As we noted in Part 1, the primary cultural, societal and personal motivations for having children were to continue family name and protect patrimony, to ensure care in old age for parents and for emotional fulfilment of the couple. While the first is the motivation most emphasised throughout the primary literature, it is clear that the latter two were also extremely important. Alongside this emerging idea of emotional fulfilment in child-bearing and rearing, we can also see these more emotive discourses of parenthood emerge. Once a person became a parent, as almost every person did, their lives were expected to change drastically. Both parents were expected to undergo an emotional transformation that placed the child at the centre of their occupations. However, the manifestation of these transformations, and the other facets of the construction of parenthood differed drastically between mother and father. Fathers were constructed as firm disciplinarians, expressing their affection for their child through the provision of a patrimony and good training, but affection is very much a central facet of conversations surrounding fatherhood. As God had become a model for fatherhood, so mortal men could mould their fatherly roles and identities in His image, and love is at the centre of that image. Fatherhood is also presented as having an element of legal choice, with men who had produced biological children able to deny being a father due to the fundamental importance of patrimony to the definition of father and child/heir. Notably in this period too we see a shift in the legal construction of patrimony too, with the emphasis moving from the parents to the children as the right to disinherit or use the patrimony to control one's children was removed.

Mothers too are constructed in this post-Imperial, Christian world as being more physically and emotionally involved with their children than their classical Roman/pre-Christian counterparts. They are seen as nurturers and carers and more reliant on their children than previously where mothers were identified as severe moral guides and teachers, analogous to the modern example of Amy Chua. Motherhood in this Christian world is also represented as being a purely biological event, something that cannot be rejected in the same way fatherhood can. While one can choose to be a father even when one has living children, a woman who produces children cannot choose not to be a mother. Motherhood is a bodily thing.