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The basic patterns of evolution of childhood have begun to be
traced by myself and other psychohistorians. I would like to summarize the
six childrearing modes that I have suggested are common to all groups that
have traversed the full path of childhood and cultural evolution so far.
These modes are, in fact, quite independent of technological development.
But the overall evolutionary direction of parent-child relations is, I
think, evident in the historical record, regardless of what labels one
chooses to put on its stages. The earliest childrearing mode I have called
infanticidal to highlight the constant presence
of infanticidal wishes in the parent. Real infanticide is, of course,
ubiquitous in most preliterate cultures, ranging about a third or more of
all children born, and evidence remains of widespread infanticide among
all historical records. By historical times, census figures from antiquity
show boy/girl ratios as high as 400 boys to 100 girls--a believable figure
since, as Poseidippos said, "even a rich man always exposes a daughter." I
have estimated that perhaps half of all children born in antiquity were
killed by their caretakers, declining to about a third in medieval times
and dropping to under one percent only by the eighteenth century. Since
these skewed sex ratios do not vary by economic class--the rich do away
with their children at about the same rates as the poor--the evidence
suggests that the parents were coping with the emotional anxieties of
childrearing more than economic conditions.
That incest is also
traditional in the infanticidal mode is harder to prove conclusively,
since what really happened in the family bed does not often leave
historical traces. Yet all the records we have suggest that this was so.
Man began, after all, as an incestuous primate--along with other primates,
who remain incestuous today. In most simple societies today in such areas
as New Guinea, boys and girls are used sexually by both their mothers and
by the men, who gang rape girls and often are also pederasts who use the
boys sexually, have boy-wives, or force all the boys to fellate them daily
from age seven to fourteen "in order to ingest semen to counteract
maternal pollution."
By the time historical records begin, the
widespread sexual use of children is well documented. The Greek and Roman
child lived his or her earliest years in an atmosphere of sexual abuse.
Girls were commonly raped, as reflected in the many comedies that have
scenes that were considered funny of little girls being raped. Both Greek
and Roman doctors report that female children rarely have hymens--just
like the Indian and Chinese girls I described above. In order to find out
if your young wife was really a virgin (girls usually married before
puberty to older men), one had to use mystical tests for virginity, since
intact hymens were so rare.
Boys, too, were regularly handed over
by their parents to neighboring men to be raped. Plutarch has a long essay
on what was the best kind of person a father should give his son to for
buggering. The common notion that this occurred only at "adolescence" is
quite mistaken. It began around age seven, continued for several years and
ended by puberty, when the boy's facial and pubic hairs began to appear.
Child brothels, rent-a-boy services and sex slavery flourished in every
city in antiquity. Children were so subject to sexual use by the men
around them that schools were by law prohibited from staying open past
sundown, so their pedagogues--slaves who were assigned to protect them
against random sexual attack--could try to see that their teachers didn't
assault them. Petronius especially loved depicting adults feeling the
"immature little tool" of boys, and Tiberius was said by Seutonius to have
"taught children of the most tender years, whom he called his little
fishes, to play between his legs while he was in his bath. Those which had
not yet been weaned, but were strong and hearty, he set at fellatio..."
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Since boys in antiquity shared the experience of being buggered,
Christianity constructed its central myth of the Father sending his son
down to be penetrated by a soldier's lance in order to restage the common
experience of fathers giving their boys to a neighbor to be sexually
penetrated. Those who accepted the myth, accepted the penetration, and
were promised the Father's love and Mary's tears in return. Although
Christianity attempted to reduce the outright killing of newborns, thus
moving beyond the infanticidal mode, it continued the abandonment of children--whether by child sale or by
sending to wet nurse or monastery or nunnery or foster family or to other
homes as servants--which is why I labeled this second stage the abandoning
mode. The refusal of parents to raise their own legitimate children was so
powerful that through the nineteenth century over half of the children
born in Florence, for instance, were dumped into foundling homes at birth,
to be picked up by their families--if they lived that long (the majority
died)--when they were around five years old, thus avoiding having homes
where crying babies disturbed the peace. The same abandonment was common
in France, where, in 1900, over 90 percent of the babies born in Paris
were carted out to the countryside to wetnurses at birth. As one author
put it, "mother love" was a late historical achievement, not an
instinctual trait.
