Barbara Hanawalt is a widely respected authority on family life and peasants in the middle ages. Her books entitled The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (1986), Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (1993) are widely held to be authoritative on their subjects. I would trust her assertions on the subject. Unfortunately I can't give any more specific information on subject as it's been some time since I've read her work. The only real issue I have with this article is its promgulation of the "miserable middle ages" trope which is far from an accepted academic truth