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The ancient concepts of childhood in India were based on a very positive regard for the children's development, education and future independence, adult role and contribution to society. Children were wanted and considered precious. The children were categorized in to 4 different varnas based on their intelligence, abilities, merit and aptitude and educated accordingly, away from their home, at Gurukuls. They had universal right to education.
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Growing up, children would be part of a large household. In Greco-Roman Egypt the most common family model was male-oriented, or in technical terms, virilocal. This means that after marrying, boys usually stayed with their family and brought their wives to their family home. By contrast, married women usually left their homes and went to live with their husbands’ families.
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Mamluk means “owned”. The Mamluk system began during the Abbasid caliphs of 9th century Baghdad. Boys of about thirteen were
captured from areas to the north of the Persian Empire and trained to become elite soldiers for the personal use of the sultan or
aristocrats. -
Childhood in medieval England was determined by both social and biological factors. According to common law, childhood ranged from the birth of a child until he or she reached the age of 12. At this point, the child was seen as capable and competent to understand his or her actions, thus rendering them responsible for them. According to canon law, girls could marry at the age of 12 and boys at the age of 14. -
John Locke believed that children were "blank slates", and thought that they gained personality and characteristics through experience.
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau disagreed with Locke's beliefs and instead, believed that children were actually noble savages. Children were naturally bestowed with know their rights from wrongs. As well as having unique ways of thinking.
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The first reference to children’s rights came in a pamphlet by the British radical Thomas Spence, in the 1790s; children deserved protection against poverty and abuse. -
Charles Darwin created the theory of evolution which was constructed around two topics, natural selection and survival of the fittest. Darwin believed that the growth of a child during the prenatal stages were similar to other species, but were then proven wrong.
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Sigmund Freud had a very sexual psychological approach to the theory of child development. His "psychosexual theory" stated that it emphasizes that how parents manage their child's sexual and aggressive drives in the first few years in crucial for healthy personality development.
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James Mark Baldwin believed that children's understanding of their physical and social worlds develop through a sequence of stages. Starting off with the simplicity of a new infant, and ending on the complexity of a full adult.
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Jean Piaget created the "cognitive-development theory" which says that children actively construct knowledge as they manipulate and explore the world. His view was greatly influenced by his biology background.
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Philippe Ariès made the contentious claim that the concept of childhood is entirely modern, and that within medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist. Further to this, he also made the claim that childhood was not understood as a distinct stage of life until the 15th century, and prior to this point children were seen merely as ‘little adults’. -
Edward Shorter and a large a number of scholars considered that childhood was discovered in line with a “surge of sentiment” and the emergence of the nuclear family in the eighteenth century, -
Historians such as Edward Shorter and Lawrence Stone argue that early childhood and parenting were characterised by a lack of emotional attachment between parents and their children due to the high infant mortality rates, alongside formal and affectionless rearing techniques, such as the practices of swaddling and wet-nursing. -
Linda Pollock stated that loving relations between parents and children were the historical norm.
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