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Period: 7000 BCE to 500
Infanticide and death wishes towards children
Children were thrown into rivers, flung into dung-heaps and cess trenches, “potted” in jars to starve to death, and exposed on every hill and roadside, “a prey for birds, food for wild beasts to rend” . To begin with, any child that was not perfect in shape and size, or cried too little or too much, was generally killed -
Period: 1894 BCE to
nursing, abandonment and swaddling
the sale and abandon of childs was legal, so children were seen as property, and sold as slaves, common practice in babylonian times, other practices where giving the chidren to nurses, and then coming back home but under the care of other servants, many practices of abandonment were common.
also the practice of swaddling consisting of tying up the infant in several amount of bendage in order that it couldnt move became a common widespread practice. -
374
infanticide becomes a crime
at this point for the first time in history, the church sees teh killing of an infant to be considered as an actual murder -
442
council of Vaison
finding of abandoned children shall be announced by the church -
Period: 500 to 1400
widespreading of infanticide
evemthough it was now considered a crime, infanticide spread during middle age throughout Europe -
Period: 600 to
sex abbuse of children
coming from the times of ancient greece up to the 15th century child sexual abuse was seen as correct, taken to the point where pederastian relationships and marriages were well seemed by society and even legal.
widespreading throughout the continent eventhough some of the actions taken against this during renaissance and during the eighteenth century. -
787
first asylum for abandoned child created
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890
dead infants in the street become a common picture in england
abandoning and killing of new borns became a common practice on england even to the point dead babies were often watched in the streets -
1391
drop of female population
sex ratio drops from 156 to 100 in 801A.D up to 172 to 100, showing evidence of widespread of infanticide, and killing of female children. -
1405
Giovanni Dominci
delivers a writting trying to set clear boundaries on the child's innocence in an attempt to decrease the sexual abbuse -
Period: to
Projective and reversal reaction toward childhood
children were just seen as little adults, often leading this thought to misconducts in adults, in which they tended to either project within the child some of their own traits, or to see in the child traits of their own parents. This lead to the admission of physichal punishment as the evil they saw projected in the child needed to be whipped, or to obsessive behaviours. Techniques of frightening were used also. -
Richard Allestre
"the new-born is full of the stain and sin of the progenitor" -
toilet training
first appearings of what seemed to be training the children to do their physiological needs -
Period: to
beating and discipline
after watching the medical implications of swaddling, and also due to the amount of effort this technique required, a new technique for discipline was adopted, which was the physichal beating of the children. -
Nicholas´s testimony
Nicholas gives clear example of this projective reaction towards childhood, in a history of how his grandfather tricked him to put his hands into fire, by projecting into him traits of his mother. -
english writer description
"Nurses used to frighten the infants with stories of "raw heads and bloody bones" " -
Period: to
Polish Jew encouragement of punishing, Reprobal of frightening
they taught that within the body there were evil parts, and that as this evil needed to be gone, thos parts were the ones needing to be whipped, therefore encouraging physichal punishment
However techniques of frightening with ghost stories began to be rejected -
testimony of a father
the father horsewhipped his son, by saying the pain his child felt he also felt, clear example of projective reaction -
ghost stories
a nurse retells how she scared a 2 year old in order she did not leave her room so she could have some fun in the house alone