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Period: 500 BCE to 300
First mode: Infanticidal Mode
The image of Medea hovers over childhood in antiquity, for myth here only reflects reality. Some facts are more important than others, and when parents routinely resolved their anxieties about taking care of children by killing them, it affected the surviving children profoundly. For those who were allowed to grow up, the projective reaction was paramount, and the concreteness of reversal was evident in the widespread sodomizing of the child. -
Period: 301 to Dec 31, 1300
Secound mode: Abandoning Mode
The parents began to accept the child as having a soul, the only way they could escape the dangers of their own projections was by abandonment, whether to the wet nurse, to the monastery or nunnery, to foster families, to the homes of other nobles as servants or hostages, or by severe emotional abandonment at home. -
Period: Jan 1, 1101 to Dec 31, 1200
Invention of childhood
“Medieval art until about the twelfth century did not know childhood or did not attempt to portray it” because artists were “unable to depict a child except as a man on a smaller scale.” -
Period: Jan 1, 1301 to
Third mode: Ambivalent Mode
in this mode the child was allowed to enter into the parents' emotional life, was still a container for dangerous projections, it was their task to mold it into shape. -
Jan 1, 1405
Giovanni Dominici tried to set some limits to the convenient “innocence” of childhood
he said children after the age of three years shouldn't be allowed to see nude adults -
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During this century an extensive infanticide was seen.
For example the social historian wrote that mothers who regularly beat their infants with sticks while still in the cradle, she comments, without a shred of evidence, that “if her discipline was stern, it was even and just and leavened with kindness.”
When a third finds mothers who dunk their infants into ice water each morning to “strengthen” them, and the children die from the practice, she says that “they were not intentionally cruel,” but simply “had read Rousseau and Locke.” -
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Fourth mode: Intrusive Mode
Intrusive Mode had a tremendous reduction in projection and the virtual disappearance of reversal was the accomplishment of the great transition for parent-child relations. The child was no longer so full of dangerous projections, and rather than just examine its insides with an enema, the parents approached even closer and attempted to conquer its mind, in order to control its insides, its anger, its needs, its masturbation, its very will. -
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Fifth mode: Socializing Mode
On socializing Mode, the raising of a child became less a process of conquering its will than of training it, guiding it into proper paths, teaching it to conform, socializing it.
The socializing mode is still thought of by most people as the only model within which discussion of child care can proceed, and it has been the source of all twentieth-century psychological models, from Freud's “channeling of impulses” to Skinner's behaviorism. -
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Jean Paul Richter
One of the earliest defenders of childhood -
Period: to
It arose in France the idea of providing special protection for children
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Period: to
French law guaranteed the right of children to an education.
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The League of Nations adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child
The first international treaty on the Rights of Children. Throughout five chapters, the Declaration gives specific rights to children as well as responsibilities to adults. -
UNICEF was created
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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes that "maternity and childhood have the right to special care and assistance".
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Sixth mode: Helping Mode.
Helping mode involves an enormous amount of time, energy, especially in the first six years, for helping a young child reach its daily goals means continually responding to it, tolerating its regressions, being its servant rather than the other way around, interpreting its emotional conflicts, and providing the objects specific to its evolving interests. This mode have result a child who is gentle, sincere, never depressed, strong-willed, and unintimidated by authority. -
Period: to
Sixth mode: Helping Mode.
Helping mode involves an enormous amount of time, energy, especially in the first six years, for helping a young child reach its daily goals means continually responding to it, tolerating its regressions, being its servant rather than the other way around, interpreting its emotional conflicts, and providing the objects specific to its evolving interests. This mode have result a child who is gentle, sincere, never depressed, strong-willed, and unintimidated by authority. -
Period: to
The UN proclaimed this year as the International Year of the Child.
During this year, a real change of spirit took place, as Poland proposed to create a working group within the Commission on Human Rights to draw up an international charter.