alt Hacker News> Even without going that far back, I imagine it was easier when parents kicked the kids out of the house and told them not to come back until dinner time.
Did people ever do that with under-twos? Or under-fives?
The big difference in more recent times was community and extended family help, and at least one parent having more time at home.
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I don’t have hard evidence, but when I was a kid I enjoyed the children’s book ‘Five children and it’, written ~1900
The children cart their two year old sibling around with them everywhere (sans parents) and it’s totally unremarkable.
Evidently there was quite a bit of handwringing in the 1950s that the "nuclear family" was bad for children and would lead to more divorce, since there were no longer grandparents and aunts and uncles around to help with childrearing.
I'm of an age to have grown up like that, and one of the real drags was having to take my 3-5 year-old sibling along on whatever activity the rest of us were up to. ("But mom, we're building a fort - do I have to?") The other kids with younger siblings did the same. As I recall, at five I wasn't to leave the yard by myself, but as a mixed-age group of ~3-11 year-olds, yeah: we ran around all over the place together. The older kids took on responsibility for the younger ones.
So, yeah, that's eighties suburbia, and my sister wasn't less than two. On the other hand, if there'd been a larger age difference (and, maybe if I'd been a girl? My mum was more progressive about gender roles than most of her contemporaries, but still) I expect she'd have been entrusted to me earlier. Starting at the age of ~4 I'd been left alone with my sister for up to an hour while she napped, with the instruction to run next door to get my mother if she woke up.
By the way, I think all of that was fine.