Comment by skissane

A lot of this sounds to me like common prejudices about the past. And repeating ideas ultimately coming from Philippe Ariès' 1960 book Centuries of Childhood, which most mediaevalists nowadays consider largely discredited.

Many people in the Middle Ages loved their children just as much as anyone today does. Others treated their own kids as expendable, but such people exist today as well. If you are arguing loving one's children was less common in the Middle Ages than today, how strong evidence do you have to support that claim?

And mediaeval Christian theologians absolutely taught that sins against young children were worse. Herod the Great's purported slaughter of the male toddlers of Bethlehem (Matthew 2:16–18) was commemorated every year in the liturgy, and was viewed as an especially heinous sin due to the young age of its victims. Of course, as a historical matter, it seems very unlikely the event ever actually happened – but that's irrelevant to the question of how it influenced their values, since they absolutely did believe it had happened.