Childhood in the Victorian Era

The domestic situation of most Victorian families offered an endless net work of caregivers. The average Victorian household had six children, but most had a variety of other family and others that lived in their dwelling. The nuclear family that defined the last century was a rare family in Victorian times.

Yet, the extended family traditionally thought of by us as a Victorian norm only made up about 10 percent of Victorian households. A traditional extended family is one in which three or more generations lived in the same house. An average Victorian household would consist of the husband, wife, unmarried cousins, farm laborers, maybe one aged parent or aunt, and servants if it was a household of some economic means.

The makeup of the Victorian home was in constant flux. Older children married, left to find work, or died. In some areas of industrial homes life expectancy was only in the mid twenties and at the turn of the century not much more than 50 for most middle class people. Infants and children had more than a %50 percent chance of dying before the age of 5 in many communities. It was not uncommon for a healthy child to have lost one or both parents and a sibling before they reached their teens.

This is not to mention the changes in household help that occurred frequently as younger folks who worked in these homes married or went on to better jobs. Working class children and farm children often found themselves being farmed out to other relatives or moved to communities to find work and contribute to the family coffers in their early teens.

A family that found itself in a growing industrial community would be asked to take on other family members children in hopes they would find employment in exchange for limited economic contribution. Sickly children might have been moved to relatives that lived in the county hoping the air was better for them, but returned to the city if they could not pull their weight on a friend or family's farm. It was about the survival of the family unit and those individual close to the unit that determined the fate of many Victorian children.School was not mandatory for children in England till 1840 and much later in most parts of the United States.

The working poor who had ambitions for their children went as far as to ask charitable organizations to arrange night schools in order that children working in sweat shops might have a chance to attend school. In rural communities in the United States farm families pooled their money to hire a school Master or Marm. Most children in rural areas because of weather conditions and the planting season only attended school for three to five months a year. A growing middle class after the American Civil war increased the demand for public High School.

A girl in the rural Midwest was more likely to attend high school as her brother would have been needed to work the farm or family business than she was. In an upper middle class family, a smart girl was unlikely to get a University education than her brother was because it was considered a waste of time to educate women whose only future prospects were marriage. In late Victorian times it became acceptable for middle class girls to pursue a degree in teaching so they could have a trade before marriage. Women from the poorest urban areas many of them immigrants had always worked and never had a chance at any formal education. Women teachers especially, were underpaid and undervalued by most communities.

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Discipline for children in all social levels was strict. The sexually repressed Victorians went to great extent to punish and discourage all sexual expression in children. The very lowest classes did not have this luxury and were noted to sell young girls that family could not afford to feed into what was essentially domestic prostitution. Corporal punishment was considered appropriate even for infants in some Victorian households. Wealthier families did indulge their children in lessons, games, and parties, but many of these activities were meant to help the child learn the social mores of the day and not just "play"

In the 1830's it was not uncommon for children in urban settings to succumb to cholera because of a lack of understanding in the community about the need for clean water. Most cities had amazingly unsanitary conditions that made the whole community at risk for the spread of disease. Respiratory ailments were the norm in these communities where the industrial revolution had caused so much pollution. Many times these chronic respiratory ailments cover up epidemics of whopping cough and tuberculosis.

It was not uncommon for children who avoided these ailments to still literarily grow up with "blackened lungs" and have a short life span. Mortality rates for infants, children, and women were high because of all communicable diseases in urban areas where they went unchecked. Most women in children in poorer communities were malnourished and this contributed to low disease survival rates.

Diets tended to consist of bread, cheese, beer, and occasionally meat. There were not fresh fruits and vegetables widely available to the poor and in certain climates not even the middle class. The men as head of household got the best and largest portions of any food that was served for they were literally the most important "breadwinner".

This lead too many women and children; being deprived of necessary nutrition to have the strength to fight off common diseases Life on the farm the last century had in many ways been healthier for many people. Women breast feed until most children were two, but their milk was only as good as their diet. Wealthier women could afford wet nurses, but many times these women were less healthy than the mothers of their charges and the infant mortality rate was high. Few children who were fed cow's milk, weak tea, and sugar if their mothers could not breast feed made it through infancy.

Victorian childhood prepared most children for a life of hardship and economic uncertainty. A growing middleclass assured that a least a growing number of children would have an education and life of not just day to day survival. The lack of serious medical advances for ordinary people made the prospect of death something that the average person faced every day.

http://www.victoriaspast.com/CaringForKids/CaringForKids.html

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