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1300 BCE
Ancient Greece
Kids did not receive names until the seventh or tenth day of life. Children spent the majority of their time with their mother. Seven-year-old boys were taken to the barracks by the city and raised and were trained in the military. Girls reached puberty at ages twelve or thirteen, at which point they were considered adults and could marry and at age eighteen, boys in several ancient Greek cities were required to join the army for two years of service. -
Period: 700 BCE to
Abandonment Era
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. The effects of these and other institutionalized abandonments by parents on the child have rarely been discussed. -
600 BCE
Ancient Rome
Children were educated to the best of a family's ability to do so. They were allowed to play and visit friends. But they were also trained to obey elders. You never talked back to an elder Roman. You never talked back to your family. Doing those things could actually get you thrown out of the house, exiled by the paterfamilias (the male head of the family), and never allowed back. -
Period: 500 BCE to 1500
Swaddled Children
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. -
Period: 500 BCE to 400
Infanticidal Mode
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, infanticide of both legitimate and illegitimate children was a regular practice of antiquity, that the killing of legitimate children was only slowly reduced during the Middle Ages, and that illegitimate children continued regularly to be killed right up into the nineteenth century. -
335 BCE
Aristoteles Conception
According to his conception of childhood, 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. -
374
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 1300
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. -
442
Children announcement in Church
After the Council of Vaison (442 A.D.), the finding of abandoned children was supposed to be announced in church -
480
The Middle Ages
Its a popular notion that there was no recognition of childhood in medieval society and children were treated like miniature adults as soon as they could walk and talk. However, scholarship on the topic by medievalists provides a different account of children in the Middle Ages. It is not correct to assume that medieval attitudes were identical or even similar to modern ones. But, it can be argued that childhood was recognized as a phase of life, and one that had value, at that time. -
787
Dateo of Milan founded the first asylum solely for abandoned infants.
-
890
Dead babys in the streets
by the I 890s dead babies were still a common sight in London streets. -
1250
Saint Thomas Aquinas
He said that children were a representation of sin and the only way of healing was growing up, turning into an adult. -
1300
Renaissance
Children went to bed early, often before sunset, after saying their prayers. In boarding school, they slept two in a bed until the age of fourteen when they were adults and slept alone. Children began work as soon as they were capable. At 14, girls reached the age of majority and were legally adults, considered old enough to inherit, marry, and bear children. Boys on the other hand didn't reach the full age of majority until 21 in England. -
Period: 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.” -
17th century
The boys were likely to spend much less time at home with his
mother, and more out with the men working. If a child did
not go to school, she or he usually entered the work force by ten
to twelve, although poor children might be placed in service
at a younger age.
A girl was legally at the age of discretion at the age of twelve,
and a boy at fourteen. They could wed at these ages, although
that was very rare. -
Toilet Training
Although chairs with chamber pots underneath have existed since antiquity, there is no evidence for toilet training in the earliest months of the infant’s life prior to the eighteenth century. Although parents often complained, like Luther, of their children’s and although doctors prescribed remedies, including whipping, for “pissing in the bed” , the struggle between parent and child for control in infancy of urine and feces, is the product of a late psychogenic stag -
Jhon Locke
He said that children are like white paper void of all characters, without any ideas and they learn within the years, through education. The young child is at once the most vulnerable to bad health and moral influence but also the most open to understanding and experience. -
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. -
Industrial Revolution
Child labour was the crucial ingredient which allowed Britain's Industrial Revolution to succeed. By the early 19th century, England had more than a million child workers, accounting for 15 per cent of the total labour force. -
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. The socializing mode is still thought of by most people as the only model within which discussion of child care can proceed, and it has been the source of all twentieth-century psychological models, from Freud’s “channeling of impulses” to Skinner’s behaviorism. -
Sigmund Freud
Freud thought that all babies are initially dominated by unconscious, instinctual and selfish urges for immediate gratification which he labeled the Id. As babies attempt and fail to get all their whims met, they develop a more realistic appreciation of what is realistic and possible, which Freud called the "Ego". Over time, babies also learn about and come to internalize and represent their parents' values and rules. -
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. The helping mode involves an enormous amount of time, energy, and discussion. -
The child as a social subject of law
The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) of 1989 defines a child as any human person who has not reached the age of eighteen years. Children's rights includes their right to association with both parents, human identity as well as the basic needs for physical protection, food, universal state-paid education, health care, and criminal laws appropriate for the age and development of the child.
