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Threats to Children in the Ancient World Childhood in the ancient world had a darker side:

Some people practiced infanticide as a means of birth control or eugenics (French);

some children were sold into slavery;some of the little slaves were maimed so that they could be more pitiable beggars.

 Additionally, the use of wet nurses for the newborn was common and undoubtedly led to higher infant mortality rates.

Wet nursing led to higher infant mortality because there was a greater possibility of disease, the wet nurse had less concern for the child than the mother did, and the amount of nourishment from the wet nurse might have been less.

Infanticide was common, and such evidence as there is suggests that it was more common for female children than for male children to be killed by being abandoned and left to starve.

 A Roman law, for instance, said that all boy children and at least one girl born to a family had to be raised. In Sparta (from 700 to about 350 B.C.E.) infanticide was part of a program of eugenics whereby defective children were exposed.

Illegitimate children were also disposed of through infanticide. Most children grew up in small nuclear families with one or two siblings. These small families were of concern to the Romans, who sought to increase the birth rate through incentives.

Childhood in Medieval and Early Modern Times Very little is known about child-rearing practices and childhood in the early centuries of the Middle Ages because the historical sources for this period are very scattered and fragmentary. But it is known that children were valued.

Among the Visigoths, for example, a male baby had a blood price (wergild ) of one-tenth that of an adult male. As the child aged, the wergild increased.