Timeline: Childhood In History

500 BCE

BABYLONIAN PERIOD [2000BC – 500BC]

As described by Lloyd Demause, the sale of children was legal in Babylonian times and may have been quite common among many nations in ancient times. Also dates, the use of children as political hostages and guarantee of debts.

288 BCE

INFANTICIDE

The infanticide of legitimate and illegitimate children was a common practice in ancient times. The child´s life depended on their parents, if they did not meet certain criteria, they were killed. As Lloyd Demause said, any child that was not perfect in shape and size, cried too little or too much was usually killed. Beyond this, the firstborn was generally allowed to live, especially if it was a boy. Girls were, undervalued.

27 BCE

ROME IMPIRE

Boys and girls served their parents at the table. Children were already working even before the problem of child labor was known.

374

LAW - 374 AD

Illegal infanticide in Rome.

442

442 AD

The finding of abandoned children would be announced in the church.

787

787 AD

Dateo of Milan founded the first asylum solely for abandoned children.

1000

Use of ghostly figures

Was implemented the use of ghostly figures to scare children in such a way that they behave well. God himself was the main bogeyman used to terrorize children, and treatises were written in children's language describing the tortures that God had for children in Hell.

1101

XII CENTURY

Medieval art did not know childhood or did not try to portray it, artists were unable to represent a child except as a man on a smaller scale.
The English sold their children to the Irish of slaves, and the Norman invasion was a punishment from God for this slave trade.

1301

XIV CENTURY

General belief that babies have milk in their breasts, therefore wet-nurses were instructed to make sure to press the baby's breasts and extract all the milk. This practice was the most common cause of inflammation in this area.

1401

MEDIEVAL TIMES

Since the Middle Ages, when the baby was born, it was wrapped hermetically. The entire body was covered with cloth bands to keep it immobilized. One of the reasons they tied them up was because they felt that the babies were about to become evil beings. Additionally, they sought to prevent some kind of deformation.
In the Middle Ages all children except royalty acted as servants.

1405

Sexual Abuse

Moralists started a movement against sexual abuse.
As a culmination of the effort to control child abuse in the seventeenth century, parents began to severely punish their children for masturbating, and doctors began to spread the myth that it would cause insanity, epilepsy, blindness and death.

1601

XVII CENTURY

Severe spank of young children with various instruments at school and at home seems to have been as common in this century as it was later.
The enema and the purge, not the urinal, are the central devices to relate to the interior of the child's body.

1780

XVIII CENTURY

-Most parents send their children to the wet-nurse immediately after birth, so the amount of time that parents actually spent raising their children was minimal.
- As late as 1780 the chief of police of Paris estimated that of the 21,000 children born each year in his city, 17,000 were sent to the country to nurses, 2,000 or 3,000 were interned in nurseries, 700 were nurses at home and only 700 were breastfed for their mothers.

1801

XIX CENTURY

Baptism used to include the actual exorcism of the Devil, and they belief that the child who cried at his baptism was letting the Devil out.

1900

New Raising Methods

Parents would improved new methods to raised their children better.

1916

TWENTIETH-CENTURY

George Payne, in 1916, was the first to examine the wide scope of infanticide. Accidents occurred in large numbers because young children were left alone very often.