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Period: 300 BCE to 300
Infanticidal Mode (since antiquity)
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. -
220 BCE
Infanticide
any child that was not perfect in shape and size, or cried too little or too much, or was otherwise than is described in the gynecological writings on “How to Recognize the Newborn That is Worth Rearing,” was generally killed. Available statistics for antiquity show large surpluses of boys over girls. Poseidippos stated, “even a rich man always exposes a daughter” -
Period: 300 to 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 by severe emotional abandonment at home. Projection continued to be massive, since the child was still full of evil and needed always to be beaten, but as the reduction in child sodomizmg shows, reversal diminished considerably -
787
Dateo of Milan founded the first asylum solely for abandoned infants
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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.” -
1304
Sexual abuse
There's evidence enough in the sources so far available to us to indicate that the sexual abuse of children was far more common in the past than today, and that the severe punishment of children for their sexual desires in the last two hundred years was the product of a late psychogenic stage, in which the adult used the child to restrain, rather than act out, his own sexual fantasies. -
1405
Giovanni Dominici 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. For in a child “granted that there will not take place any thought or natural movement before the age of five, yet, without precaution, growing up in such acts he becomes accustomed to that act of which later he is not ashamed . . .” -
1500
restraint devices
Swaddling was the central fact of the infant’s earliest years, 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. Once the infant was released from its swaddling bands, physical restraints of all kinds continued. -
The child as mother
the impression that the perfect child would be one who literally breast-feeds the parent. Peter Charron called it “turning the stream back again up to the fountainhead” -
abandonment
sending children at the age of seven or earlier into the homes of others or in monasteries as servants, pages, ladies in waiting, Oblates or office workers. or the children were delivered to the wet nurse and generally left there from 2 to 5 years old. -
Use of the child as a “toilet” for adult projections
for eighteen hundred years adults were in general agreement that, as Richard Allestree puts it, “the new-born babe is full of the stains and pollution of sin, which it inherits from our first parents through our loins . . “ -
TOILET TRAINING
the struggle between parent and child for control in infancy of urine and feces is an eighteenth-century invention, the product of a late psychogenic stage. -
Period: to
Intrusive Mode
The child raised by intrusive parents was nursed by the mother, not swaddled or given regular enemas, toilet trained early, prayed with but not played with, hit but not regularly whipped, punished for masturbation, and made to obey promptly with threats and guilt as often as with other methods of punishment. The child was so much less threatening that true empathy was possible, and pediatrics was born, which along with the general improvement in level of care by parents reduced infant mortality -
Beatings
was approved beating children severely, and all allowed beating in varying circumstances. Beating instruments included whips of all kinds, including the cat-o’-nine-tails, shovels, canes, iron and wooden rods, bundles of sticks. The beatings described in the sources were generally severe, involved bruising and bloodying of the body, began early, and were a regular part of the child’s life. -
Thomas Coram opened his Foundling Hospital
He couldn’t bear to see the dying babies lying in the gutters and rotting on the dung-heaps of London -
scaring the child with ghosts as a control tool to discuss projective character
The number of ghost-like figures used to frighten children through-out history is legion, and their regular use by adults was common until quite recently. There is some evidence that this use of masked figures to frighten children goes back to antiquity -
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 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. -
“killing nurses”
mothers sent their infants to be done away with “by exposing them to cold air after a hot bath; feeding them something that caused convulsions in their stomachs and intestines; mixing gypsum in their milk, which literally plastered up their insides; suddenly stuffing them with food after not giving them anything to eat for two days . . .” -
George Payne’s book: The Child in Human Progress
was the first to examine the wide extent of infanticide and brutality toward children in the past, particularly in antiquity -
Period: to
Helping Mode
Children are apologized to if yelled at under stress. The helping mode involves an enormous amount of time, energy, and discussion on the part of both parents, especially in the first six years, for helping a young child reach its daily goals means continually responding to it, playing with it, tolerating its regressions, being its servant rather than the other way around, interpreting its emotional conflicts, and providing the objects specific to its evolving interests. -
G. Rattray Taylor’s book: The Angel Makers
Taylor’s book, rich in documentation, is a sophisticated psychoanalytic reading of childhood and personality in late eighteenth-century England -
Philippe Aries’s book: Centuries of Childhood
Aries’s argues that while the traditional child was happy because he was free to mix with many classes and ages, a special condition known as childhood was “invented” 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. -
J. Louise Despert’s book: The Emotionally Disturbed Child-Then and Now
Despert’s psychiatric comparison of child mistreatment in the past and present surveys the range of emotional attitudes toward children since antiquity, expressing her growing horror as she uncovers a story of unremitting “heartlessness and cruelty.” -
David Hunt’s book: Parents and Children in History
Centers mostly on the unique seventeenth-century document, Heroard’s diary of the childhood of Louis XIII, but does so with great psychological sensitivity and awareness of the psychohistorical implications of his findings
