Evolution of Childhood

Babylonian Times (1792–1752 BCE)

1792 BCE

In these times we could find the most extreme form of abandonment, this was child sale which was legal in Babylonian times. “Herodas showed a beating scene where a boy was told “you’re a bad boy, Kottalos, so bad that none could find a good word for you even where he is selling you.” Another form of abandonment was giving children as hostages to guarantee an agreement.

Greece and Rome

776 BCE

In Greece and Rome children were considered their father property meaning that he could decide everything in their lives, even if he wanted them to live or not, he could also sell them or abandon them if he desired.

Bartholomaeus Anglicus (c. 1230)

1230

People believed infants were on the verge of turning into total evil beings so they would tie children up. Batholomaeus said “And for tenderness the limbs of the child may easily and soon bow and bend and take diverse shapes. And therefore, children’s members and limbs are bound with lystes [bandages], and other covenable bonds, that they be not crooked nor evil shapen .”

Renaissance

1400

When a Renaissance pedagogue says you should tell the child when beating him, “you do the correction against your mind, compelled thereunto by conscience, and require them to put you no more unto such labour and pain. For if you do (say you) you must suffer part of the pain with me and therefore you shall now have experience and proof what pain it is unto both of us” we will not so easily miss the merging and mislabel it hypocrisy.

Breastfeeding

1400

The custom of not breastfeeding reached bad to the fifteenth century. Breastfeeding was considered “swinish and filthy” and husbands would threaten them by saying he would not eat if she didn’t give up this disgusting habit.”

Richard Allestree (1676)

1676

Richard Allestree (1676): “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.

Childhood as a topic of study - Freud

1800

Since Freud the way people viewed childhood changed and the study of childhood “has become routine for the psychologist, the sociologist, and the anthropologist. It is only beginning for the historian. Such determined avoidance requires an explanation.”

Ninetheenth Century

1800

In the ninetheenth-century in Germany in Jean Paul RIchters book “Levanna” “he condemned parents who kept children in order “by images of terror,” claiming medical evidence that they “frequently fall victims to insanity.”

Labor Standars

1938

There was an act called “The Fair Labor Standards Act” which said it was illegal for most children below 16 to be working in the industrial sector.

Preschool

1960

There was a change in 1960s in which people started growing awareness of the importance of good early childhood development for children, this led to multiple countries establishing preschool programs and other forms of early education for children.

Laws against abuse

1990

People started to be concerned about children abuse and neglect, therefore many countries started implementing laws in which they would protect children from abuse.

Nowadays

2000

Nowadays people from all over the world know the importance of children and how we should prepare the environment where they will be growing and provide the conditions necessary for good development.