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I'm not talking about how they were treated in humanitarian terms, but about whether they were considered property. These are obviously very entangled concepts

I'm not talking about how they were treated in humanitarian terms, but about whether they were considered property. These are obviously very entangled concepts but they are distinct. And yes kids-as-property has been the norm, but again not close to universal. Many other conceptions of children have used. None of them necessarily leading to better overall treatment of children, but affecting people's understanding of the boundaries of rights and responsibilities around them. Which is the part that's relevant to this conversation.

dsfyu404ed 4y ago
To argue that children were not historically considered property requires a level of hair splitting that will necessarily be able to be turned right back around and used to argue that slaves and serfs in other contexts were not property. >affecting people's understanding of the boundaries of rights and responsibilities around them. Civilizations in ancient southern generally outlawed gratuitous violence toward enslaved or indentured people and/or obliged their owners to feed and cloth them. Does that make slaves not property? In medieval and early modern central Europe landowners were legally responsible for productively working their land or a subset thereof (this was a large part of the legal doctrine used by the English settlers to justify taking of native lands). Does that make land not property? (obviously the specifics of the above two examples vary by culture and exact time period but that's not the point.) I'd be interested to see you cite a preindustrial civilization where kids are treated as second class citizens rather than de-facto property of either the individual or the tribe/state/other.