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Adults told children fantastical stories of gods or witches eating children or torturing them if they misbehaved in order to terrify them and force them to behave properly.
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It was far more common child sexual abuse in antiquity than now. Greek and roman adult men used children sexually, specially teachers. However, it was said that this required at least the unconscious complicity of the child's parents. -
Various authors present several studies of the common infanticide and brutality towards children through the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and particularly in antiquity.
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In antiquity until recent ages, there were several ideas that related babies to the adults. Closeness between the word “baby” and the various words for grandmother (baba, Babe). Adults would suck on the child’s nipples and private parts. There was also the belief that children had milk on their breasts, hence adults squeezed the children’s breasts and also had children suck adult’s lips.
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The beating of children was common, and even ended up in the child's death. It was up until de eighteenth century that child beating decreased and families had to come up with new ways of punishing children, such as locking them up alone in a dark room.
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Athenian laws attempted to limit sexual attacks on schoolchildren. -
Infanticide was not punished in Rome nor Greece until this date. -
Children were sent to another family until he was around 17 years old, then he returned to the family. Adults realized children had a soul and avoided passing on their unresolved traumas onto the children. Also, even until recent ages it was common that the children of wealthy parents were fed by wet-nurses instead of his or her mother, because her breasts were reserved for the father.
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Much more girls than boys were killed eventhough they were legitimate children. This created an imbalance of males over females, until the Middle Ages, were the killing of legitimate children was reduced.
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Dateo of Milan founded the first asylum solely for abandoned infants. Other countries followed much the same pattern of evolution. -
Babies started being swaddled because it was thought they committed sins when they cried too much. Today, child swaddling, if done well, has been proved to relax the baby and help him sleep better. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28394766/) -
Children were allowed to enter the parents' emotional life, but still they could project its own traumas into the children, so it was the parents' job to shape them. A lot of children instruction manuals were used.
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Childhood: "Tyrannical concept of the family which destroyed friendship and sociability and deprived children of freedom, inflicting upon them for the first time the birch and the prison cell."
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Children took care of their mothers, carrying the responsibility of making sure of her wellness and comfort, thinking of her wellbeing first than his or her own. -
Richard Allestree talks about children's being considered a toilet term for adult's projections. By this time it was believed that children who cried too much were letting the Devil out of their body. Babies were considered a changeling if he cried too much or was somehow demanding. Even some church fathers said that if a baby barely cried, he was committing a sin. -
A campaign started to punish childhood masturbation, doctors began to spread the myth that it would cause insanity, epilepsy, blindness, and death. Even anti-masturbation devices were created in order to prevent childhood masturbation. Mainly, because people thought it would cause adult homosexuality.
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Evolution of parent-child interaction increased the degree of empathy between children and their parents, and swaddling came to an end. Parents did not lack love in the past, however they lacked the emotional maturity of seeing children as a person apart of themselves.
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A reduction on the killing of illegitimate children was observed on the eighteenth century. Before this time, illegitimate children were killed regularly.
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Parents started to bond more and really empathize with children. The child was no longer so full of dangerous projections, he was no longer whipped but regularly hit. Pediatrics was born and the care provided by parents reduced infant mortality rate.
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Projective and reversal reactions often occurred simultaneously in parents in the past, producing an effect which is called “double image,” where the child was seen as both full of the adult’s projected desires, hostilities, and sexual thoughts, and at the same moment as a mother or father figure.
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The raising of a child becomes less of conquering its will, and more of training, guiding and teaching. It is the first time the father starts having more of an interest in his child and even relieves the mother of child care duties.
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“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” -
Involves the proposition that the child know better what it needs at each stage of life rather than the parents trying to form habits. The parents provide the children with everything they need, specially during the first six years of their life. This parenting mode requires the continuous effort of both parents.
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Projective care starts as a projection of the parents’ own unconscious into the child and is distinguished from empathic care by being either inappropriate or insufficient to the child’s actual needs. -
The central force for change in history is neither technology nor economics, but the “psychogenic” changes in personality occurring be-cause of successive generations of parent-child interactions. -
Helicopter parents are overly focused on their children. They usually take too much responsibility for the children's successes and failures. Are Helicopter Parents Ruining a Generation? -
"Children and adolescents have much less free, unstructured, unsupervised time than their predecessors did. Parents are putting their kids much more into adult-structured, adult-supervised activities than they did in the past. The geographical range of childhood and youth has contracted over time." - Steven Mintz.
(https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-07-11-how-childhood-has-changed-and-how-that-impacts-education)
Technology has also had a great influence on how childhood has evolved over time.