Despite the advance that just abandoning rather
than outright killing your children represents, most of the other
childrearing practices of antiquity continued in the middle ages, with the
buggering of boys--even in monasteries--continuing to be widespread and
even accepted by society. By the time boys were in their teens, they were
so addicted to violent sex that they sometimes formed adolescent raping
gangs that grabbed and raped any girls or young women they could find
unprotected, to such an extent that the majority of women in some cities
would have been raped by these gangs at some time in their lives.
The erotic beating of children continued in Christian times,
because of the anxieties of living with a child who is so full of your
projections. Children were experienced as always about to turn into
"changelings," those who, as St. Augustine puts it, "suffer from a
demon"--which usually meant just that they cry too much, since the Malleus
Maleficarum says that one can recognize changelings because they "always
howl most piteously," and since Luther says they "are more obnoxious than
ten children with their crapping, eating, and screaming."
That
children with devils in them had to be beaten goes without saying. A
panoply of beating instruments existed for that purpose, from cat-o'-nine
tails and whips to shovels, canes, iron rods, bundles of sticks, the
discipline (a whip made of small chains), the goad (shaped like a
cobbler's knife, used to prick the child on the head or hands) and special
school instruments like the flapper, which had a pear-shaped end and a
round hole to raise blisters. The beatings described in the sources were
almost always severe, involved bruising and bloodying of the body, began
in infancy, were usually erotically tinged by being inflicted on bare
parts of the body near the genitals and were a regular part of the child's
daily life. Century after century of battered children grew up to batter
their own children in turn. Public protest was rare. Even humanists and
teachers who had a reputation for gentleness approved of the severe
beating of children. Those who attempted reform did so only to prevent
death. As a thirteenth-century law said, "If one beats a child until it
bleeds, then it will remember, but if one beats it to death, the law
applies." As Batholomew Batty put it, parents must "keep the golden mean,"
which is to say they should not "strike and buffet their children about
the face and head, and to lace upon them like malt sacks with cudgels,
staves, fork or fire shovel," for then they might die of the blows. The
correct way, he said, was to "Hit him upon the sides...with the rod, he
shall not die thereof."
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By the thirteenth century in the West, abandonment via oblation, or
the giving of young children to monasteries for sexual and other uses, was
ended, the first disapproval of pedophilia appeared, the first
childrearing tracts were published and some advanced parents began to
practice what I have termed the ambivalent mode of childrearing, where the
child was not born completely evil, but was seen as being still full of
enough dangerous projections so that the parent, whose task it was to mold
it, must beat it into shape like clay. Church moralists for the first time
began to warn against sexual molestation of children by parents, nurses
and neighbors (the mothers had previously been instructed to masturbate
their boys "so their yards will grow long"). The length of time of
swaddling was eventually reduced from a year or more to only a few months.
Pediatrics and educational philosophy were born. Parents of means began
suggesting that perhaps rather than sending their infants out to be
wetnursed in some peasant village--and thereby condemning over half of
them to early death--the mother might herself nurse her infant. The baby,
said some mothers who began to try nursing their own babies, even responds
to this care by giving love back to the nursing mother, stroking her
breast and face and cooing. And if the father, as often happened,
complained that his wife's breast belonged to him not the baby, these bold
new mothers suggested that the father should be allowed to hold the baby
too.
These childhood reforms immediately preceded and thereby
produced the humanistic, religious and political revolutions we associate
with early modern times. For the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in
Western Europe represent the great watershed of psychogenic change,
wherein vastly improved childrearing allowed at least some of the schizoid
and borderline personalities of antiquity and medieval times--who
regularly heard voices and hallucinated visions--to move on to the more
integrated, less splitting modern neurotic personality more familiar to
recent times, thus achieving Melanie Klein's "depressive position." The
sixteenth-century watershed in childrearing allowed people to reduce
splitting and feel real depression for the first time, as can be seen in
the popularity of Renaissance melancholy (Hamlet's admirable depressive
guilt), the ability of Protestants to end the good mother/bad mother
splitting of Mary/Eve, and the ability to internalize the projective
panoply of split Catholic saints/devils into Protestant depressive guilt.
