Parents and Parish Childcare

Abstract

It is becoming increasingly clear that the enlarged nursing system from 1767 did not exist in isolation from children’s relations with their parents. Rather, the timing and likelihood of a nursing placement depended at least partially on the whereabouts of mothers in particular. Jonas Hanway was clear that the bonds between parents and children should not be broken lightly. Idealogue though he was in many respects, he also noted that maternal nursing was much cheaper for a parish than paid nursing, and that this made a forcible separation of mother and child unlikely. However, Hanway’s focus on parish nursing obscures the degree to which parents had any control over how their children’s care was managed by the poor law. Paid parish nursing fits in so neatly to a narrative about changing attitudes to adult paupers, and to a greater value being placed both on childhood and children that it is easy to overlook this question of parental autonomy. As was outlined in Chapter 1, however, ideas about the parenting of the poor were quite diverse at this time, with different approaches stressing either the dangers of allowing feckless adults to raise their own children, or the inviolable nature of family bonds of love. This chapter will develop the evidence on this topic using records on parish care and nursing after 1767, in particular questioning how far the poor could direct the form that their family took at any given time.