ABSTRACT
It’s impossible to know exactly how humans lived in ancient times or exactly how characteristics of the geography or the dwellings in which they lived and the objects that they used affected what parents did or the activities of children. For more than two centuries, archeologists have gathered artifacts from around the globe trying to find clues as to what ancient life was like. Their findings have sometimes been startling—humans appear to have been engaged in certain types of activities, such as organized hunting for meat and specialized tool making, centuries or even millennia earlier than previously thought. Although much remains unclear about the enterprise of child rearing for most human populations (especially those of long ago), one thing is clear: Life has radically changed over the millennia, including the activities of parents. Some activities that could hardly have been imagined even 100 years ago (e.g., watching an infant sleeping in a crib via a baby monitor while one works in one’s own office; playing a game on cell phones with one’s 9-year-old while the 9-year-old is spending time with grandma; selecting a video to play in the car for the 4-year-old in the back seat) are now commonplace, a consequence of new gadgets that have proliferated in the lives of families in wealthier nations. Changes in the accouterments of life have long led artists to imagine what life might be like in the future and how human activities would change over time, sometimes amusingly so (see the TV program, The Jetsons; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jetsons).
