Like the early penitentials, the Dialogues of Gregory the Great devote much attention to the myriad manifestations of human fallibility. Indeed, Gregory's accounts of various human failings seem to overwhelm his interlocutor, Peter, who concludes that salvation must be rare indeed, especially for adults. Given the ‘great and innumerable sins’ plaguing humanity, Peter presumes that ‘the greater part of heaven must be populated with little children or infants’. In his response, Gregory affirms Peter's sentiment about the relative blamelessness of childhood, but he notes that even this is not sufficient to guarantee the salvation of even young children. It is true, Gregory says, that ‘all baptized infants who die in their infancy’ enter heaven, but he insists that the same cannot be said for ‘all little ones, especially once they are able to speak, since for some of those little ones, if they are raised wrongly, the approach to the heavenly kingdom is blocked by their parents’.

The early penitentials reveal similar sentiments of young children as both inherently vulnerable and imperfectly innocent. Some appear in these manuals as potential sinners, while others, especially the very young, appear primarily as the victims of others’ transgressions. Rejecting the presumption of absolute innocence for even these youngest members of society, the penitentials nevertheless demonstrate a shared understanding, congruent with the ideas of Gregory and others, of early childhood as a distinct life stage marked by complex social, physical, and spiritual vulnerabilities inseparable from the limitations of speech and its associated developmental thresholds. By anticipating young children as potential victims and, less frequently, as potential sinners, they also help situate young people in the communities for which the manuals were produced. The majority point to children as valuable and vulnerable dependents of their parents, while some also suggest the anticipated presence of young children in the custody of, and thus subject to the authority of, the religious community itself.

Children were obviously present in early medieval Christian societies, and they were just as clearly important members of families and wider communities. As David Herlihy has noted, however, young people are among the least visible of medieval social groups. This obscurity notwithstanding, medieval childhood has received regular attention in response to the conclusions of Philippe Aries about the alterity of medieval sentiments, or lack thereof, towards children and about childhood.