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Period: 400 BCE to 300 BCE
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. -
347 BCE
Aristotle: Child is an immature specimen
Aristotle thinks of the Final Cause of a living organism as the function that organism normally performs when it reaches maturity. According to this conception, a human child is an immature specimen of the organism type, human, which, by nature, has the potentiality to develop into a mature specimen with the structure, form, and function of a normal or standard adult. -
Period: 301 BCE to Feb 24, 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. The symbol of this mode might be Griselda, who so willingly abandoned her children to prove her love for her husband. -
200 BCE
Children in Ancient Greece
Babies born in ancient Greece often had a difficult time surviving. Many died in the first couple days of life; therefore, babies did not receive names until the seventh or tenth day of life. If a baby was born deformed, it might have been abandoned on a mountain (female babies were abandoned more often than males). Sometimes abandoned babies were rescued and brought up as slaves by another family.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebxG3OpiQJo -
397
St. Augustine: Children are hidrance
The generalization of the existence of childhood as a hindrance is coined from the confessions of St. Augustine (354-430), whose theology refers that man is born of sin, so the child is the living image of slip.
This implied that many children are deprived of warmth and maternal affection and are considered by the family as a nuisance. Infanticide, abortion, exile, abandonment and nursery-nurture were the customs of the time. -
Feb 24, 900
Children as small adults
Artists were unable to depict a child except as man on a smaller scale’. In medieval society, the idea of childhood did not exist. That is why, as soon as the child could live without the constant solicitude of his mother, his nanny or his cradle-rocker, he belonged to adult society. -
Period: Feb 24, 1300 to
Ambivalent Mode
Because 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. Enormous ambivalence marks this mode. The beginning of the period is approximately the fourteenth century, which shows an increase in the number of child instruction manuals, the expansion of the cults of Mary and the infant Jesus, and the proliferation in art of the “close-mother image.” -
Feb 24, 1560
Child is a economic resource
Among the peasant families of the sixteenth century in England, children aged 6 to 7 worked in household chores, from the age of 9 or 10 they were encouraged or forced to work as servants in other affluent families. The work that the older children stopped doing was taken over by the younger ones. This child labor is an important contribution in the family economy but is not considered a reward for the child. -
Descartes: Childhood is weaakness of the spirit
Childhood is weakness of the spirit and affirms that the prejudices we incubate at that stage are the main cause of our mistakes and make difficult the learning of the sciences and the clear representation of ideas. -
The child as an angel
The childhood was seen as a state of purity and innocence, it was affirmed that the children came from the sky and from the angelic beings that surround the throne of God and for that reason it was believed that the sin had not touched them, nor the corruption. There was an idea that the child had an essential goodness. He was also considered, as the savior of the adult because he led him to a land of light and calm, away from threatening destruction. -
Comenius introduced his book "Orbis Picture"
Comenius is credited for introducing the first illustration book for children who was called: "Orbis Pictus" (the World of Pictures). He believed that children needed pictures to help them learn. His philosophy was based upon the idea that, chiildren should be permitted to play, learn and discovr at their own pace. He compared the children to "seeds". -
The child as a blank board
Locke diffuses that the child is like a blank board where there is nothing written and therefore neither bad nor possesses innate knowledge, only learns through the sensory experiences. He posited that education should train the child to be an educated person, the ideal being the image of the Englishman, so moral education was of greater importance than the acquisition of knowledge or skills. This view reflected that the adult was the one who decided what the child would have to be. -
Period: to
Intrusive mode
A tremendous reduction in projection and the virtual disappearance of reversal was the accomplishment of the great transition for parent-child relations which appeared in the eighteenth century. 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. -
Jean - Jacques Rousseau encouraed to play in his book "Emilie"
Rosseau introduced the concept "The child is born good, it is society that corrupts it". He considered that he possesses an innate goodness and that his natural impulses should be accepted as they are. He posited that education should understand the child, meet his needs and improve his natural interests.
Rousseau first wrote "nurturing" children as opposed to the repressive perspective taken at the time. He renowned for his book Emilie, encouraged free play. -
Period: to
Socializing Mode
As projections continued to diminish, 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. It is most particularly the model of sociological functionalism. 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. -
darwin: Child as a primitive man
Darwin and reductionism, considered that childhood is similar to the development of primitive man, the development of mental life is like the evolution of life: vegetable, animal, human. This theory considers that the child will be molded by the habits, the passions, the ideals of those who surround him and that he will be impressed for good or bad, for everything he sees or hears. -
Erickson: The child is a playful being
Erickson in his book "Toys and Reason" claims that children should play alone (a practical reflection of the needs of the time) and defines play as the training of life because it allows him to build his identity "A child likes to play Not because it is easy but because it is difficult for him. "Criticizes those who understand play or play as fun and do not consider it as child labor. -
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 Convention on the Rights of the Child
The convention consists of 54 articles covering all four major categories of child rights: Right to life, Right to development, Right to protection, and Right to participation.Link text
