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

The reasoning for late marriage in Europe was that people felt like getting a job and being able to support a family came before starting a family. Land was the greatest source of income during this time so the men would often wait until their father died and they inherited land before they would marry. If the men had land they felt they could then support a family. The land would provide a place to live and money from its harvest. The women on the other hand would also wait to inherit a small dowry from their deceased parents to help their fiance buy land and or build a house.

Attitudes towards children were different in the eighteenth century than they are today. Young children were not of much concern to their parents in society. All classes treated children poorly. Even the rich put their children under the care of wet nurses, which were not chosen well. The wet nurses often did not even know the parents and they often neglected the children they were supposed to be caring for. "It had been said that the English gentleman of the period had more interest in the diseases of his horses than of his children"(602).

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 ha

Some common words found in the essay are:
Couples Europe, Industrial Revolution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Susannah Wesley, , eighteenth century, children eighteenth century, attitudes towards children, family newly, eighteenth century children, people getting, nuclear family, wet nurses, extended families, newly weds, european society, late marriage, seventeenth eighteenth,
Approximate Word count = 1022
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)