With nearly a third of children dying before their first birthday, keeping a child alive in Ancient Rome required constant, deliberate effort. This video breaks down the real strategies Roman families used: having more children than they wanted specifically to counteract the mortality rate, the medical guidance of Soranus of Ephesus on pregnancy, birth, swaddling, and wet nurses, the father's legal right to decide whether to raise a newborn at all, and the naming ceremony delayed until the eighth or ninth day specifically because early infancy was so dangerous. It covers protective amulets like the bulla and fascinum, the minor deities invoked purely to guard infants, documented pediatric cases from the physician Galen of Pergamon, and the grave of a one-year-old boy whose father commissioned a monument imagining the adulthood he never reached. If you've ever wondered what it actually took to raise a child to adulthood in the ancient world, this one's for you.