• mommykink@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    it’s probably healthier for children to grow up with a larger set of adults

    That’s how it was for pretty much all of history up until around the ~15th century when the “family unit” became a lot more defined. It wasn’t at all uncommon for a few people in a community (typically women) to help raise the village children while the parents were away at work. Not to mention the fact that most housing for the average person was communal, meaning children got a lot more exposure to adults outside of their biological family.

    The idea of “parents should be the sole guardians of their children” didn’t really come about until the concept of private land ownership for the peasant class, which didn’t reach widespread adoption across Europe (and later the Western World at large) until around the late 1400s.