A family is and always will be important to almost all cultures. A family is where people can find love, comfort, and support in most cases. All through time everyone has always had families, just not necessarily the same type. In Europe, before the Industrial Revolution, families lived as extended families like many parts of the world still do today. An extended family is when a newly married couple does not find a place of their own; they just live together with either the bride or groom's family. The only difference was in Europe usually the parents would move in with the newly weds. Many times this happened but also they had what is normal to us, the nuclear family. This is the family where newly weds start off on their own and start a family of their own away from their parents. By the 1700s extended families were not found in western and central Europe. Not many people married young during this time. The average person actually married late. People would enter adulthood!

and start working before they thought about marrying. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century twenty-seven was recorded as an average age for people getting married in one English

village. Late marriage and a nuclear family defined the ways of living in European society during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The ways people felt about children had much to do with the death rate of young children. Doctors would often tell the mothers not to get close to their children and bond in any way because the child might not survive. One man named all of his boys Edward because he wanted one to be named Edward and he knew that they would all probably die. This way maybe one would survive and he would have a boy named Edward to pass on his name.

The reason for most children dying was the medical treatment during this time. The doctors had the same attitude as most people, they were not sympathetic to the children. The only tender care the children would get was from house wives and women healers. These were the women that helped deliver babies. The children got attention only when they were punished; this neglect led to physical and emotional abuse. Susannah Wesley stated that her children were "taught to fear the rod, and to cry softly".

Children in the eighteenth century were put to work in factories where they were brutally mistreated. This was the way children were brought up, with strict physical discipline. The strict discipline way of child-rearing soon ended in the middle of the century. "Critics, led by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his famous treatise Emile, called for a greater love, tenderness, and understanding toward children as well as child-based, experimental

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1022
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)