THE EVOLUTION OF CHILDHOOD

Ancient Egypt

5500 BCE

Children were not swaddled because paintings showed them naked, swaddling may have been practiced.
They practiced Child sacrifice, the most concrete acting out of Rheingold’s thesis of filicide as sacrifice to the mother of the parents.

Ancient Greece

1200 BCE

The killing of legitimate children even by wealthy parents was so common.
The child in antiquity lived his earliest years in an atmosphere of sexual abuse by older men.
Aristippus said that a man could do what he wants with his children, for “do we not cast away from us our spittle.
Seneca said they pretend only sickly infants are involved.

Ancient Rome

753 BCE

Sacrifice of children led an underground existence.
Dio said Julianus “killed many boys as a magic rite;”
Also Infants were castrated “in the cradle” to be used in brothels by men who liked buggering young castrated boys.

Plato

428 BCE

He said child-hood is a key to this understanding.
Also that children should be held in common was that when men had sex with boys they wouldn’t know if they were their own sons

ARISTOTLES

384 BCE

“As to exposing or rearing the children born, let there be a law that no deformed child shall be reared; but on the ground of number of children, if the regular customs hinder any of those born being exposed, there must be a limit filed to the procreation of offspring.”
He said homosexuality often becomes habitual in “those who are abused from childhood.”

PLUTARCH

46 BCE

Plutarch have denounced mothers for sending their children out to be wet-nursed rather than nursing them themselves.
Also he said the reason why freeborn Roman boys wore a gold ball around their necks when they were very young was so men could tell which boys it was not proper to use sexually when they found a group in the nude.

MEDIEVAL PERIOD

476

Aries says that a separate concept of childhood was unknown in this age because artists were “unable to depict a child except as a man on a smaller scale.
The usually stiff medieval mother-child portraits alternate
with a few like these which show the wish that the child be a
lover who would passionately embrace the mother.
They had a practice of sending noble children to the Devil.

RENAISSANCE

1401

Renaissance parents would “burn in the neck with a hot iron, or else drop a burning wax candle” on newborn babies to prevent “falling sickness. And when a child does something clever, they think “that child is not meant to live.” Fathers of every age tell their sons, with Luther, “I would rather have a dead son than a disobedient one.”

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

1760

Child labour existed before the Industrial Revolution but with the increase in population and education it became more visible. Many children were forced to work in relatively bad conditions for much lower pay than their elders

NINETEENTH- CENTURY

1801

The historical sociologists manage to turn out theories explaining changes in childhood without ever bothering to examine a single family, past or present. The literary historians, mistaking books for life, construct a fictional picture of childhood, as though one could know what really happened by reading Tom Sawyer

SIGMUND FREUD

May 6, 1856

The view of childhood has acquired a new dimension, and in the past half century the study of childhood has become routine for the psychologist, the sociologist, and the anthropologist. It is only beginning for the historian. Such determined avoidance requires an explanation.

20TH CENTURY

1901

It was created in 1950 The Children's Rights