Parenting Was for Life, Not Just for Childhood: The Role of Parents in the Married Lives of their Children in Early Modern England

Abstract

Marriage is a false dividing line to impose on our understanding of childhood, adulthood and parenting in the past. In early modern England neither the dependency which has been associated with childhood, nor the supervision of parents in the lives of their children, ceased with wedding bells. An examination of the parent-child bond beyond marriage within the middle and upper ranks can provide new and important insights into the intergenerational relationships of the early modern past. While parents could contribute to the smooth running of their children's marriages, they could also have a role as instigators of, commentators upon, and arbitrators of the discord which could result in their children's marriages. Motives for parental involvement could be complex, but parents could share in both the sorrows and the joys of their children's marriages. The emotional and financial repercussions of marriage breakdown could have painful effects for parents as well as for the married couple.A n important aspect of our understanding of the relationships between members of the early modern English family has been absent from recent histories. Powerful bodies of historical scholarship have combined to ensure that the role of English parents in the married lives of their children has been neglected. Demographers, keen to dismiss the myth that households in the past contained many generations of the same family living under one roof, have shown that most households in the early modern period were simple or nuclear in structure. Parents and their married children, it has been demonstrated, were rarely co-resident. Relationships with kin, of both first and second

Conceptualising childhood as a relational status: parenting adult children in sixteenth-century England

“…Marriage was not 'the point of no return when the break from parental control was completed'. 36 Parents and adult children had generally reached a 'delicate balance of power' by the time they married, where children were no longer expected to obey their parents' orders. 37 However, this balance was often still being negotiated well into a child's adulthood.…”

“…63 As well as advocating for them, parents could offer support if their children faced marital difficulties. 64 Sir Robert Sidney arranged a marriage for his eldest daughter Mary to Sir Robert Wroth in 1604, and took an interest in their relationship immediately afterwards. Only a month after Mary's marriage, Robert reported to his wife Barbara that he had met his son-in-law in London: I find by him that there was somewhat that doth discontent him: but the particulars I could not get out from him: only that he protests that he cannot take any exceptions to his wife nor her carriage towards him.…”

“…The study of the interdependence of parents and children across the life course has been considered by historians of the long eighteenth-century, who show that parents and children continued to share experiences and influence each other's lives and identities. 11 'Transitional points' including marriage, crisis, and death, where parent-child relationships were re-positioned, have been identified as well as the significance of this relationship in forming and upholding gender identities. 12 Less research has been done on the sixteenth century, an era in which concepts of deference and patriarchal authority keenly shaped the roles of parent and child.…”

Resisting Silences: Gender and Family Trauma in Eighteenth‐Century England

“…Given the importance of maintaining family honour, Newdigate's public statement may have been part of his family strategy. 74 For example, he tried to hide any potential indications of familial madness by insisting that Gilbert and Amphillis had been falsely locked up by their brothers who wanted to control their money. 75 Newdigate also confirmed his daughters' innocence.…”

“before midnight she had miscarried”

“…This demonstrates how parents continued to care for their children after marriage, as Elizabeth Foyster has point out in refuting the idea that early modern parents did not love their children. 106 Indeed they were involved in this most private area of married life -sex, pregnancy and birth.…”