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[therahedwig]

Dumping babies in daycare is very 20th century. Adoption is the way to go, especially in such small communities. If there are groups that practice charity, they might qualify too.

It's also very closely tied together with the emancipation of women. The qeustion would rather be 'do you want emancipated women or historically accurate baby-care'(and even then there should be a sense of babysitting. Mom in the army? Of course auntie mason will take care of that baby.)

[Tierre]

Well dwarfes have actual full sex equality so that's pretty 20th century to me:) And as it is it makes for a good reason for society to develop daycare practise (like it was in RL).

[LordBaal]

A furniture-cradle thing will be fine too. Either by making daycare areas (I suppose they could be on the hospital area) or in the bedrooms of the dwarfs.

If the mom is in the military it could left him on the cradle while on duty and his father or siblings should take care of him while until mom is back.

If a children is orphan only of mother then the father should look after him but instead of carrying him around he could simply left the infant on the cradle all the time until is a children.

If its orphan of both parents and have no siblings then it could be adopted by some one passing near the cradle (if in a room) or whenever the baby is. If it has siblings alive then one of them should adopt them.

[Silverionmox]

Dumping babies in daycare is very 20th century. Adoption is the way to go, especially in such small communities. If there are groups that practice charity, they might qualify too.

It's also very closely tied together with the emancipation of women. The qeustion would rather be 'do you want emancipated women or historically accurate baby-care'(and even then there should be a sense of babysitting. Mom in the army? Of course auntie mason will take care of that baby.)

It's not so much historically as biologically accurate. All depends on the sexual dimorphism of dwarves. Human females have significantly less upper-body muscle power, which would greatly impair their melee combat ability (or manual labor ability, eg. almost any dwarf job). Add that to the impact of pregnancy and breastfeeding combined with the lack of birth control, and it wouldn't even make sense to even train a married woman for the military - so almost nowhere people did. So, do you like butch, bearded, breastless female dwarves?

And in any case the option remains to push off childcare to servants, limit military service to celibate women etc.

[Bohandas]

A furniture-cradle thing will be fine too. Either by making daycare areas (I suppose they could be on the hospital area) or in the bedrooms of the dwarfs.

I was thinking nursery/daycare areas too!

[NW_Kohaku]

It's not so much historically as biologically accurate. All depends on the sexual dimorphism of dwarves. Human females have significantly less upper-body muscle power, which would greatly impair their melee combat ability (or manual labor ability, eg. almost any dwarf job). Add that to the impact of pregnancy and breastfeeding combined with the lack of birth control, and it wouldn't even make sense to even train a married woman for the military - so almost nowhere people did. So, do you like butch, bearded, breastless female dwarves?

And in any case the option remains to push off childcare to servants, limit military service to celibate women etc.

There are ways around that - you can't avoid the actual period of pregnancy, but a little thing called "wetnursing" existed.  Throughout history, women of wealth and privilege didn't stop their social or political lives for silly things like taking care of their children. 

Further, male advantage in upper body strength is present, but a mere statistical average.  Outliers exist.  I know some women in the army that I'm willing to bet good money could tie you into a human pretzel.  (Or just google the terms "Female bodybuilder"...)

Anyway, yes, realistically, women, and especially married women who were expected to be giving birth or who had children to take care of were not really allowed in front-line combat.  However, at the same time, this was largely because restricting the rights of women to nigh chattel status has led to extremely high birth rates, which in turn leads to having more disposable children to throw into armies to further your culture's wars against other cultures, and a little Darwinian action means the most repressive societies win.  However, I don't think we really want to turn DF into a game so realistic in its historical accuracy that we broker the trades of daughters and dowries between families, and keep female dwarves almost solely as housekeepers and child-raisers unless they're lucky enough to be a widow and can have some control of their own destiny. 

A concept of daycare (or even a school) is appropriate for the kind of game situation we are left with.  A government-run daycare for all workers that would include a function as orphanage would be the most sensical way to handle children in a fortress that expects a woman to be working almost without any sort of break for child-rearing.

In fact, working women generally don't wetnurse a full year.  In fact, they typically switch to formula as soon as they have to go back to work, which raises a serious question of maternity leave.  (I.E. the infamous giving birth on the battlefield in between axe swings.  Or the even worse wardogs that give birth in the middle of combat only to have the newborn puppies join in the attack.)

