AP European History

## Learning Outcomes

- Understand what AP European History means by families investing more in children
- Explain how Enlightenment ideas changed views of childhood and child-rearing
- Identify the roles of **John Locke**, **Jean-Jacques Rousseau**, and **Émile (1762)**
- Distinguish between demographic change and cultural change in 18th-century family life
- Assess why this trend was strongest among bourgeois or middle-class families
- Use counterevidence such as wet nursing, child labor, and foundling hospitals to qualify an argument
- Apply this topic to comparison, causation, and continuity/change questions on the AP European History exam

## AP European History Syllabus

For the AP European History, you are expected to understand changing family life and childhood in 18th-century Europe, with a focus on the following syllabus points:

- Know that “families invested more in children” means increased emotional, moral, and educational attention to children, not simply having more or fewer children
- Identify the influence of **John Locke** and **Jean-Jacques Rousseau** on child-rearing and education
- Know the key works **Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)** and **Émile (1762)**
- Explain why this trend is most strongly associated with bourgeois or middle-class family life rather than all Europeans
- Understand that childhood came to be viewed more clearly as a distinct stage of life
- Distinguish demographic developments such as population growth and lower mortality from changing ideas about parenting
- Recognise limits to the trend, including child labor, wet nursing, abandonment, and foundling hospitals
- Assess continuity and change by showing that affection and investment increased in some settings without overturning older economic pressures

## Test Your Knowledge

_Attempt these questions before reading this article. If you find some difficult or cannot remember the answers, look more closely at that area during your revision._

1. What did 18th-century Europeans increasingly mean when they treated childhood as a distinct stage of life?
2. How did **John Locke** and **Rousseau** influence family attitudes toward children?
3. Why should you be careful not to say that all European families became child-centered?
4. What do wet nursing and foundling hospitals suggest about the limits of this trend?
5. How could this topic be used in a continuity-and-change essay?

## Introduction

In AP European History, the statement that families invested more in children refers to a gradual social and cultural shift in the 18th century. Many families, especially in the **bourgeois** or middle classes, gave more thought to children’s upbringing, education, discipline, and emotional development. Children were increasingly seen not just as small workers or future adults, but as people who needed guidance during a special stage of life.

This shift matters because it connects several AP themes at once: **individual and society**, **poverty and prosperity**, and **objective knowledge and subjective visions**. It also links intellectual history to social history. Enlightenment thinkers changed ideas about how children learn, while demographic and economic changes affected what families could actually do in practice.

> **Key Term: child-centered family**
> A family model in which parents devote greater emotional, educational, and moral attention to children and their development.

### The older family economy and the beginnings of change

To understand why investing more in children mattered, start with what came before. In early modern Europe, the family was usually an **economic unit**. Children worked. Boys might become apprentices or servants from a young age. Girls often helped with domestic labor, household production, and rural work. In peasant and artisan households, survival depended on everyone contributing.

> **Key Term: family economy**
> A household system in which all members, including children, contributed labor to support family survival and income.

This means the 18th-century shift was not a sudden discovery that children existed. Parents in earlier centuries did care about their children. The real change was that some families, especially those with more resources, could spend more time and money on shaping children rather than using them mainly for immediate labor.

The demographic background helped. Europe experienced population growth in the 18th century. Better food supplies, fewer severe famines in some regions, and some decline in mortality created conditions in which families could think differently about child-rearing. But do not confuse this with a complete emotional revolution. A lower mortality rate may encourage stronger long-term investment, yet it does not automatically create affectionate parenting by itself.

A key social setting for this trend was the growing middle class. Merchant, professional, and urban families increasingly viewed the home as a place of supervision, discipline, and moral formation. This did not mean fathers stopped working or mothers stopped laboring. It meant that childhood itself drew more deliberate attention.

> **Test Tip:** For SAQs and LEQs, separate **material conditions** from **ideas**. Write one sentence on demographic or economic change, then another on Enlightenment thought. That clear split earns stronger analysis.

### Enlightenment ideas: Locke, Rousseau, and the new view of childhood

The strongest intellectual support for greater investment in children came from Enlightenment thought. **John Locke** argued that the mind at birth was a **tabula rasa**, or blank slate. If experience shapes the person, then education and environment matter enormously. That idea gave parents and educators a new sense of responsibility.

> **Key Term: tabula rasa**
> Locke’s idea that the mind begins as a blank slate and is shaped by experience and education.

Locke’s educational thinking is linked especially to **Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)**. He stressed discipline, habit, reason, and careful upbringing. This did not mean indulgence. In fact, Locke thought children should be formed carefully so they would become rational adults. The point is that upbringing now seemed central, not secondary.

**Rousseau** pushed this shift further. In **Émile (1762)**, he argued that childhood was a distinct phase of life and that education should follow the child’s natural development. This was a major change from treating children mainly as incomplete adults. Rousseau believed adults could damage children by imposing the wrong expectations too early.

> **Key Term: Émile**
> Rousseau’s 1762 work on education, which argued that childhood is a distinct stage and that education should follow natural development.

Rousseau’s influence was large because he joined educational theory with emotional language about nature, innocence, and growth. Even where families did not literally follow his model, his ideas helped spread the belief that children needed age-appropriate care and supervision.

Locke and Rousseau differed in emphasis. Locke highlighted formation through experience and rational discipline. Rousseau stressed natural development and the uniqueness of childhood. On an exam, using both thinkers together is stronger than naming only one, because it shows range.

