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Parents routinely resolved their anxieties about taking care of children by killing them, it affected the surviving children profoundly.
Ancient writers openly approved of infanticide, saying, like Aristippus, that a man could do what he wants with his children.
The law began to consider killing an infant murder only in 374 A.D. -
The child in antiquity lived his earliest years in an atmosphere of sexual abuse. Growing up in Greece and Rome often included being used sexually by older men.
Sexual abuse by pedagogues and teachers of smaller children may have been common throughout antiquity.
Children in the past were under the fullest control of their parents, who had to agree to give them over to their abusers. -
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.
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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.
In infancy swaddling was essential to protect the infant from the dangerous adult projections within him. -
The new-born child sleeps tightly swaddled in a wooden rocking cradle which is enveloped from end to end in a blanket, so that he lies in a kind of dark airless tent. Mothers are fearful of the effects of cold air and evil spirits. -
Christianity introduced a new concept – childhood innocence. As Clement of Alexandria said, when Christ advised people to “become as little children” in order to enter into Heaven, one should not foolishly mistake his meaning.
Giovanni Dominici, writing in 1405, tried to set some limits to the convenient “innocence” of childhood; he said children after the age of three years shouldn’t be allowed to see nude adults.
https://www.medievalists.net/2020/05/babies-middle-ages/ -
Tabula rasa was the theory that the (human) mind is at birth a "blank slate" without rules for processing data, and that data are added and rules for processing are formed solely by one's sensory experiences. -
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.
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Children were specially employed at the factories and mines and as chimney sweeps, often working long hours in dangerous jobs for low pay.
Child labor was a common feature in industrial societies as children as young as four years old were often employed in the factories and mines that developed during the time. This was particularly true in Britain, where the Industrial Revolution first began in the 1700s. -
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.
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Freud's view, personality is acquired and developed during childhood, and is critically shaped via a succession of five psychosexual stages – the Freudian psychosexual theory of development. And every stage presents the child with a conflict between his own biologically driven needs and social expectations. -
A child's cognitive development is not just about acquiring knowledge, the child has to develop or construct a mental model of the world. Cognitive development occurs through the interaction of innate capacities and environmental events, and children pass through a series of stages. -
The historian Philippe Aries has an extreme view on childhood as a social construction. He argues that in the Middle Ages (the 10th to the 13th century) ‘the idea of childhood did not exist’ – children were not seen as essentially different to adults like they are today.
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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.
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Is an international human rights treaty which sets out the civil, political, economic, social, health and cultural rights of children. The Convention defines a child as any human being under the age of eighteen, unless the age of majority is attained earlier under national legislation.
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Early childhood development is defined as the period from
conception up to school entry. It is a unique window of opportunity for children’s cognitive, social, emotional and physical development, which occurs as the result of the interaction between the environment and the child.