[smitherfield]

People treated their children well enough for us to exist!

If we had a time machine and brought an ordinary American from the 1950's to the present, or asked ~40% of Americans nowadays, chances are they'd be horrified by what they'd see as the legalized murder of tens of millions of children (abortion). I'm not trying to bring politics into this (I'm strongly pro-choice), just pointing out that the definitions of "crime," "violent" and even "child" are highly subjective.

In any society I can think of which left a substantial enough written and/or archaeological record, it's clear that people were particularly affectionate towards and protective of children, which is the only way it could be since our brains and emotional/hormonal responses are literally wired that way.

That's in turn because those instincts are necessary for the continuation of the species. Objectively, it takes well over a decade of near-constant, stressful labor before a child provides net-positive economic utility, which, at historical life expectancies (early 40's), would usually be after one parent's and shortly before the other's death. So if we weren't hard-wired to want to care for and protect children, babies would be left to die of exposure and we'd die out after one generation.

[caf]

Low life expectancies in the past weren't because most people died in their 40s / 50s. They were heavily depressed by infant and child mortality - if you survived to adulthood, you had a reasonable chance of living to a ripe old age.

[smitherfield]

I'm already adjusting upwards for that; life expectancies didn't reach 50 (in the US) until the 1920's[1], and the posts I'm responding to are talking about the Medieval period or earlier, when life expectancy at birth would've been 30 or so. Some people did live into their 60's or longer but they were very much the exception, even among adults.

[1] https://www.seniorliving.org/history/1900-2000-changes-life-...

[naasking]

That's incorrect. The average age of adult death was much higher, around 60 [1], ie. if you lived to 5 years old, you could expect to live another 55 years.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy/

[smitherfield]

That was in the mid-19th century, which was a very different world from the Medieval period. From your own link, during the 18th century Swedish 10-year-olds lived on average into their mid-50’s. From that it can be reasonably extrapolated that 10-year-olds lived on average into their 40’s in (civilizations at the level of development of) Medieval and Classical-period Europe.