with grief there was often a considerable amount of fatalism. Even where medical help existed, many families did not bother with it for children, because death seemed so inevitable; and in all agricultural societies the rate of what modern people might see as preventable accidents – children falling into wells, for instance – was quite high.
Here, in fact, is a challenging interpretive dilemma. Some earlier historians of the family, aware of the high death rate for children and the absence of some seemingly obvious precautions, assumed that parents did not care much if a few children died. Too many surviving offspring, after all, would be a burden. Some agricultural societies deliberately killed some young children, using infanticide as a means of population control. And even when infanticide declined, under the influence of religions such as Islam or Christianity, some parents still did not bother naming kids until they reached two, on grounds that there was no point until survival was more certain. Yet, against this, many parents mourned the deaths of children, seeing them as significant markers in family life. Figuring out how child death was assimilated in agricultural societies remains a difficult assignment.
Perhaps related to death, most agricultural societies also developed some interesting fears and what we would call superstitions about children. Many African groups believed that twins carried evil spirits, and often put them to death. Children in the early Harappan civilization, along the Indus river, had their ears pierced to keep out evil spirits. European Christians were afraid of children born with the caul (the fetal membrane that might still cover an infant’s head at birth), believing this might be a sign of witchc...