With this vast improvement in childrearing--in some families at least--the
modern world could begin, with the development of science, technology and
democratization now being possible in parts of the West.
By the
seventeenth century, the intrusive mode of
childrearing began, particularly in England, America and France, whereby
the child was seen as less full of dangerous projections, so it could
actually be unswaddled soon after birth, not given regular enemas (which
had until then been given daily from birth to remove the bad contents felt
to be inside the infant), toilet trained early rather than late, hit but
not regularly whipped, and punished for masturbation rather than being
masturbated by adults. It eventually became unacceptable for men to go
about with a mistress on one arm and a catamite on the other, though
underground seduction of minors continued. Intrusive parenting, in
essence, began to substitute psychological pressure for physical abuse, so
that rather than whipping the child to prevent it from sin, it was, for
instance, shut up in the dark closets for hours or left without food,
sometimes for days. One mother shut her three-year-old boy up in a drawer.
Another had a house she described as "a sort of little Bastille, in every
closet of which was to be found a culprit--some were sobbing and repeating
verbs, others eating their bread and water..." Another five-year-old
French boy, in looking at a new apartment with his mother, told her, "Oh
no, mama...it's impossible; there's no dark closet! Where could you put me
when I'm naughty."
Although erotic whipping of children decreased
gradually, the intrusive mode required nevertheless a steady pressure on
the child to "break its will" and discipline it properly. This breaking of
the will began early. John Wesley's mother said of her babies, "When
turned a year old (and some before), they were taught to fear the rod, and
to cry softly." One would never know, she claimed, that children were
present in her house. Rousseau confirmed that in France babies in their
earliest days were often beaten to keep them quiet. Another mother wrote
of her first battle with her four-month-old infant, "I whipped him till he
was actually black and blue, and until I could not whip him any more, and
he never gave up one single inch." One can sense in this description of
baby battering the struggle with the mother's own powerful parent, with
the baby seen as so obstinate that it "won the battle" even after being
beaten. In fact, this "double image" of the child as both a powerful adult
and a wicked child accounts for the merging of beater and beaten in our
myriad historical accounts of child abuse. Here, for instance, is an early
American father describing the beating of his four-year-old boy for not
being able to read something. The child is first tied up naked in the
cellar. Then, the father writes:
"With him in this condition,
and myself, the wife of my bosom, and the lady of my family, all of us in
distress, and with hearts sinking within us, I commenced using the
rod...During this most unpleasant, self denying and disagreeable work,
I...felt all the force of divine authority and express command that I ever
felt in any case in all my life...But under the all controlling influence
of such a degree of angry passion and obstinacy, as my son had manifested,
no wonder he thought he "should beat me out," feeble and tremulous as I
was; and knowing as he did that it made me almost sick to whip him. At
that he could neither pity me nor himself."
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This picture of the merging of parent and child, with the father
complaining that he is the one "beaten out" and in need of pity, is common
for the intrusive mode. Similar confusion between parent and child can be
seen in the severe punishments for masturbation championed by the
child-training literature since Tissot. Prior to this, children were
masturbated by adults and even licked on their bodies as though they were
substitute breasts. For instance, Little Louis XIII, in 1603, was
described by his pediatrician as having his penis and breasts kissed by
everyone in the court, and his parents would regularly make him part of
sexual intercourse in the royal bed. But childrearing reformers beginning
in the eighteenth century began to try to bring this open sexual abuse
under control, only it was the child who was now punished for touching his or her genitals, under threat
of circumcision, clitoridectomy, infibulation and various cages and other
genital restraint devices. These terrorizing warnings and surgical
interventions only began to die out at the end of the nineteenth century,
after two hundred years of brutal and totally unnecessary assault on
children's bodies and psyches for touching themselves. Despite the
reformers' efforts, progress was so uneven that one British journalist
could write in 1924 that "cases of incest are terribly common in all
classes. [Usually] the criminal...goes unpunished...Two men coming out
from [an incest] trial were overheard saying to a woman who deplored there
had been no conviction, "What nonsense! Men should not be punished for a
thing like that. It doesn't harm the child.'"