Having a few nurses working on full-time babycare would make far more sense as a social institution than having a baby suckling while you're working the magma forge or while you are firing your crossbow from the fortifications. 

In fact, even just professional, communal wetnurses would make sense in a DF style of gameworld.  It is, in fact, how wolves take care of their young in real life - the alpha and beta females are the only wolves allowed to have children, but they're also needed in the hunt, so the delta females have a "mock pregnancy" to start nursing, and do the actual child-rearing.  These delta females are typically also the older aunts or mothers of the alphas that have grown too old to hunt as well as their nieces or daughters, at that...


Anyway, I would like to ask if hospitals are necessarily the best place to put infants?

I mean, I know this whole game takes place in a time before germ theory was popularized, but they did have the notion of a "quarantine" of the sick, and the idea of "miasma" coming from rot causing disease. 

Why would you put your infants next to the guy vomiting his own insides out from a terrible and highly infectious forgotten beast syndrome?

Historically, you put orphans in an orphanage run by a church or the state unless someone was willing to adopt.  If we're going to have a daycare system, however, it makes just as much sense to just make it all a new type of zone for generalized child-care.

[therahedwig]

Well, it's mostly convenience. The hospital system is already there, the AI associated is already there, the only thing left is to make babies associated as hospital patients.

Nurseries wouldn't be a bad idea, it wouldn't be too difficult to use the hospital system to create it. Though, I guess the materials required would be a bit different(maybe cloth to clean, and perhaps toys, even though they're not used, and honey to keep the children quiet), and there should probably be a system in there that recognises that sick babies should be going to the hospital none the less and healthy babies should be going back to the nursery.

Regarding the wetnursing, a woman can nurse as long as she's got something to nurse.(There are some mothers who nurse their children well into their teens) Men, I believe, are also capable of nursing if they have the right biological conditions, so I guess a syndrome or drugs could cause your men to start nursing too.(That's supposed to be as disturbing as it sounds, there's seriously something wrong with the hormone levels of a guy when they can nurse)
I guess, right now the game checks whether the child is with it's mother, if not, it'll grow hungry and thirsty.
What it should do is check if the child is with a person that can nurse before it starts growing hungry. If you'd apply that to animals as well, then you would: 1)First have to wait till your cows have calfs before they start giving milk. 2) Be able to have 'raised by wolves' type of children. Would also solve how the goblins raise the kids they steal.

How does milk from animals work as babyfood? Isn't it too fat? But it's also historically the drink intended for children instead of alcoholic drinks.

[Babylon]

Dumping babies in daycare is very 20th century. Adoption is the way to go, especially in such small communities. If there are groups that practice charity, they might qualify too.

traditionally the community and extended family would generally watch children.

[NW_Kohaku]

How does milk from animals work as babyfood? Isn't it too fat? But it's also historically the drink intended for children instead of alcoholic drinks.

They need to be a few months old first, so that their bodies can learn to digest it.  Before that, they need to nurse from their mother, or have a wetnurse. 

Children in the middle ages did, indeed, drink "raw" (unpasteurized) milk.  Because it would go bad so quickly, this was done pretty much straight out of the bucket you just milked the cow into.  Families tended to own a family cow in the "commons", the common pasture for villagers to keep a cow, which was used for daily dairy needs. 

Many children, however, would drink some alcohol.  Keep in mind, however, that this was because the water sources were contaminated, and as such, you created "grog" by adding alcohol to water in order to get the alcohol to kill all the diseases in the water.  Middle ages alcohol was therefore almost always heavily diluted so as to be something you could drink continuously throughout the day without getting much more than a minor buzz. 

In this state, it was fairly safe for children to drink, as well. 

Of course, there were always those who went for the strong stuff or drank in excess or who drank too much as a child or whose mothers drank too much, and that caused problems.  One of the things my mother always used to say was that the best way to understand the Dark Ages and Renaissance period was to just keep in mind that everyone in a position of power was a hormonal teenage male who was half-drunk at all times.  Most of the constant warfare makes more sense, then.

[Captain Crazy]

I think orphaned babies being treated as hospital patients may not make too much sense, but it's the easiest to implement and use, as you won't have to build anything new if the functionality is updated-just let a dwarf carry the little bugger to a bed when it needs to be fed, hydrated or put to bed (might as well let it toddle around the fort in the mean-time so it won't be bored out of its head)