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Period: 300 to 400
Infanticidal Mode- PARENT-CHILD RELATIONS
In the year 300 the parents began to assassinate the children by the suffering that the mother caused to him after the birth, this was considered like murder.
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. -
Period: 300 to 500
Plato
Platon was one of the first people to propose that one of the most important stages of life is childhood, from this thought many philosophers after Christ begin to read of this thought to have a more humanistic vision. -
Period: 400 to 1300
Abandoning Mode, PARENT-CHILD RELATIONS
The parents at this time marketed the children, selling them to other families to become servants and helpers from other homes, also paid their debts through them.
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. -
415
Saint Augustine of Hippo, Doctor of the Church, bishop, philosopher, theologian
St. Augustine was one of the first to determine that raising mothers at an early age was crucial to their lives and to the lives of others.
“Give me other mothers and I will give you another world” -
Period: 476 to 1492
Middle Age
Parental infanticidal acts were usually projected onto Jews
or witches, as here in Guazzo’s Compendium Malificarum. Very typical in the present and the middle age itself
Most ancients agreed that it was good to have the images of these witches constantly before children, to let them feel the terror of waiting up at night for ghosts to steal them away, eat them, tear them to pieces, and suck their blood or their bone marrow. -
500
The misuse of Seneca´s thoughts
The killing spree from mothers to sons reaches its climax in the middle age. "Mad dogs we knock on the head; the fierce and savage ox we slay; sickly sheep we put to the knife to keep them from infecting the flock; unnatural progeny we destroy; we drown even children who at birth are weakly and abnormal. Yet it is not anger, but reason that separates the harmful from the sound" -
600
Children as an image of sin
Some church fathers declared that if a baby merely cried it was committing a sin -
650
Children abandoned as a gift to the devil
HOW?
1. sending of children to wet-nurse
2. Child sale was legal in Babylonian times, and may have been quite common among many nations in antiquity.
3. The use of children as political hostages and security for debts, which also went back to Babylonian times.
4.Behind the custom of fosterage, wherein an infant was sent to another family to be reared to age 17, and then returned to the parents. -
700
Children as Servants- Middle Age
Boys and girls waited on their parents at table, and in the Middle Ages all children except royalty acted as servants -
840
Medieval infanticide
It is not evident in church records and other quantitative sources. But if sex ratios of 156 to 100 (c. 801 AD.) and 172 to 100 (1391 A.D.) are any indication of the extent of the killing of legitimate girls,(135) and if illegitimate were usually killed regardless of sex, the real rate of infanticide could have been substantial in the Middle Ages. -
1100
Children as their mother´s lovers
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. -
1400
Childhood innocence
Christians throughout the Middle Ages began to stress the idea that children were totally innocent of all notions of pleasure and pain.
Unfortunately, the idea that children are innocent and cannot be corrupted is a common defense by child molesters against admitting that their abuse is harming the child, so the medieval fiction that the child is innocent only makes our sources less revealing, and proves nothing about what really went on. -
Period: 1400 to
Ambivalent Mode-PARENT-CHILD RELATIONS
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. From Dominici to Locke there was no image more popular than that of the physical molding of children, who were seen as soft wax, plaster, or clay to be beaten into shape. -
1520
Children being exorcised
The history of witchcraft in the West is filled with reports of children’s convulsive fits, loss of hearing or speech, loss of memory, hallucination of devils, confession of intercourse with devils, and accusations ofwitchcraft against adults, including their parents. And finally, even further back in the Middle Ages, we encounter children’s dancing mania, children’s crusades and child-pilgrimages. -
Baptism as a Exorcism
Richard Allestree said: “the new-born babe is full of the stains and pollution of sin, which it inherits from our first parents through our loins . . “ Baptism used to include actual exorcism of the Devil, and the belief that the child who cried at his christening was letting out the Devil long survived the formal omission of exorcism in the Reformation. -
Period: to
Intrusive Mode-PARENT-CHILD RELATIONS
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. -
Punishing the little boy or girl for touching its own genitals
As a climax of the effort to bring child abuse under control, that parents began severely punishing their children for masturbation,
Doctors began to spread the myth that it would cause insanity, epilepsy, blindness, and death.
The Image shows some Metal Anti-Masturbation Devices. -
Sexual Abuse Remains
It was far more widespread among servants and other adults and adolescents than among parents, although when one reads of the number of parents who continued to let their children sleep with servants after previous servants had been found abusing them sexually, it is obvious that the conditions for child abuse still remained within the control of the parents -
Children being Purged in Sickness but also in Health
Children were given suppositories, enemas, and oral purges in sickness and in health. One seventeenth-century authority said infants should be purged before each nursing so the milk wouldn’t get mixed up with the feces -
Period: to
Socializing Mode-PARENT-CHILD RELATIONS
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 behavior -
The State intervention, for the first time, in relations between parents and children
The Prevention of Cruelty to, and Protection of, Children Act 1889, commonly known as the Children's Charter, was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (as it then was). It was the first Act of Parliament for the prevention of cruelty to children. -
UNICEF Was Founded
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) is a new York-based United Nations programme that provides humanitarian and developmental assistance to children and mothers in developing countries. -
Period: to
Helping Mode- PARENT-CHILD RELATIONS
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.
