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Childhood in history

  • 300

    Infanticidal parenting

    Parents kill their children to solve their anxieties about taking care of the children.
  • 374

    The law against infanticide was created

    The law against infanticide was created
    Before, there was no law that said infanticide was wrong in either Greece or Rome. In this year, they created the law that consider killing an infant a murder.
    These law is closely linked to the social moment we are living now days because without this moment, the law against infanticide maybe wouldn't exist.
  • 400

    Athenian laws

    The laws in Athenian attempted to limit sexual attacks on school, because teachers abused children in schools.
    These law is closely linked to the social moment we are living now days because without this moment, sexual abused in school would be normal.
  • 401

    Infanticide of legitimate children decreased

    During the Middle Ages, the killing of legitimate children reduced. Before, it was a regular practice, but then new 
public opinions about this topic started to arise. For this reason, the infanticide of legitimate children decreased.
  • 476

    Term unknown: "childhood"

    Term unknown: "childhood"
    In the early Middle Ages, the term “childhood” was unknown. For this reason, there is no Medieval art that portray childhood.
  • 500

    Anti-Castration law

    Constantine approve the law against castrators. This practice grew so quickly under his successors that soon even noble parents mutilated their own sons to further their political advancement.
    These law is closely linked to the social moment we are living now days because without this moment, most kids would be mutilated.
  • 787

    First asylum for abandoned infants


    Dateo of Milan founded the first asylum solely for abandoned infants. Later, other countries decided to do the same. This was the first step to find an alternative for those children.
  • 787

    First asylum for abandoned infants


    First asylum for abandoned infants

    Dateo of Milan founded the first asylum solely for abandoned infants. Later, other countries decided to do the same. This was the first step to find an alternative for those children.
  • 1200

    Abandoning parenting

    Parents began to see their children as living being with a soul, so they avoided projecting their own traumas and feelings onto their children by abandoning them either physically or emotionally.
  • 1300

    Moses Reign sexual abuse laws to children

    Moses’s injunction against corrupting children: the law against sodomy with children over 9 years old was death by stoning.
  • 1405

    Giovani Dominici

    Giovani Dominici writes about the effects of exposing children to sexual images and acts, referring to “the ancients”, as he calls them, who saught to prevail a child’s innocence.
  • 1500

    Creation of term: "childhood"

    Creation of term: "childhood"
    In the Early Modern Period, the term “childhood” was invented. It was tyrannical concept of the family which destroyed friendship and sociability, and deprived children of freedom.
  • 1500

    Renaissance childhood abuse

    During the Renaissance, temper childhood beatings began in earnest.
  • 1500

    Growth of Abandonment

    It was normal that an infant was sent to another family to be reared to age 17, and then returned to the parents. This practice was made among classes of Welsh, Anglo-Saxons, and Scandinavians.
  • 1550

    Parents give the Devil the children they promised to him

    Parents give the Devil the children they promised to him
    During the fifteenth-century Ritter von Turn and sixteenth-century woodcut from Agnes Sampson trial illustrate widespread theme of parents who give the Devil the children they promised to him.
  • Children were given suppositories, enemas, and oral purges

    In sixteenth- century, children were given suppositories, enemas, and oral purges because of the feces. Some attempts were made in the seventeenth century to limit the beating of children, but it was the eighteenth century which saw the biggest decrease.
  • Diary of Heroard, Doctor of Louis XII

    Diary of Heroard, Doctor of Louis XII
    The diary of Heroard was the most completed record of childhood prior to modern times. It allows us to glimpse
the shifting double image, as his picture of the baby shifts between projective and reversal images. The double image means being an adult and a child.
  • Swaddling children

    Swaddling children
    Swaddling was complicated and it could take 2 hours to dress an infant. Adults rarely had to pay any attention to infants once they were tied up. As a recent medical study of swaddling has shown, swaddled infants are extremely passive, their hearts slow down, they cry less, they sleep far more.
    This act is closely linked to the social moment we live now days because parents practice swaddling children. The only difference is that it took less time.
  • The child as mother’s lover

