A child's life in the time of Jesus

Having wondered about and curious about the world that Jesus and Paul lived in and what it was like, I have gathered the following items.
Let me begin with one of the strangest in my estimation.

There was for the Romans practice and law, (patria potestas), the father’s power. With this power a Roman father had absolute power over all members of his family. This allowed him to sell any member of his family as slaves, he could make any member of the family work in the fields and do so in chains if he chose, and he could punish even to the death penalty and do it legally.

This power extended over a child’s total life span, and did so as long as the father lived. Therefore a Roman son never came of age to be his own man. This held true if the son rose to political heights, received honors, was vastly rich, he was still under his father’s power.

This power of the father was seldom carried to extreme because public opinion would have not have allowed it. Paul would have been very much aware of this as he wrote in Ephesians 6:1 “Children, obey your parents, as Christian children should.”

There was also the custom of child exposure. When a child was born, it was placed at its father’s feet, and if the father stooped and lifted the child, it was accepted and kept. If he walked away, it meant the child was to be quite literally be thrown out.

Barkley quotes a letter written in 1 B.C. from a man called Hilarion to his wife Alis. “….when you have a child, if it is a boy, let it live; if it is a girl throw it out.”

Unwanted children were commonly left in the Roman forum, and became the property of anyone who cared to pick them up. Girls were most often left, picked up, and raised to be sold as slaves or to stock the brothels of Rome.

The philosopher Seneca writes. “We slaughter a fierce ox; we strangle a mad dog; we plunge the knife into sickly cattle; children who are born weakly and deformed we down.”

It was against this practice that Paul wrote as he did, and if you ever consider what Christianity did for the world, point to the status of woman and children.

(This taken from Barkley,1976, pages 174-177)

Paul writes that children should obey their parents and to honor their parents. He says this is the fist commandment. I believe he said this as the first commandment the children were to memorize. The way to honor one’s parents was to obey them, respect them, and not cause them regret, pain or sorrow.

The other side of the coin is that father’s are not to “provoke their children to wrath”. Then as now, Mom’s were often more tender hearted than fathers, who are more often inclined to each for the belt.

Paul comments on this in Colossians 3:21. “Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged.” Criticism over done, and unreasonable discipline can break a man’s or child’s spirit.

This could very well have been Saul who became Paul experience. He could have well had a harsh child hood upbringing and one that was the most demanding in his Jewish culture. Paul was raised to be a Pharisee, the strictest of all the Orthodox Jewish life styles.

We need to remember that times change. A mother says I was never allowed to do that when I was a child, and the daughter answers: ”That was then and I am now.”

We can have such control that it deforms a child, mostly by stunted growth of spirit. It means the child is not trusted and it also means the parents do not trust their upbringing.

We as parents can forget the duty of encouragement. A child’s best effort recognized and praised can well plant the germ that can flower into a life skill or direction.