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Period: 100 to
Swaddled Children. 5th Century B.C. to 16th Century.
Almost all nations swaddled. In ancient Egypt, where it is claimed children were not swaddled because paintings showed them naked, swaddling may have been practiced and occasional figurines showed swaddling clothes. Swaddling was so taken for granted that the evidence for length of swaddling is quite spotty prior to early moderntimes. ight swaddling, often including strapping to carrying-boards, continued throughout the Middle Ages, but I have not yet been able to find out for how many months. -
Period: 101 to 399
Infanticidal Mode (Antiquity to Fourth Century AD.)
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. -
196
Children have always taken care of adults. 2nd Century.
Children have always taken care of adults in very concrete ways. Ever since Roman times, boys and girls waited on their parents at table, and in the Middle Ages all children except royalty acted as servants, either at home or for others, often running home from school at noon to wait on their parents. -
Period: 399 to Aug 29, 1299
Abandoning Mode (Fourth to Thirteenth Century A.D.)
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 -
Period: Aug 28, 1301 to
Ambivalent Mode (Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries)
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 shape. From Dominici to Locke there was no image more popular than that of the physical molding of children, who were seen as soft wax, plaster, or clay to be beaten into shape. Enormous ambivalence marks this mode. -
Children playing with terror - mask. (Seventeenth century)
There is some evidence that the use of masked figures to frighten children goes back to antiquity. Jacques Stella printed it. -
Period: to
Intrusive Mode (Eighteenth Century)
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, in order to control its insides, its anger, its needs, its masturbation, its very will. -
Period: to
Socializing Mode (Nineteenth to Mid-twentieth Centuries)
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. 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. -
Children's sleeping-belt
These devices seemed to be more commonly used in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries than in medieval times, but this could be due to the paucity of earlier sources. -
George Payne’s, The Child in Human Progress
Payne was the first to examine the wide extent of infanticide and brutality toward children in the past. -
Period: to
Helping Mode (Begins Mid-twentieth Century)
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. This mode demands a great amount of time, energy and discussion. It is and exhaustive process, mainly in the first six years where many aspect get stronger.
