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Period: 3000 BCE to 476
Infanticidal Mode
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. All children who had defects were killed. -
Period: 300 to 1300
Abandoning stage
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. -
Period: 1301 to
Ambivalent stage
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.” -
Period: to
Socializing Mode
As projections continued to diminish, the raising of a child became less a process of conquering its will of training, guiding it into proper paths, teaching it to conform, socializing it. -
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.