A 17th century colloquial term for children, in the way we use 'kids' today

I'm looking for a A 17th century colloquial term for children, in the way we use 'kids' today. The best I've yet found is striplings, which seems to connote male teens more specifically, or possibly goslings.

edit: Great suggestions. Thank you very much. All are helpful. Really appreciate the link to the Canting book.

Solution 1:

I think you may use kid; the term is from the late 16th century:

• c. 1200, "the young of a goat," from a Scandinavian source such as Old Norse kið "young goat,"
• Extended meaning "child" is first recorded as slang 1590s, established in informal usage by 1840s. Applied to skillful young thieves and pugilists since at least 1812.

Etymonline

Solution 2:

The chiefly Scottish word bairn may satisfy your request, defined as:

child

Etymology:

• Middle English bern, barn, from Old English bearn & Old Norse barn; akin to Old High German barn child

• First Known Use: before 12th century

Source: Merriam-Webster

Solution 3:

"tots", first known use in 1725, has been in use for almost three hundred years.

"little child," 1725, Scottish, of uncertain origin, perhaps a shortened form of totter, or related to Old Norse tottr, nickname of a dwarf. OED

"Tiny tots with their eyes all a-glow, Will find it hard to sleep tonight. They know that Santa's on his way..."

Solution 4:

Wean.

Wean is used today in both Scotland and Ireland.

The first source below refers to a written example of wean from early C18th.

The second source mentions that wee for small (which is a root of wean) dates from C15th.

So hard to say when wean became common but probably it was in use in C17th.

wean n. a child, especially a young one

Scots has a number of words for children and young people, the most well-known being bairn and wean. While bairn is traditionally associated with dialects of the north and east of Scotland, wean is more often found in the south and west, and both terms occasionally appear in northern English dialects, reminding us of the fluidity of linguistic 'boundaries'. Wean is a good example of an entirely Scots compound, deriving from wee ain 'little one', unlike the term bairn, which was inherited from Old English bearn, and reinforced by Old Norse barn.

Wean therefore reminds us that Scots, as a living language, can generate new vocabulary from its existing word-stock and does not always borrow new terms from other sources. Early uses of the word, including the following example from Alan Ramsay's The Gentle Shepherd (1725) evidence this shift from two words to one:

Troth, my Niece is a right dainty we'an.

A young man might also be described as a chiel or chield, as in Robert Burns' description of his friend Francis Grose, the noted antiquarian:

Hear , Land o' Cakes, and brither Scots, Frae Maidenkirk to Johnie Groat's, If there's a hole in a' your coats, I rede (advise) you tent (pay attention to) it: A chield's amang you takin notes, And faith he'll print it.

The two men were good friends and Burns' epic poem Tam o'Shanter was created to complement the illustration of Alloway's Auld Haunted Kirk in Grose's Antiquities of Scotland (1791).
— http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/ScotLit/ASLS/SWE/TBI/TBIIssue7/Wean.html

EDIT: Regarding pronunciation and etymology from caledonianmercury.com:

The Scots word does not share a pronunciation with the English verb (ween).
Instead, it is pronounced to rhyme with gain
[...]
Wee first came into Scots in the late-14th century as a noun in the phrase a lytil wee meaning “a small distance”.
Derived from the Old English waeg, a weight, wee did not make an appearance as an adjective until the middle of the 15th century.

Solution 5:

What, all my pretty chickens and their dam?

OED 1 cites uses of chicken and chick from 14th century into the 19th. MED suggest that the term was contemptuous in Middle English, and the OED 19th-century citations smack of revivalism to me; but the Tudor and Stuart uses seem to parallel today's kid pretty well.

And practically any term for a small or immature animal might be used along the entire spectrum from affection to contempt: lamb, urchin, sprat, kit. Brat was only mildly derogatory: it connoted insignificance rather than misbehavior or bad attitude.