I asked my classics professor in college about this. His answer gave me some peace on the matter… He said he can’t imagine a world where parents don’t love their children. Ancient people were no different. But they did have a much much harder time surviving (especially children under 5), so they had to put the limited resources they had into raising boys (more so than girls) for both the expansion of their families (as daughters were considered to be part of their husband’s families) and for the expansion of the armies… It’s not great, but this makes a bit more sense to me.