"Italian Mother and Baby" appeared in Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890). This image captures the misery of urban poverty as well as the tenacity of life. It is infused with unmistakable sentimentalism and symbolism. This forlorn mother with her swaddled baby is evocative of Mary and of many paintings of "Madonna and Child." The hat hanging on the wall above her head is also suggestive of the halo that long represented the sacred in ancient art and religious iconography.

Many of Riis's photographs provide insight into the struggles of everyday life for immigrant children. What does this photo reveal about infancy among Italian immigrants? In what ways does the material culture of infancy mingle Old World practices and modern ones? While useful for recording the past, documentary photographs need to be seen through a critical lens. For example, historians have observed that children in Riis's photographs are portrayed as innocents, victims, or criminals. How is the baby in this picture represented?

How did Riis stimulate sympathetic feelings and summon sacred associations in this photo's gritty realism? In order to create this rendition of the Virgin Mary and Child Riis developed the "flash" technique that illuminated the basement of this New York City tenement. The halo-like hat was Riis's own and did not belong to the father who barely supported this family as a rag picker. Why might Riis have staged the scene? As a social reformer, Riis used religious imagery in order to capture the attention of the middle-class and inspire them to act on their beliefs to help the poor.

This postcard, from the early 20th century, shows a group of women and children, most likely belonging to the Mapuche people. The Mapuche occupied a large area in the cone of South America, the territory of the current nations of Chile and Argentina. Indigenous American tribes were popular subjects for postcards around the turn of the 20th century, and a large subgroup of postcards portrayed babies in cradleboards—called "papooses."

One of the women is holding a cradleboard upright in front of her, and another is holding a young girl by the hand. The use of cradleboards was widespread among indigenous American ethnic and tribal groups. With variations in the shape of the board, the use of fabrics and lacings to bind the child onto the board, and the arrangement of the protective hoods, cradleboards display remarkable uniformity across North and South America. One postcard legend described this variation on the worldwide practice of swaddling infants: "the Cradle of the Indian children consists of a board made of slats, with hood of same material or wicker. the youngster being bound with bands there to uncomfortable in appearance yet the children seem fat and happy. they are usually carried on their mothers back wrapped in a bright shawl.[sic]"

The postcards—some with black-and-white or color-retouched photographs, and others as color lithographs—often featured captions intended to be humorous, such as "An Embryonic Warrior" or "Snug as a Bug in a Rug." One postcard of a Navaho papoose from the popular publisher Fred Harvey contained a printed legend commenting on indigenous American childrearing practices: "The Navaho child is seldom punished for the simple reason that he seldom requires it. There appears to be a bond of sympathy and love between parent and child which is very strong during the minority of the child, but strange to say the children do not always love and protect their parents when the latter become old and infirm."

These images of swaddled infants come from a series of 10 glazed terra cotta bas-reliefs known as the "bambini." Andrea della Robbia sculpted them between 1463 and 1466 to adorn the Ospedale degli Innocenti, or Foundling Hospital, in Florence, Italy. The images show a sequence of childhood stages, from a tightly swaddled newborn to a child liberated from bindings that gradually loosen and fall aside. The images reflect the practice of confining infants’ bodies in tightly wound strips of cloth, which can be found on images of infants in many world regions and cultures.

The Silk Guild of Florence, responsible for foundling care in Florence starting in 1294, commissioned architect Filippo Brunelleschi to build a sanctuary for foundlings in 1419. The building featured a door—la routa—with a rotating stone platform where individuals could anonymously leave infants for charitable foster care until 1875. The Ospedale degli Innocenti as an institution provided continuous care for infants and children for more than five centuries. The image of the liberated child in the 2nd roundel from the left has been used as the official insignia of the American Association of Pediatrics since 1955.

The hadith, or narrated report, reflects the Islamic custom of sacrificing a sheep upon the birth of a child, sharing the meat with extended family members, and donating some of it as charity (sadaqa). This practice of the people of Madinah mentioned in Al-Muwatta is based on the precedent of Muhammad in establishing the custom as an Islamically appropriate one. Several aspects of the hadith and the interpretation are noteworthy: the sacrifice was made for both boys and girls, the animal must be a healthy and sound one, and the pagan custom of smearing blood on the child is deemed un-Islamic. This may refer to a pre-islamic custom, like denying this ceremony to a girl child. Part of the aqiqa ceremony is naming the child and cutting its hair (or shaving the baby's head) and weighing the hair so as to give an equal amount of silver as charity.

Al-Muwatta is among the earliest written compendia of legal interpretations based on the two pre-eminent sources of Islamic knowledge, the Qur'an, or scripture, and the hadith, or reports of the sayings and deeds of Muhammad. Al-Muwatta, compiled and edited by Malik ibn Anas (c. 711 – 795 CE), means "well-trodden path" for its authoritative documentation of legal opinion and practices in Madinah, the city where Islam was established. The hadith covers both religious duties and social practices such as contracts, family matters, civil and commercial matters, and customs.

