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Infanticide of both legitimate and illegitimate children was a regular practice of antiquity. Adults resolved their anxieties about caring for them by this activity. Children were thrown into rivers, flung into dung-heaps and cess trenches, “potted” in jars to starve to death, and exposed on every hill and roadside, “a prey for birds, food for wild beasts to rend” (Euripides, Ion, 504).
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The practice of terrorizing children so that they did not bother their parents or maids was overcome.
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There were forms of abandonment as the outright sale of children, the use of children as political hostages and security for debts and the custom of fosterage in which a child was sent to another family to be raised until he was 17, and then returned to his parents.
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The law began to consider killing an infant murder only in 374 A.D. Yet even the opposition to infanticide by the Church Fathers often seemed to be based more on their concern for the parent’s soul than with the child’s life.
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The infanticide of legitimate children was reduced only slightly. The children were thrown into the rivers, thrown in muladares and ditches, "packed" in jars so they would die of hunger
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Childrens, both boys and girls had to wait their parents at the table since roman times. In Middle ages, children were servants with the exception of royalty.
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Asylum for abandoned children
Dateo of Milan founded the first asylum solely for abandoned infants. -
A French boy claimed that Jesus Christ had been asked to lead nearly 30,000 children to the reconquest of the Holy Land. However, the crossing ended when a group of merchants became involved in the children to embark to the Middle East, but actually sold them as slaves.
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The child enters in the affective life of parents. From this point, the child is considered as a "bad" being with punishable tendencies. So adults were worried about adapting it and, in this way, avoiding the emergence of "dangerous" reactions that were really his projections. Physical punishments they were very common and had a dual function: to purify the child and download the emotional weight of the adult.
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Swaddling was often so complicated it took up to two hours to dress an infant. Its convenience to adults was enormous-they rarely had to pay any attention to infants once they were tied up.
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Once the projective and investment reactions diminish, the child's vision as a dangerous enemy fades to another in which the child begins to be considered by himself, but still perfectible. At this time, pediatrics and scientific views towards childhood are born.
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At the end of the eighteenth century in England and North America the custom of wrapping in strips was disappearing. While in France and Germany it was disappearing in the 19th century.
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Moved from the enema to the potty. Not only was toilet training begun at an earlier age, partly as a result of diminished use of swaddling bands, but the whole process of having the child control its body products was invested with an emotional importance previously unknown.
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At this time in which the methods of education are basically focused on the socialization of the child, it was shocking that for the first time parents are interested in the systematic way by the child.
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The first Act of Parliament for the prevention of cruelty to children. It 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 also protects children from work and mendicity.
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The attitude of adults towards children is very different and much more empathetic. The attitude of the parents is patient and dedicated so that the child grows up in an environment nice and carer. The interest is no longer dominate or socialize only, but in developing the characteristics of each child, understand their needs and empower his skills.
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The General Assembly of the United Nations approved the Declaration of the Rights of the Child. This recognition was the first major international consensus on the fundamental principles of children's rights.
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A book becomes a great work, it becomes famous, the author
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) created "Émile ou de l'éducation" that contains a series of basic principles on how educate children, Between his most influential and known ideas is that the child is good by nature and it is society that can pervert the good inclinations of the child. -
Smacking children was banned in Sweden already in 1979, a radical world first. Since then, many more countries have implemented laws against corporal punishment of children.
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The United Nations approves the first International Convention in which it is accepted that children have rights like all human beings. It is oriented towards greater recognition of the child as a person and as a citizen, towards overcoming old patterns of domination, authoritarianism and towards greater recognition and social participation of children as a population group.
