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20,000 BCE
Prehistory
There was no gender equality when it comes to the children, boys were highly appreciated as they were considered useful and girls were more likely to be killed, so there was an evident imbalance of males over females. -
7000 BCE
Infanticide
Children were killed and their bones were used in walls, foundations of buildings and bridges to strengthen the structures. -
2300 BCE
Sales
Selling children was legal, even though in Athens Solon tried to restrict it and the church as well. -
1200 BCE
Sexual abuse
Growing up in Greece and Rome often included being used sexually by older men. Despite Moses’s injunction against corrupting children, the penalty for sodomy with children over 9 years of age was death by stoning, but copulation with younger children was not considered a sexual act, and was punishable only by a whipping, “as a matter of public discipline.” Children in the past were under the fullest control of their parents, who had to agree to give them over to their abusers. -
367 BCE
Wet nursing
Wet nursing was a common practice, it consisted on leaving the child with a nurse who would take care of him but this situation would lead to abandonment and in most cases, children would die of starvation or in rare accidents. Sometimes they would be switched for other children in order to return them to the parents who required the services. -
374
Killing children as homicide
The law began to consider killing an infant as a homicide. 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. -
401
Middle ages
Concept of childhood was unknown; a child was seen as a man on a smaller scale. Regarding arts, children were not portrayed until XII century. The infanticide was still present, specially among legitimate female babies, illegitimate babies were killed regardless the gender. -
450
Bogey man
Children were scared with the belief of a bogeyman, a creature who would cut their throats. God was the bogeyman used by people to scare their children, this was used to give moral lessons to children. -
1230
Shape shifter
People used to believe infants were capable of taking diverse shapes so they were bound with bandages so they would not be evil shaped. Children were tied up or swaddled. Some church fathers declared that if a baby merely cried it was committing a sin -
1301
mistreatment
Wet nurses used to remove milk from the babies' breast, this consisted on squeezing the nipples of the new-borns in order to get a milky fluid from them causing inflammation on this part of the body. -
Manipulation
It was believed that grandparents were reborn in babies, as well parents used to kiss and touch the genitals and nipples of babies, this was a way of passive manipulation. Two practices, however, were probably common to every country since antiquity. The first is the general scantiness of dress for “hardening” purposes; the second is the use of stool like devices, which were supposed to assist walking, but in fact were used to prevent crawling, which was considered animal-like. -
Use of corpses with children
Children were terrorized with masks and corpses and told at the same time moral stories for being well behaved. -
The Devil in children
“The new-born babe is full of the stains and pollution of sin, which it inherits from our first parents through our loins. Richard Allestree. Baptism used to include actual exorcism of the Devil, and the belief that the child who cried at his christening was letting out the Devil long survived the formal omission of exorcism in the Reformation. -
Abandonment
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. -
Projective and reversal relationships
Parent-children relationships were projective and reversal reactions, meaning the child was seen as the boss or “parenting figure” and as the desires and hostilities of the adult. It was the representation of the good and evil. Ex: A child was induced to burn himself as his grandfather told him his mother was in grieve because of the attitude of the child. -
Controlling child abuse
The beating of children was highly reduced but in order to control child abuse, parents began to punish their children for masturbation, and doctors began to spread the myth that it would cause insanity. Doctors and parents sometimes appeared before the child armed with knives and scissors, threatening to cut off the child’s genitals. -
"Toilet of projections"
The child was seen as the toilet of adult projections. Parents used to leave little children alone without feeling the need of preventing accidents because if something happened it was well deserved, as the parent would be punished by his faults. -
Helping mode
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.The helping mode involves an enormous amount of time, energy, and discussion on the part of both parents, especially in the first six years, for helping a young child reach its daily goals means continually responding to it, playing with it and tolerating its regressions. -
Modern days
"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."-Unicef. The past events in history helped developing a new concept of childhood because it was understood the suffering of children and how it affected them as vital elements of the future society.