This intellectual shift also reinforced changing domestic ideals. Mothers were increasingly associated with early child-rearing, and fathers with moral oversight and education planning. In bourgeois families, this could produce a more private, affectionate model of family life.

> **Key Term: domestic affection**
> Greater emotional warmth and attachment within the household, especially between parents and children.

Yet there was a limit here too. Educational concern often focused more on boys than girls. Even in families that invested more in children, ideas about gender remained unequal. Investment did not equal equality.

> **Test Tip:** If a prompt asks about “the extent” of change, avoid absolute claims like “European families became child-centered.” Say “many bourgeois families increasingly did so, while poorer families often remained tied to child labor.”

### What changed in practice, and what did not

The clearest practical effects of this trend were in schooling, supervision, discipline, and emotional language about children. Middle-class families increasingly wanted children to be trained, observed, and morally guided. Parenting literature expanded. Childhood was treated as a period during which character could be shaped.

In some elite and urban settings, there was also more concern over infants’ care. But here the evidence becomes mixed. The practice of **wet nursing** remained common in parts of Europe, especially among elites and in some urban societies such as France. Parents often sent infants away to be nursed by another woman, sometimes in the countryside.

> **Key Term: wet nursing**
> The practice of paying another woman to breastfeed and care for an infant.

This matters because wet nursing could weaken direct parental contact and was often linked to higher infant mortality, especially when infants were sent away. So even while ideas of affectionate parenting grew, some families still relied on practices that seem to cut against that ideal. That contradiction is exactly the kind of complexity AP examiners like.

Another limitation was abandonment. **Foundling hospitals** expanded in some regions to receive abandoned infants. These institutions show that concern for children did exist at a public level, but they also reveal poverty, illegitimacy, and family crisis.

> **Key Term: foundling hospital**
> An institution for abandoned infants, often created to reduce infanticide and manage poverty and illegitimacy.

Do not use foundling hospitals as simple proof that parents loved children more. They are mixed evidence. On one side, they show organized attempts to save infants. On the other, they show that many families still could not keep or support children. In some foundling hospitals, mortality was extremely high, so institutional “care” was often tragic.

Poor families in particular could not fully adopt bourgeois child-centered ideals. They still needed children’s labor. In rural households and among urban workers, children continued contributing economically. That is why the AP-safe argument is not “child labor disappeared” but “new ideas about childhood spread unevenly across class lines.”

Marriage patterns also matter here. Early modern families often married relatively late, which limited years of childbearing, and family size was not always as huge as students imagine. But investing more in children does not simply mean smaller families. It means greater concentration of resources and attention on those children who were present.

The growth of a more child-focused family model therefore involved both continuity and change:

- **Change:** more educational attention, more domestic affection, stronger belief that childhood required guidance
- **Continuity:** child labor, patriarchy, class inequality, abandonment, and high mortality still shaped many lives

### How to argue this topic in AP European History

This subtopic works especially well in essays about causation, continuity and change, or the social effects of Enlightenment thought. A strong argument should combine three layers.

First, show **context**. Explain that Europe in the 18th century was experiencing population growth, urban change, and the spread of Enlightenment ideas.

Second, show **change**. Use **Locke**, **Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)**, **Rousseau**, and **Émile (1762)** as evidence that children were increasingly viewed as educable and developmentally distinct. Connect that to bourgeois family life, moral supervision, and schooling.

Third, show **limits and continuity**. Use wet nursing, child labor, and foundling hospitals to prove that this was not a universal social transformation.

If you want a brief historiographical point, you can mention **Philippe Ariès**, who later argued that Europe gradually became more child-centered. But be careful: his thesis is debated, because he relied heavily on elite cultural evidence and may have overstated the sharpness of change. On an AP exam, that point is useful only if it supports an argument about complexity.

A high-scoring mini-judgment might sound like this: 18th-century Europe saw increased investment in children mainly among middle-class families, where Enlightenment ideas and changing domestic values encouraged greater attention to education and child-rearing; however, the trend remained limited by poverty, child labor, and persistent high infant mortality.

> **Test Tip:** In a DBQ or LEQ, use a qualification sentence near the end of a body paragraph: “However, this development was strongest among bourgeois families and did not erase the economic pressures facing peasants and workers.” That sentence helps show complexity.

## Key Point Checklist

_This article has covered the following key knowledge points:_

- “Families invested more in children” means greater emotional, educational, and moral attention to children
- The trend was strongest among bourgeois or middle-class families, not all Europeans
- Earlier families were economic units in which children’s labor was normal and necessary
- Demographic growth and somewhat lower mortality formed part of the background to changing family life
- **John Locke** linked childhood to education through the idea of the **tabula rasa**
- **Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)** stressed parental responsibility, discipline, and environment
- **Rousseau’s Émile (1762)** presented childhood as a distinct stage of natural development
- Greater domestic affection and supervision became more visible in 18th-century family ideals
- **Wet nursing** shows that increased concern for children coexisted with risky infant-care practices
- **Foundling hospitals** reveal both public concern for children and the persistence of abandonment and poverty
- Poor families still relied on child labor, so the shift toward child-centered family life was uneven
- A strong AP argument must show both change and continuity, not a complete social transformation

## Key Terms and Concepts

- child-centered family
- family economy
- tabula rasa
- Émile
- domestic affection
- wet nursing
- foundling hospital


18th-Century Society and Demographics - Families invested more in children