Milanich examines the linkage of two categories of social relations (usually considered separately) those of class and and family. This book is a history of children and family but it is also a history of social inequality and class. She's concerned with the evolution of legal regimes, state formation, and class relations. It is also a historical ethnography of children and filiation in Latin American society. She reconstructs a social world in which children are ubiquitous; Arguing that familial patterns emerge in, are sustained by and help reproduce the profound social hierarchies that have characterized Latin American societies historically.

I enjoyed the premise of this book. I didn't get to dive as deeply into it as I would have liked. Children and childhood are such under-read topics (for me) that this book really did pique my interest in the class.