The dominant discourses surrounding parenthood construct both mother and fatherhood as being affectively connected to their children while they are in their infancy. The moment of becoming a parent was expected to fundamentally change the priorities and worldview of both men and women, with the child becoming the centre of attention and the motivation for most expected behaviours such as working to increase their patrimony. Once children reached adulthood and were married or in employment their parents fade into the background in the source material. Only rarely are they, and their relationships with their children, depicted. This next section will examine how the relationship between parents and children changed as the child aged, and the roles that parents were expected to take when their child reached maturity. We will note immediately that mothers fade away far more than fathers, becoming vague mentions for the most part, while fathers tend to maintain an identity. In large part, this is because fathers wrote about themselves, while mothers did not.

Almost all societies have rituals which determine the point of transition from childhood to adulthood (‘social puberty’). In the classical Roman tradition, for boys this took the form of the toga virilis, an event usually seen between the ages of fifteen and sixteen in which the boy formally puts away his bulla (amulet) and childhood costume of the toga praetexta and takes on the toga virilis, also known as the toga libera and toga pura. After this ceremony took place, the boy – now a man – made his first entrance into adult public life, often characterised by military training. For girls, their transition to adulthood was less gradual, and was marked on the day of her marriage (not betrothal, which could occur in infancy). Once the toga ceased to have significance in the post-Imperial world, there are some scant mentions of a ritualised first shave (barbatoria) being used as a similar form of public transition to manhood, for example by Paulinus of Nola who refers to a young man who dedicated his first beard to a saint. An analogous ritual in the Frankish world – or at least Frankish law – comes in the form of the capillaturia: the first hair cutting.