Love to the Little Ones The Trials and Triumphs of Parents Through the Ages in Letters, Diaries, Memoirs and Essays

This anthology shows how mothers and fathers have thought about and written to their children over the last eight hundred years, using examples from letters, diaries and (occasionally) books of advice. The book is divided into five phases of an individual parent's life: pregnancy through infancy; childhood; adolescence; adulthood; and death. Within each section the extracts are arranged chronologically so that the opening chapter on pregnancy and birth, for example, begins with the anxieties and problems confronting parents in the fifteenth century but ends with the wholly different experiences of birth in the late twentieth century.Parents today tend to believe that they face more problems in bringing up their children than ever before. They are certainly given more advice: from professional childcare experts, from other parents and from governments. Letters and diaries from the past are reassuring, because they speak of familiar concerns against very different historical backgrounds. The fundamental feelings of parents now and parents then seem to be unchanged: their affections, their anxieties, their hopes, their difficulties and their grief. It is fascinating to understand the predicament of a mother trying to mediate between her son and his father, four hundred years ago, and to enjoy the tenderness of an eighteenth-century father who tells his friend that he should read to his pregnant wife every night.The book is divided into five phases of an individual parent's life: pregnancy through infancy; childhood; adolescence; adulthood; and death. Within each section the extracts are arranged chronologically so that the opening chapter on pregnancy and birth, for example, begins with the anxieties and problems confronting parents in the fifteenth century but ends with the wholly different experiences of birth in the late twentieth century.Parents today tend to believe that they face more problems in bringing up their children than ever before. They are certainly given more advice: from professional childcare experts, from other parents and from governments. Letters and diaries from the past are reassuring, because they speak of familiar concerns against very different historical backgrounds. The fundamental feelings of parents now and parents then seem to be unchanged: their affections, their anxieties, their hopes, their difficulties and their grief. It is fascinating to understand the predicament of a mother trying to mediate between her son and his father, four hundred years ago, and to enjoy the tenderness of an eighteenth-century father who tells his friend that he should read to his pregnant wife every night.