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Wouldn't earlier plagues been in times of ubiquitous stay at home mothers as well? Surely a good chunk of kids just got home schooled.

• topkai22 6y ago
  Possibly, but my great great grandparents were school aged in New York in the late 1800s. There were 10+ kids and 2 adults in the family. Mom might have been at home, but she was busy.
  • sukilot 6y ago
    The kids can teach each other, as was done in small "one room" schools of the past.
• sandworm101 6y ago
  >>Surely a good chunk of kids just got home schooled. This was before widespread laundry machines and dishwashers. Those "stay at home mothers" worked. School was, and still is, in part a babysitting service. If the kids were to stay at home they would have been helping mom, not asking her for reading lessons. This was also a time of increasing literacy and education overall. Illiteracy was not uncommon. There is a good chance that many parents were simply not as well educated as their school-age children. Homeschooling is all well and good, unless mom cannot read.
  • sukilot 6y ago
    Then how did moms get by when kids were in school not helping? I'm sure some parents or school studenta were illiterate, but not the majority. And families were larger, so they'd have multiple children to teach each other.
    • ivanbakel 6y ago
      >Then how did moms get by when kids were in school not helping? They got by better because children were in school. If you don't have to keep an eye on your kids, you can commit 100% to all the housework and get it done that much sooner. They were productive with or without the children around. The point is that there was no productivity to spare for mother and child to do any teaching/learning.