While parents, particularly mothers, have always been attached to their infants, societal conditions frequently made this attachment difficult to maintain. First of all, the high infant death rate in the premodern times meant that such attachments often ended in hopelessness. Perhaps to prevent the sadness that infant death caused, a number of societal practices developed which worked against early attachment of mother and child.
虽然父母，尤其是母亲，一直都依恋着他们的婴儿，但社会条件往往使这种依恋难以持续。首先，在进入现代之前，婴儿死亡率很高，这意味着这种依恋往往以绝望告终。也许是为了避免婴儿死亡造成的悲伤，许多社会实践发展起来用于阻止母亲和孩子的早期依恋。
One of these premodern attachment-discouraging practices was to leave infants unnamed until they had survived into the second year. Another practice that discouraged maternal attachment was tightly wrapping infants. Wrapping effectively prevented the close physical interactions like stroking and kissing that are so much a part of modern mothers' and fathers' affection for their infants.
现代之前有一种阻止依恋的做法是直到婴儿活到第二年才给婴儿取名。另一种阻止母亲依恋的做法将婴儿紧紧包裹。包裹有效地防止了像抚摸和亲吻这样的亲密身体互动，这是现代父母对婴儿宠爱的一部分。
A third practice which had the same distancing effect was wet-nursing. Breast-feeding was not popular among the well-to-do in the early modern times; infants were often fed by wet nurses hired for the purpose. In some places, such as nineteenth-century France, city infants were sent to wet nurses in the country. Often a wet nurse would feed her own child first, leaving little for the city infant - who, in many case, died. In Rouen, the death rate for children sent to a wet nurse was 35 percent.
第三种具有相同疏远效应的做法用奶妈哺育。母乳哺育在现在社会早期的富人中不受欢迎；婴儿通常由专门聘请的奶妈喂养。在一些地方，如19世纪的法国，城市的婴儿被送到乡下的奶妈那里。通常奶妈会先给自己的孩子喂奶，几乎没有什么留给城市婴儿——许多情况下，城市婴儿会死亡。在鲁昂，被送到奶妈那里的儿童死亡率为35%。
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