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Period: 500 BCE to 300
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. -
350 BCE
Aristotle
Aristotle departed from the prevailing idea of childhood in Greek antiquity, according to which children were treated as miniature adults and schooled in adult literature as if their minds were able to function like those of adults.
Children should be trained in the direction of virtuous conduct but cannot engage in such conduct until their intellects develop in such manner that they can determine which means to employ in the pursuit of moral and social ends. -
Period: 300 to Feb 1, 1200
Abandoning Mode
Once 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. The symbol of this mode might be Griselda, who so willingly abandoned her children to prove her love for -
400
Sexual Abuse
The child in antiquity lived his earliest years in an atmosphere of sexual abuse. Growing up in Greece and Rome often included being used sexually by older men. The exact form and frequency of the abuse -
Period: 500 to Feb 25, 1100
Middle Age
Accorfding to Ariés there was no conception of childhood in the middle ages. Medieval art until about the twelfth century did not know childhood or did not attempt to portray it. There was no differenciation between childhood and adulthood -
Feb 24, 600
Child Selling
The most extreme and oldest form of abandonment is the outright sale of children. Child sale was legal in Babylonian times, and may have been quite common among many nations in antiquity. The church tried for centuries to stamp out child sale. Theodore, Arch-bishop of Canterbury in the seventh century, ruled a man might not sell his son into slavery after the age of 7. -
Period: Feb 25, 1300 to
Ambivalent Mode
Because the child, when it was allowed to enter into the parents’ emotional life, was still a container for dangerous projections, it was their task to mold it into shap. Enormous ambivalence marks this mode. The beginning of the period is approximately the fourteenth century, which shows an increase in the number of child instruction manuals, the expansion of the cults of Mary and the infant Jesus, and the proliferation in art of the “close-mother image.” -
Period: Feb 25, 1400 to Feb 25, 1500
Italian Renaissance
Children had a new status as individuals during the Renaissance, and their moral development was of increased concern, not only to parents but also to the state, which needed them as good citizens. Enter Link text -
Feb 24, 1500
Children as Property
At this stage there is a marked debate among the aristocrats, theologians and philosophers on the essential nature of the people, against the social and economic reality, and the common perception of the citizens. This, in turn, gave the opinion that the child was a property or an economic resource. -
John Locke
Made a strong contribution to early childhood education, Thoughts Concerning Education" here he stated that students needed to receive better treatment as well as a more diverse syllabus."In another one of his works, "Essay Concerning Human Understanding," Locke stated that he believed educating children was not only a concern of the parents of the children, but also of the state, and that the status of the state will always depend upon the training of its youth. -
Pierre de Bérulle
‘is the most vile and abject state of human nature,
after that of death’ -
Period: to
Intrusive Mode
A tremendous reduction in projection and the virtual disappearance of reversal was the accomplishment of the great transition for parent-child relations which appeared in the eighteenth century. 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. -
Children´s Literature
From around the middle of the 18th century, many people in Britain began to think about childhood in new ways. As a result, much of the earliest children’s literature is concerned with saving children’s souls through instruction and by providing role models for their behaviour. -
Rousseau--children are innately innocent
rejects the doctrine of Original Sin, but maintains that children are innately innocent, only becoming corrupted through experience of the world. - See more at: https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/perceptions-of-childhood#sthash.KgibVWbY.dpuf -
Pestalozzi: Father of modern school
Pestalozzi’s believed that rather than dealing with words, children should learn by doing and they should be free to pursue their own interests and draw their own conclusions. This was in marked contrast to the typical pedagogy of the day, in which the children learned entirely from books, lecture and rote repetition and memorization, often without understanding what they were repeating. -
Period: to
Socializing Mode
As projections continued to diminish, 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. Also, in the nineteenth century, the father for the first time begins to take more than an occasional interest in the child, training it, and sometimes even relieving the mother of child-care chores. -
Friedrich Fröbel (Kindergarten
was one of the early pioneers of the reformation of childhood education. As an idealist, he supported the idea, that every child from birth had educational potentiality, and that an appropriate educational setting was imperative to help the child to continue to grow and develop his or her optimal potential. He coined the term Kindergarten in 1840. -
Period: to
Helping Mode
The helping mode involves the proposition that the child knows better than the parent what it needs at each stage of its life, and fully involves both parents in the child’s life as they work to empathize with and fulfill its expanding and particular needs. There is no attempt at all to discipline or form “habits.” -
History of Childhood
Philippe Ariés´ Centuries od Childhood, is one od the most influential histories od childhood ever written. Ariés´ study puts the controversial claim that childhood, as a concept, was not "discovered" until well after the middle ages. -
Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Defined childhood as a separate space from adulthood and recognized that what is appropriate for an adult may not be suitable for a child.
Childhood is the time for children to be in school and at play, to grow strong and confident with the love and encouragement of their family and an extended community of caring adults.
