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Children were killed since the prehistoric times -
They let children feel the terror of waiting up at night for ghosts to steal them away, eat them, tear them to pieces, and suck their blood or their bone marrow -
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. -
Parents resolved their anxieties about taking care of children by killing them.
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The law began to consider killing an infant murder 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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Here the child is used by the adult as a vehicle for the projection of the contents of his own unconscious. Parents stoped killing their children and accepting that they had a soul but began to abandon them.
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Use of children as political hostages and security for debts
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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 -
Law brought child-beating into the public domain -
The killing of legitimate children was only slowly reduced during the Middle Ages. The killing of legitimate children even by wealthy parents was so common that Polybius blamed it for the depopulation of Greece. -
Was the common belief that infants had milk in their breasts which had to be expelled. The fourteenth-century Italian balia (wet-nurse) was instructed to “be sure and press his breasts often – to get out any milk there because it bothers him. -
Children started to be seen as soft wax or clay that needed to be shaped. Child was allowed to enter the parents emotional life but was still full of dangerous projections.
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Children perceived as an innocent creature that should be protected from the evil world.
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Campaign against sexual abuse of children
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Child was raised by very intrusive parents that attempted to control every thought and will. Boys and girls were punished for touching it's own genitals.
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Raising a child starts being a process of training and guiding into proper paths
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Illegitimate children continued regularly to be killed right up into the nineteenth century
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Children did much of the work in the world long before child labor became such an issue in the nineteenth century. -
This is the first international treaty concerning children's rights.
In five chapters it gives specific rights to the children and obligations to the adults -
There is no attempt to discipline or form habits. Both parents fully involved in the child's life. This involves the proposition that the child knows better than the parent what it needs at each stage of its life.
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Parents are putting their kids much more into adult-structured, adult-supervised activities than they did in the past