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Period: 200 to 400
Infanticidal Mode
The image of Medea hovers over childhood in antiquity, for myth here only reflects reality. Some facts are more important than others, and when parents routinely resolved their anxieties about taking care of children by killing them, it affected the surviving children profoundly. For those who were allowed to grow up, the projective reaction was paramount, and the concreteness of reversal was evident in the widespread sodomizing of the child. -
374
Law against infant murders
The law began to consider killing an infant murder. Yet even the opposition to infanticide by the Church Fathers often seemed to be based more on their concern for the parent’s soul than with the child’s life. -
Period: 400 to Dec 31, 1299
Abandoning Mode
Once parents began to accept the child as having a soul, the only way they could escape the dangers of their own projections was by abandonment, whether to the wet nurse, to the monastery or nunnery, to foster families, to the homes of other nobles as servants or hostages, or by severe emotional abandonment at home. Projection continued to be massive, since the child was still full of evil and needed to be beaten, but as the reduction in child sodomizmg shows, reversal diminished considerably. -
442
Council of Vaison
After the Council of Vaison, the finding of abandoned children was supposed to be announced in church. -
Jan 1, 787
Dateo of Milan founded the first asylum solely for abandoned infants.
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Jan 1, 1100
Childhood represented in medieval art
Medieval art until about the twelfth century did not know childhood or did not attempt to portray it, because artists were unable to depict a child except as a man on a smaller scale. Also, the mother-child portraits show an incest which shows the wish that the child would be a lover who would passionately embrace the mother. -
Period: Jan 1, 1300 to
Ambivalent Mode
ecause the child, when it was allowed to enter into the parents’ emotional life, was still a container for dangerous projections, it was their task to mold it into shape. From Dominici to Locke there was no image more popular than that of the physical molding of children, who were seen as soft wax, plaster, or clay to be beaten into shape. he beginning of the period is approximately the fourteenth century, which shows an increase in the number of child instruction manuals. -
Jan 1, 1400
Swaddling the children
Tying the child up in various restraint devices was a near-universal practice. Swaddling was the central fact of the infant’s earliest years. As we have noted, restraints were thought necessary because the child was so full of dangerous adult projections that if it were left free it would scratch its eyes out, tear its ears off, break its legs, distort its bones, be terrified by the sight of its own limbs, and even crawl about on all fours like an animal. -
Campaign against the sexual abuse of children
Before this time it was common the sexual use of children, this dates back to Ancient Rome and Greece where it was an usual practice. -
Effort to bring child abuse under control
It was not until the beginning of the eighteenth century that parents began severely punishing their children for masturbation, and doctors began to spread the myth that it would cause insanity, epilepsy, blindness, and death. By the nineteenth century, this campaign reached an unbelievable frenzy. Doctors and parents sometimes appeared before the child armed with knives and scissors, threatening to cut off the child’s genitals as punishment. -
Period: to
Intrusive Mode
The child was no longer so full of dangerous projections, and rather than just examine its insides with an enema, the parents approached even closer and attempted to conquer its mind, in order to control its insides, its anger, its needs, its masturbation, its very will. The child was so much less threatening that true empathy was possible, and pediatrics was born. -
Frightened infants
When religion was no longer the focus of the terrorizing campaign, figures closer to home were used: the werewolf will gulp you down, Blue Beard will chop you up, Boney (Bonaparte) will eat your flesh, the black man or the chimney sweep will steal you away at night. Fearful figures were also the favorites of nurses who wanted to keep children in bed while they went off at night. -
Parental duties to the child
Sir William Blackstone (1765-9) recognized three parental duties to the child: maintenance, protection, and education.[10] In modern language, the child has a right to receive these from the parent. -
Industrial revolution.
Because Industrial Revolution, a lot children stopped working and the school attendance got relevant. -
Decreasing of Whipping
It was not until the nineteenth century that the old-fashioned whipping began to go out of style in most of Europe and America, continuing longest in Germany, where 80% of German parents still admit to beating their children, a full 35% with canes. -
Period: to
Socializing Mode
The raising of a child became less a process of conquering its will than of training it, guiding it into proper paths, teaching it to conform, socializing it. Also, in the nineteenth century, the father for the first time begins to take more than an occasional interest in the child, training it, and sometimes even relieving the mother of child-care chores. -
Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child
The League of Nations adopted the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1924), which enunciated the child's right to receive the requirements for normal development, the right of the hungry child to be fed, the right of the sick child to receive health care, the right of the backward child to be reclaimed, the right of orphans to shelter, and the right to protection from exploitation. -
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) in Article 25(2) recognized the need of motherhood and childhood to "special protection and assistance" and the right of all children to "social protection." -
Period: to
Helping Mode
The helping mode involves the proposition that the child knows better than the parent what it needs at each stage of its life, and fully involves both parents in the child’s life as they work to empathize with and fulfill its expanding and particular needs. There is no attempt at all to discipline or form “habits.” Children are neither struck nor scolded, and are apologized to if yelled at under stress. Few parents have yet consistently attempted this kind of child care. -
United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child.
The United Nations General Assembly adopted the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959), which enunciated ten principles for the protection of children's rights, including the universality of rights, the right to special protection, and the right to protection from discrimination, among other rights.
