Louise Tilley And Wrigley

Both Louise Tilley (Tilly, et al., 1992) and Wrigley (Wrigley, 1978) argued that this effect of mass child foundling and abandonment was a form of “social distribution of children in Medieval Europe” where houses with extra children distributed them to those with deficiency in an effort to balance the economics of the time , this is however from an economical modelling and has nothing to do with family decision making. Boswell (Boswell, 1988) also asserts that children were redistributed in the population, he argues that this process happened without any harm reaching the children. However, the majority of scholars agree on the fact that Boswell’s studies had methodological problems as his analysis lacked evidence. For example, Boswell’s (Boswell, 1988) studies revolved around urban mothers with relatively high status, he rationalized that majority of abandoned children survived because of the kindness of strangers who would then raise the children as their own.
This exaggerated survival rate, however, contradicts research by Fuchs (Fuchs, 1987), Sherwood (Sherwood, 1988), Wrigley (Wrigley, 1978), Tilly and Kertzer (Tilly, et al., 1992) who all cited poverty as one of the major causes of infant abandonment and reported high rates of child mortality in foster homes