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301
Infanticidal Mode (Antiquity to Fourth Century AD.)
Parents routinely resolved their anxieties about taking care of children by killing them. 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, “a prey for birds, food for wild beasts to rend”. Any child that was not perfect in shape and size, or cried too little or too much was killed. Otherwise, the first-born was usually allowed to live, especially if it was a boy. -
400
Abandoning Mode (Fourth to Thirteenth Century A.D.)
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 most extreme and oldest form of abandonment is the outright sale of children. Another abandonment practice was the use of children as political hostages and security for debts. -
1301
Ambivalent Mode (Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries)
The child was allowed to enter into the parents’ emotional life, but they have to mold it into shape because it still being a container for dangerous projections. They considered children as soft wax, plaster, or clay to be beaten into shape. -
Intrusive Mode (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. The child was so much less threatening that true empathy was possible, and pediatrics was born, which along with the general improvement in level of care by parents reduced infant mortality. -
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. 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. -
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. 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.
