-
2100 BCE
Scaring children with fantastical stories
If a child misbehave their parents told stories of witches, creatures, gods that torture or eat children in order to force them to behave. -
374
Law against infanticide
The law began to consider killing an infant murder. -
400
Athenian laws
Some of the Athenian laws which attempted to limit sexual attacks on schoolchildren: consider the case of the teachers abused children in schools. -
470
¿Childhood?
In the early Middle Ages, the term childhood” was unknown. 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. -
500
Law against castration
Constantine made a law against castrators, the practice grew so rapidly under his successors that soon even noble parents mutilated their sons to further their political advancement. -
787
First asylum for abandoned childs
Dateo of Milan founded the first asylum solely for abandoned infants. Other countries followed much the same pattern of evolution. -
1500
Abandonment
It was common among all classes of Welsh, Anglo-Saxons, and Scandinavians, wherein an infant was sent to another family to be reared to age 17, and then returned to the parents. -
1500
The "invention" of Childhood
in the early modern period, resulting in a tyrannical concept of the family which destroyed friendship and sociability and deprived children of freedom, inflicting upon them for the first time the birch and the prison cell. -
1550
Bad Parents Giving Their Children To The Devil
Durer’s fifteenth-century Ritter von Turn and sixteenth-century
woodcut from Agnes Sampson trial illustrate widespread theme of
parents who give the Devil the children they promised to him. -
Swaddling The Child.
Swaddling was often so complicated it took up to two hours to dress an infant. Its convenience to adults was enormous-they rarely had to pay any attention to infants once they were tied up. As a recent medical study of swaddling has shown, swaddled infants are extremely passive, their hearts slow down, they cry less, they sleep far more. -
The Child As Mother’s Lover.
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. -
Children's sins
It was believed that children who cried too much were letting the Devil out of their body. Babies were considered a changeling if he cried too much or was somehow demanding. Even some church fathers said that if a baby barely cried, he was committing a sin. -
Double Image
Where the child was seen as both full of the adult’s projected desires, hostilities, and sexual thoughts, and at the same moment as a mother or father figure. -
Replacing beating
Shutting children up in the dark became quite popular, because replace the beating. Children were put in “dark closets, where they were sometimes forgotten for hours.” -
Parents Raising childrens
The average child of wealthy parents spent his earliest years in the home of a wet-nurse, returned home to the care of other servants, and was sent out to service, apprenticeship, or school by age seven, so that the amount of time parents of means actually spent raising their children was minimal. -
Child Abuse
An American father tells of horsewhipping his four-year-old boy for not being able to read something. The child is tied up naked in the cellar: This reflects that beating was so wide spread in the past. -
The end of whipping
The old-fashioned whipping began to disappear in most of Europe and America.