-
Period: 300 to 500
Plato´s conception of Childhood
Plato was one of the main and first objective people that assured the fact that childhood manners and treating was one of the main keys to life itself. Many old philosophers and rising post-Christ groups of study start reading Plato's thoughts on a lot of matters and topics. A more humanistic view is given to those topics through the years. -
Period: 300 to 400
Infanticidal Mode
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. -
415
Saint Augustine
The well known philosopher and saint gave a still shivering quote back in his age: “Give me other mothers and I will give you another world”.
He knew very well the fact that mother's raise at child's early age is a determining factor in their lives, and in the lives of others. -
500
Seneca's thoughts are misused
The killing spree from mothers to sons reaches its climax in the middle age. Doubts if the child should be raised are equally born. "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" -
Period: 500 to
Medieval fears implanted to Children at early age
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. -
Period: 500 to Aug 29, 1200
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. The symbol of this mode might be Griselda, who so willingly abandoned her children to prove her love for her husband. -
May 9, 675
Children in Middle Age
Note smallest child stands to eat, older child serves family. Elizabethan Family at Dinner. Abandonment is institutionalized. -
Aug 27, 890
Children Being Cooked
Parental infanricidal acts were usually projected onto Jews
or witches, as here in Guazzo’s Compendium Malificarum. Very typical in the pre and the middle age itself -
Period: Mar 27, 1000 to Apr 28, 1492
Medieval and Pre-Renaissance Conception of Childhood
Children were saw as Richard Allestree (1676) 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". They deserved hard and harsh punishment for things the did not do. Payed the blood price for their fathers mistakes. It is the infant full of the parent’s dangerous, evil projections that is swaddled. -
Apr 15, 1150
Medieval incest at early age
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. -
Period: Aug 28, 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. 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. Enormous ambivalence marks this mode. -
Feb 27, 1450
Philo of Alexandria's statements are briefly reviewed
(25 BCE – c. 50 CE), was a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher who lived in Alexandria, in the Roman province of Egypt. "Some of them do the deed with their own hands; with monstrous cruelty and barbarity they stifle and throttle the first breath which the infants draw or throw them into a river or into the depths of the sea, after attaching some heavy substance to make them sink more quickly under its weight" is one of his first claims toward child's imparted brutality -
Period: Oct 12, 1492 to
Reinassance
Reinassance would be polarized in the field; making incredible achivements and improvements in human treatment, but none of it included the child well-being and its development as a future adult. If a child said something clever, an italian in the reinassance would say "this child shall not live", and shamefully, sometimes that statement would be followd by action. -
Apr 16, 1550
Solon's law is read, not followed
Solon´s law from 530 BC was known and rebirthed in the Reinassance but not followed, and there are no instances that lead to think that it was followed in Greece either: "The wife was to have three suits of clothes, a little inconsiderable household stuff, and that was all; for he would not have marriages contracted for gain or an estate, but for pure love, kind affection, and birth of children." -
Sexual Harassment Depicted in History- Relevant Children
Louis XIII was a well known abused child, as older people went to kiss and touch his private parts. This is just one case, the real amount would outnumber any scale. Valerius Maximus depicts the story of the "perfect" child: the one that can breasfeed his parents. -
Masked Figures to Frighten Children
This were seen even in the Reinassance. Fresco by Jacques Stella (1657) -
Period: to
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. -
Misinterpretation of Rousseau's Praxis
Jean Jacques Rousseau (Ginebra, june 28th 1712-Ermenonville, july 2nd 1778), presented in his traités the praxis above all manners or ways of knowledge and learning. This was and has been misunderstood by many (even nowadays), including mothers that drown their children at early age to "incept" strenght in them. -
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. -
Mutilation and Circumcision
Throughout the ages, whether by religion or belief, mutilations have been imparted to children. In the image, a Circumcision being performed in central Asia (probably Turkestan). -
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer book is Published
This book clearly turns a hit when published back in those days, mainly because it reflects what was really happening inside the average american home -
Prevention to Cruelty, Parliament first act UK
The first act of parliament for the prevention of cruelty to children, commonly known as the "children's charter" was passed. This enabled the state to intervene, for the first time, in relations between parents and children. Police could arrest anyone found ill-treating a child, and enter a home if a child was thought to be in danger. The act included guidelines on the employment of children and outlawed begging. -
Period: to
New Conception of Childhood
Not only was the view of children changed, but the way they are deepened into society. -
Freud's work on childhood conception
Freud worked on the parent - child relationships for social change, and thought that parents built the sexual and agressive desires of their children, through caring or the lack of it. -
"The Child in Human Progress"
George Payne's "The Child in Human Progress" was the first to examine the wide extent of infanticide and brutality toward children inthe past, particularly in antiquity. -
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. -
Period: to
New findings lead and Enlighten the way
Projective Care, as seen in Apache mothers to her babies, is what gives hope and good lead to the cause. Global (almost) concience is acquired through mass media spread, children acquire another meaning and a much higher scale of relevance in society's stratagem
