This chapter discusses the history of the family and the history of childhood as its complement and offshoot. Both have been studied in detail before, and as such, there is an abundance of documentation and new interpretations about family life in the distant and recent past. Few of these studies have focused intensively on corporal punishment of children by parents, but many broach the subject. In fact, discipline and punishment often figure as key themes in historical accounts of the family, since punishment is typically assumed to be a central and enduring means of child rearing. How parents punish children, moreover, is frequently taken as a way to indicate, symptomatically, something of the subjective tenor of family life.