The evolution of childhood

The evolution of childhood

1 BCE

Children have required special measures of care and protection, due to their particularly vulnerable condition, they have retrospectively suffered all kinds of abuse and mistreatment, so this timeline makes a journey through different contexts of childhood to evidence it.

Infanticide

400

Until the fourth century A.D., neither law nor public opinion found infanticide wrong in either Greece or Rome. The great philosophers agreed. Those few passages which classicists consider as a condemnation of infanticide seem to me to indicate just the opposite, such as Aristotle’s “As to exposing or rearing the children born, let there be a law that no deformed child shall be reared"

Child abandonment

1300

Forms of abandonment
- Keep the children in another house
- Educate them in other families
- The outright sale of children
- Debt guarantee
- Political hostages

Ambivalence

1700

The task of parents and caregivers was to break the rebellious spirit of children, employing punishments and strict disciplines to guide them to virtue.

Intrusion

1800

Some adults refused to try to strike a balance between discipline and kindness

Socialization

1900

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.

Helping mode

2000

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.”