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1230
Evil babies
The belief that infants were felt to be on the verge of turning into totally evil beings is one of the reasons why they were tied up, or swaddled, so long and so tightly. Bartholomaeus Anglicus 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 . . .” -
1301
Ambivalent Mode (XIV to XVII)
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 -
1487
Baby craying
The child in the past was so charged with projections that he was often in danger of being considered a changeling if he cried too much or was otherwise too demanding. There is a large literature on change-lings, but it is not generally realized that it was not only deformed children who were killed as changelings, but also those who, as St. Augustine puts it, “suffer from a demon... they are under the power of the Devil... some infants die in this vexation..." -
use of masked figures to frighten children
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Child as toilet
The use of the child as a “toilet” for adult projections is behind the whole notion of original sin. 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 . . “ -
New ways to terrorize children
When religion was no longer the focus of the terrorizing campaign, figures closer to home were used: the werewolf will gulp you down, Blue Beard will chop you up... -
Children tucked into closets and sexually abused
Children were put in “dark closets, where they were sometimes forgotten for hours.” A house was “a sort of little Bastille, in every closet of which was to be found a culprit – some were sobbing and repeating verbs, others eating their bread and water . . . ” Children were sometimes left locked in rooms for days. The child in antiquity lived his earliest years in an atmosphere of sexual abuse. Growing up in Greece and Rome often included being used sexually by older men. -
Witches and ghosts to educate children (XIX)
Taking more extreme measures to control children who were growing up and outgrown, adults created scary methods such as witches, demons and countless ghosts that would prevent the "bad" behavior of children. -
George Payne's book "The Child in Human Progress"
Payne, was the first to examine the wide extent of infanticide and brutality toward children in the past, particularly in antiquity -
Philippe Aries’s book "Centuries of Childhood"
he argues the traditional child was happy because he was free to mix with many classes and ages, a special condition known as childhood was “invented” in the early modern period, resulting in a tyrannical concept of the family which destroyed friendship and sociability and deprived children of freedom, inflicting upon them for the first time the birch and the prison cell.
