The planning of modern homes takes babies, children, and safety into consideration a bit more (mildly put) than did earlier architectural design. 
In some early colonial homes, small items (pictured to the right) have been found, often located somewhere on the floor of the main room. Initially it was thought to be something to house firewood, though it didn’t seem capable of holding much, and the slat that sits perpendicular to the box on the inside wall made little sense. It took observers a while to realize that this contraption was a device for holding children—a “baby tender.”
Baby tenders existed for two reasons: to give parents time without the infant and to ensure the baby’s safety whilst the parents were away. 
The most dangerous part of a colonial home was the open hearth. Necessary for both warmth and the “one-pot meals” that characterized early American family eating, the open hearth was an essential, yet simultaneously lethal, aspect of early American homes. Children were routinely injured, and sometimes died as a result of burns.
But the reason that we didn’t initially guess that the crate above was for babies had nothing to do with the dimensions of the crate or a misunderstanding of the dangers of fire. Rather, it had to do with a fundamentally different understanding of children. Today, we simply “see” children differently than they did in colonial America. If you’re anything like me, feeling as though anyone could look at an infant and feel anything other than love, affection, and a strange desire to nuzzle those chubby little cheeks seems almost impossible. Yet, these feelings and desires are actually part of a larger ideological shift in cultural conceptualizations of childhood. And this shift had architectural implications–ones that were slower to come about.
Inequality by (Interior) Design 