Bicentennial Essay: Growing Up in America--Then and Now

The following Bicentennial Essay is the fifth in a series that will appear periodically into 1976 and will examine how we have changed in our 200 years.

Childhood in America 200 years ago began at home; boys and girls were born there, most likely delivered by a midwife or simply a neighbor woman. There were virtually no obstetricians. Commonly the infants were delivered in a room specifically set aside for the purpose: the "borning room"—much used because the children came one after the other and, alas, died far more often than is now the case. Historians estimate that year in, year out, about a third or more of all children died in infancy—in typhoid and smallpox epidemics, of diphtheria, dysentery and respiratory ailments. Measles exacted a frightful toll. And, of course, parents were helpless to do much except pray and wait. The medical "treatments" of the day were themselves a major source of sickness and even death: bloodletting, purging and bizarre concoctions.

For those children lucky enough to survive, life was not without its pleasures—and its points of similarity to the life of our own children. Two centuries ago, as with many of us, a child's birth was an occasion of pride. Christening blankets were a traditional gift; often quotations from Scripture were embroidered on them, and they were handed down over the generations. The children were breast-fed—or if their parents were rich and interested in emulating the latest London trend, a wet nurse was hired. The child was wrapped in "flannel sheets," as the homespun blankets or quilts were usually called, and bedded in a cradle; diapers in the modern sense were unknown.