-
Parents routinely resolved their anxieties about taking care of children by killing them, it affected the surviving children profoundly.
-
Neither law nor public opinion found infanticide wrong in either Greece or Rome
-
-
Swaddling was the central fact of the infant’s earliest years, restraints were thought necessary because the child was so full of dangerous adult projections that if it were left free it would scratch its eyes out, tear its ears off, break its legs, distort its bones, be terrified by the sight of its own limbs, and even crawl about on all fours like an animal
-
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
-
-
-
-
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
-
Before that period it was common the sexual use of children, this dates back to Ancient rome and Greece where it was an usual practice
-
-
-
Shutting children up in the dark became quite popular in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries -
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.
-
By the nineteenth century, parents generally began toilet training in earnest in the earliest months of life, and their demands for cleanliness became so severe by the end of the century that the ideal child was described as one “who cannot bear to have any dirt on his body or dress or in his surrounding for even the briefest time.”
-
Although there were many exceptions to the general pattern, up to about the eighteenth century, the average child of wealthy parents spent his earliest years in the home of a wet-nurse, returned home to the care of other servants, and was sent out to service, apprenticeship, or school by age seven, so that the amount of time parents of means actually spent raising their children was minimal
-
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.
-
Despite efforts that date back to 1741 to stop this
-
Written by a professional historian: George Payne’s, was the first to examine the wide extent of infanticide and brutality toward children in
the past, particularly in antiquity. -
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. Children are neither struck nor scolded, and are even apologized to if yelled at under stress.
-
Taylor’s book, rich in documentation, is a sophisticated psychoanalytic reading of childhood and personality in late eighteenth-century England
-
Philippe Aries’s ries’s central thesis is: while the traditional child was happy because he was free to mix with many classes and ages, a special condition known as childhood was “invented” in the early modern period, resulting in a tyrannical concept of the family which destroyed friendship and sociability and deprived children of freedom, inflicting upon them for the first time the birch and the prison cell.
-
Despert’s psychiatric comparison of child mistreatment in the past and present surveys the range of emotional attitudes toward children since antiquity, expressing her growing horror as she uncovers a story of unremitting “heartlessness and cruelty.”
-
David Hunt’s centers mostly on the unique seventeenth-century document, Heroard’s diary of the childhood of Louis XIII, but does so with great psychological sensitivity and awareness of the psychohistorical implications of his findings
