The disciplinary nature of the parental role has been used as the litmus test of parent-child relations in the past. In fact, most works dealing with the treatment of children in earlier centuries give the impression that parents only interacted with their offspring in order to whip them. The majority of authors believe that children have always been harshly punished at home and at school and that more humane methods of discipline did not appear till the mid-18th century. This chapter will be concerned with the methods used to discipline children, both in the home and at school, and also with the amount of control which parents tried to exert over their children’s lives. The texts have been divided into 50-year periods, from 1500 to 1900, in order to discover whether or not modes of discipline have changed dramatically over time.
