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Period: 1 BCE to
Infanticidal
Infanticide during antiquity has usually been played down despite literally hundreds of clear references by ancient writers that it was an accepted, everyday occurrence. Children were thrown into rivers, flung into dung-heaps and cess trenches, “potted” in jars to starve to death, and exposed on every hill and roadside -
300
Child sacrifice (7.000 B.C)
It was practiced by the Irish Celts, the Gauls, the Scandinavians, the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Moabites, the Ammonites, and, in certain periods, the Israelites.Thousands of bones of sacrificed children have been dug up by archeologists, often with inscriptions identifying the victims as first-born sons of noble families, reaching in time all the way back to the Jericho of 7,000 B.C. -
300
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. -
Period: 300 to
Abandoning
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. -
374
The law began to consider killing an infant murder
Yet even the opposition to infanticide by the Church Fathers often seemed to be based more on their concern for the parent’s soul than with the child’s life. -
Jan 1, 800
Child sale was legal
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: Jan 1, 1200 to
Ambivalent
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. 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.” -
child exploitation
By the late 18th century, however, children were specially employed at the factories and mines and as chimney sweeps, often working long hours in dangerous jobs for low pay. In England and Scotland in 1788, two-thirds of the workers in 143 water-powered cotton mills were described as children. In 19th-century Great Britain, one-third of poor families were without a breadwinner, as a result of death or abandonment, obliging many children to work from a young age. -
Early modern periods
During the 1600s, a shift in philosophical and social attitudes toward children and the notion of 'childhood' began in Europe. Adults increasingly saw children as separate beings, innocent and in need of protection and training by the adults around them. -
Period: to
Intrusive
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
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. -
Education
According to Pre-K Now, the concept of early childhood education started with a European mother in the early 1800’s that educated children outside of their homes. The idea came to America during the Industrial Revolution with “infant schools” set up in churches, factories, and private homes to care for the young while parents were working. -
Infant Life Protection Act
A succession of statutes since the Infant Life Protection Act 1872, culminating in the Children and Young Persons Act 1969, have striven to protect children from neglect and ill-treatment by parents and guardians and to provide, where it was thought necessary, alternative forms of care. However at no time was it thought necessary to give children independent voices in such proceedings, or access to legal representation. Only in the past ten years has this become an issue -
Custody of children
Before 1839 children were automatically in the custody of a living father. The Custody of infants Act (1839) gave the Court of
Chancery the right to grant to the mother custody of a child under seven. The ‘fitness’ of the father or mother was the Court’s chief concern in such cases. This continued to be so until 1873 when the maternal right to custody was extended to the age of 16. Custody remained thereafter a question to be decided among mother, father and the court. -
The age of criminal responsibility
In the second half of the nineteenth century and especially from the 1880s there were other moves to remove children from the full rigours of adult life. The age of criminal responsibility remained where it had been, at seven. From time to time were, hanged, imprisoned and transported equally with adults, although lack of ‘full knowledge’ could still successfully be pleaded on behalf of children aged seven to 14. -
Protection
Children from the 1880s were protected from the cruelty and neglect of adults. The beliefs of doctors and psychiatrists have infl uenced the treatment of children by the law, by parents and by social services, as the beliefs of clerics influenced such treatment in the seventeenth century. -
Period: to
Helping
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.” Children are neither struck nor scolded, and are apologized to if yelled at under stress.