    Children were considered to be a lover who would passionately embrace the mother. It paintings you could see 
how children were the ones showing affection towards the mother. There was a strong and dangerous relationship mother and child, because the closer they were, the bigger the burden on the growing child.
  • Child as a “toilet” term

    Child as a “toilet” term
    The use of the child as a “toilet” for adult projections is behind the whole notion of original sin, and for eighteen hundred years adults were in general agreement that, 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 . . “
  • Children’s sins by Richard Allestree

    The believe that children who cried too much means that they were letting the Devil out of their body. Even in some church, priests said that if a baby barely cried, he was committing a sin. Therefore babies started being swaddled around 1230.
  • Intrusive parenting

    Parents attempted to conquer the children’s minds and control them in every aspect of their life.
  • Children Masturbation

    Children were punished for touching their own genitals because people were against childhood masturbation. This happened because people were concern on adult homosexuality. In fact, to prevent children from masturbating, doctors began to spread the myth that it would cause insanity, epilepsy, blindness, and death.
  • Empathizing with children’s start

    Evolution of parent-child interaction increased the degree of empathy between children and their parents. Parents didn’t lack of love in the past, but they didn’t have emotional maturity of seeing children as a person apart of themselves.
    This change is closely linked to the social moment we live, because now days the relationship of parent-child is really beautiful and close.
  • First Illustration of the “double image”

    First Illustration of the “double image”
    The first illustration of these closely interlocking concepts, double image, of an adult-child scene from the past. The child was seen as full of the adult’s projected desires, hostilities, and sexual thoughts, and at the same time as a mother or father figure. 
  • New concept that the grandparent is reborn in the baby

    New concept that the grandparent is reborn in the baby
    Relationship between the word: baby and the different words for grandmother. There was the belief that children had milk on their breasts, for this reason the adults squeezed the children’s breasts and had children suck adult’s lips.
  • Time that parents spent raising their children

    The average child of wealthy people spent his earliest years in the home of a wet-nurse. Then, they returned home where other servants took care of them. Also, they were sent out to service, apprenticeship, or school by age 7. For these reasons, the amount of time parents really spent raising their children was so little.
  • Socializing parenting

    Parents teach their children to conform and guiding them into “proper paths” to conquer their will.
  • Socializing parenting

    Parents teach their children to conform and guiding them into “proper paths” to conquer their will.
  • Infanticide of illegitimate children decreased

    After a time, thee killing of illegitimate children started to decreased although before this, there was a high incidence of infanticide in Europe.
  • How bad punitive figures are for children by English parent

    “The custom once prevalent of terrifying young minds with stories of ghosts, is now universally reprobated, in consequence of the increasing stock of national good sense. But many yet living can place fears of supernatural agency, and of darkness, among the real miseries of childhood”
  • Child Abuse

    Child Abuse
    An American father horsewhipping his four-year-old boy for not being able to read something. One can often catch the merging of beaten and beater and therefore lack of guilt in the historical sources.
  • Whipping in America and Europe

    During the nineteenth-century, the old-fashioned whipping decreased in most of America and Europe.
  • Frightening children with fantastical stories

    Frightening children with fantastical stories
    Adults told children fantastical stories about Gods/witches that ate children or torture them if they misbehaved in order to terrify them and force them to behave properly.
  • Studies of the wide extent of infanticide and brutality toward children

    Studies of the wide extent of infanticide and brutality toward children
    In the quartet of books, written by George Payne, Gordon Rattray Taylor, David Hunt and Juliette Louise Despert, the studies of the wide extent of infanticide and brutality toward children in the past was presented, particularly in antiquity.
  • Studies on projective care in Apaches

    Projective care was a projection of the parents’ own unconscious into the child. It was distinguished from empathic care because it was inappropriate or insufficient for the actual needs of the child.
  • Creation of the Evolutionary theory of historical change in parent-child relations

    Creation of the Evolutionary theory of historical change in parent-child relations
    The Association for Applied Psychoanalysis set up a team of historians that uncover the major stages of child-rearing in the West.