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Plutarch’s statement was only one among many which indicate that the sexual abuse of boys was not limited to those over 11 or 12 years of age. Sexual abuse by pedagogues and teachers of smaller children may have been common throughout antiquity. It is said that the Greeks and Romans couldn’t keep their hands off children. Also, signs of castration surrounded the child in antiquity
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Infanticide of both legitimate and illegitimate children was a regular practice of antiquity and has usually been played down.
Any children born "different", were thrown into rivers, "potted" in jars to starve to death or were thrown as food for animals.
Only first-borns were allowed to live, especially if it was a boy, girls were most likely to get killed this caused a large imbalance of males over females. Until the fourth century A.D law and public opinion did not found infantice wrong. -
Until the fourth century A.D law and public opinion did not found infantice wrong, infanticide was probably common since prehistoric times.
Althought some attempts were made to pay parents to keep children alive, it was not until the fourth century that real change was apparent.
In 374 A.C the law began to consider killing an infant murder, even so the Church fathers were often concern for the parent's soul rather than the child's life. -
The most extreme and oldest form of abandonment is the outright sale of children that was already in Babylonian times, and may have been quite common among many nations in antiquity. Another abandonment practice was the use of children as political hostages and security for debts.
The parents gave every kind of rationalization for giving their children away “to learn to speak”, still it was the sending of children to wet-nurse the form of institutionalized abandonment most prevalent in the past. -
On 442 A.D. The finding of abandoned children was supposed to be announced in chuch, later on 787 A.D. Dateo of milan founded the first asylum for abandoned infants. -
The beginning of the period is approximately the fourteenth century, which shows an increase in the number of child instruction manuals, Children were allowed to enter the parents' emotional life, so the parents prevented their projections by molding children into shape.
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Tying childrens in various restraint devices was a practice. The parents would tie their children in swaddling bands, some studies suggest a pattern of total swaddling until they were old enough to have their arms free.
Growing up, Children were even sometimes tied to chairs to prevent their crawling while others were strapped into backboards and their feet put in stocks while they studied, and iron collars and other devices were used to “Improve posture". -
Children were given purges, suppositories and enemas. Also their urines and feces were often examined in order to determine the inner state of the child, this was partly because of the swaddling. IT was not until the eighteenth century that the main focus moved from the enema to the potty.
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The child was no longer so full of dangerous projections, and rather than just examine its insides, the parents approached even closer and attempted to conquer its mind.
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The eighteenth century it took the campaign against the sexual use of children to an entirely new twist: punishing the little boy or girl for touching its own genitals. Parents began severely punishing their children and doctors began to spread the myth that it would cause insanity, epilepsy, blindness, and death.
In the 19th century were doctores and parents would show up infront of the child with knives or scissors, they used many restraint devices as punishment for touching their genitals. -
The raising of a child became less a process of conquering its will and it's minds than of training it, guiding it into proper paths, teaching it to conform, socializing it. Also, in the nineteenth century, the father for the first time begins to take more than an occasional interest in the child.
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By 1925, punishments to stop children of touching their genitals and other practices related to stop masturbation had almost completely died out, after two centuries of brutal and totally un-necessary assault on children’s genitals -
There is no attempt at all to discipline or form “habits.” Children are neither struck nor scolded, and are apologized to if yelled at under stress. The helping mode involves an enormous amount of time, energy, and discussion on the part of both parents. From the books which describe children brought up it is evident that it results in a child who is gentle, sincere, never depressed, never imitative or group-oriented, strong-willed, and unintimidated by authority.