The Phoenician terracotta vessel features a human face, the nose forming a narrow spout. The bottle is an archaeological find from Carthage, near modern Tunis, dated to 399 BCE-200 BCE. Archaeologists believe this object was a baby bottle. It could have been used to feed diluted wine with honey or other sweet liquid such as juice, milk, or thin porridge, cooked cereal made from ground grain. Such vessels, called guttus, were placed with Greek infant burials of the same period, placed in proximity to the infant's head. Many such examples have been found in at Greek and Phoenician sites, in various forms, such as a dog bottle dated to c.300 BCE-64 BCE from Sousse, Tunisia, and a pomegranate-shaped Greek bottle from 399 BCE-200 BCE found in Italy. The whimsical shapes and decorations are appealing to children's appetites. These bottles may also have aided the process of weaning the child from breast milk.

Italian noblewomen presented soft, absorbent, linen towels with indigo woven borders to birthing mothers during the 14th century and later. The cultural context of the towels is illustrated in Italian paintings of the period depicting childbirth customs such as presentation and use of the towels. For example, this fresco by Paolo di Giovanni Fei, Birth of the Virgin Mary (1380) displays several uses for the towels. Women used these soft, fringed cloths as head coverings, tablecloths, and for wrapping household items. The towels were originally imported from Egypt, a center for linen and indigo dye production and weaving. Weavers finished the white body of the towels with fringe and woven border designs featuring Arabic inscriptions called tiraz. Tiraz bands alternated with geometric, plant, or animal designs. Like other luxury textiles from the East, imported Egyptian towels were copied by Italian weavers, eventually becoming a specialty of Perugia and other weaving centers. In place of the tiraz, pseudo-Arabic and then Latin lettering with Christian motifs appeared in the European border designs.

Thelma Norwood, a 7th-grade student in Nassau, Delaware, wrote this letter in 1925. The school was segregated, or used only by African Americans, while separate schools were maintained for white students. The letter expresses appreciation on Du Pont Day, a celebration held each year to show gratitude to Pierre du Pont, founding member of DuPont Corporation, who spearheaded an effort to improve and modernize education for African Americans in Delaware. Du Pont worked to draw attention to the problem of inadequate education, donating over $6 million of his own money to fund studies, school construction, and to gain community support for improving African American children’s school access and attendance.

Thelma's letter illustrates the community's response to du Pont's gift, and indicates some ways in which the school administration showed gratitude toward du Pont through school activities and writing assignments. Her letter reflects both obstacles to education such as student absence due to the need for child labor to help support the family, and milestones of progress such as the recent graduates who went on to college (including Thelma's brother or cousin Charles). Her listing of the school's new equipment allows the inference that such items were lacking in her previous school, and the subjects listed indicate that both academic and vocational topics were taught. Many African Americans would have gone from the 8th grade directly into jobs, while few had the opportunity to attend high school, and even fewer to attend college.

This ceramic cup with a drinking spout is from the cargo of an Arab or Indian dhow that sank in the Strait of Malacca between 826 and 850 CE. The ship, which contained thousands of other ceramic pieces, was probably bound for the Persian Gulf. The cup was made at the Changshan ceramic production center, whose kilns produced export wares during the Tang dynasty (618-906 CE). Such cups may have been used for infants in wealthy Persian or Arab households. Pediatric treatises by physicians Ibn al-Jazzar (898-980) and al-Baladi (fl. 979) recommend special cups used for weaning infants. The cup is decorated with a splash pattern in green glaze. The fish design in the bottom of the cup might have amused a child, who could only see it after drinking all the liquid.

This panel painting represents an innovation in the history of western European painting and a moment in religious iconography: depiction of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus in Byzantine icons was traditionally symbolic. In the past, the figures were not humanized, but represented the qualities of divine beings and episodes in sacred history. This painting from the late 13th century by Italian painter Duccio di Buoninsega, in contrast, expresses the emotions of love and tenderness between mother and child. The infant Jesus returns the Madonna's placid but intense gaze. The painter depicted Jesus in a life-like, natural pose with his toes touching his mother's hand, one foot slightly raised as he reaches up to play with the folds of his mother's veil, almost touching her cheek. The artist retained many of the features of iconographic painting, including the use of gold background, the basic composition of the two figures, but added a humanizing element. Although the figure of the Christ child in this panel is more playful than in previous artistic depictions, his physique is still more that of a middle-aged man than a baby. This typical representation of children also donning adult clothing is what led to the widespread assumption that childhood as a separate stage of life did not exist. However, recent research that draws upon a wide range of primary sources—iconography, archaeology, letters, romances, pedagogical texts, miracle accounts, and law codes—reveals that children were regarded as vulnerable and in need of special protection. Examinations of the everyday lives of children demonstrate, for example, that orphans were protected from abuse by medieval laws and that sick children received different medical treatments than adults.

The earthenware mold for casting a figurine of an infant was found in Tangyangu China, and is likely dated to between 960 and 1279 CE, during the Song dynasty. The mold measures 3.2 inches long, and belongs to a collection of molds depicting men, women, and animals. The molds were likely used to make tomb figurines that were placed with the dead for burial, a ritual practice that was becoming less widespread by the Song dynasty. The mold for an infant figurine shows the widespread practice of swaddling, or tightly binding newborn infants with strips of cloth. In cultures from western to eastern Asia, it was believed that the practice was necessary, and helped form the child's body by preventing too much movement. The practice of swaddling has been abandoned in modern times, but a recent pediatric article noted that it may help newborns to sleep, calm their heartbeat, and prevent sudden infant death.