It goes without
saying that the effects on the child of these physical and psychological
punishments were immense. Adults remembered that as children they had had
recurring nightmares and even outright hallucinations as they lay awake at
night, terrorized by imaginary ghosts, demons, "a witch on the pillow," "a
large black dog under the bed," or "a crooked finger crawling across the
room." History is filled with reports of children's convulsive fits,
dancing manias, loss of hearing and speech, loss of memory, hallucinations
of devils and confessions of intercourse with devils. Nor did the parents
help their children's mental anguish by giving them comfort. It was
thought that the way for children to get over their fears was to make them
face fear even more concretely, so adults used to take children on visits
to the gibbet to inspect rotting corpses hanging there, while being told
moral stories. Classes used to be taken out of school to witness hangings,
and parents would also sometimes take their children to hangings and then
beat them when they returned home to make them remember what they had
seen. Even humanists, like Mafio Vegio, who protested the severe beating
of children, would admit that "to let them witness a public execution is
sometimes not at all a bad thing."
The effect on the children of
this corpse-viewing was of course massive. One little girl, after her
mother showed her the fresh corpse of her nine-year-old friend as an
example, went around saying, "They will put daughter in the deep hole, and
what will mother do?" Another woke at night screaming after seeing
hangings, and "practiced hanging his own cat." Religion was a further
source of terrorizing. God was said to "hold you over the pit of hell,
much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire" and
children's books depicted Hell as follows: "The little child is in this
red-hot oven. Hear how it screams to come out...It stamps its little feet
on the floor..." Various terrorizing figures were used to control the
child. If you were bad, the werewolf would gulp you down, Blue Beard would
chop you up, Boney (Bonaparte) would eat your flesh, the black man or the
chimney sweep would steal you away at night. This need to personify
punitive figures was in fact so powerful that adults actually dressed up
dummies to use in frightening children. As one English writer, in 1748,
explained the practice:
The nurse takes a fancy to quiet the
peevish child, and with this intent, dresses up an uncouth figure, makes
it come in, and roar and scream at the child in ugly disagreeable notes,
which grate upon the tender organs of the ear, and at the same time, by
its gesture and near approach, makes as if it would swallow the infant up.
Another writer, in 1882, described how the nurse of a friend's
child wanted to leave for the evening while the parents were out, and so
told the little girl that a
horrible Black Man...was hidden in the
room to catch her the moment she left her bed...[Then] she made a huge
figure of a black man with frightful staring eyes and an enormous mouth,
and placed it at the foot of the bed where the little innocent child was
fast asleep. As soon as the evening was over...[she] went back to her
charge. Opening the door quietly, she beheld the little girl sitting up in
her bed, staring in an agony of terror at the fearful monster before her,
both hands convulsively grasping her fair hair. She was stone dead!
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By the nineteenth century's socializing mode, some parents no
longer needed to terrorize, beat and sexually seduce their children, and
more gentle psychological means began to be used to "socialize" the child. The socializing mode is still
the main model of upbringing in Western nations, featuring the mother as
trainer and the father as provider and protector, and the child is seen as
slowly being made to conform to the parents' model of goodness. Many of
the abusive practices are reduced in the home but remain elsewhere in
society. While Elizabeth I was sexually seduced as a girl by her
caretakers and Louis XV had Madame du Barry procure little girls for the
King to rape in his royal bedroom, by the nineteenth century parents would
less often commit incest themselves but still sent their children to
schools where they were erotically whipped on the bare buttocks and
usually buggered by the older boys and masters. As John Addington Symonds
reported his experience as a boy at public school:
"Every boy
of good looks had a female name, and was recognized either as a public
prostitute or as some bigger fellow's 'bitch.' Bitch was the word in
common usage to indicate a boy who yielded his person to a lover. The talk
in the dormitories and the studies was incredibly obscene. Here and there
one could not avoid seeing acts of onanism, mutual masturbation, or the
sports of naked boys in bed together. "
Reformers during the
nineteenth century tried to bring the rest of society into the socializing
mode by legislation designed to prevent outright battering and sexual
abuse of children, which of course still went on in the majority of
families around them. But those who tried to oppose buggering and beating
boys in schools were opposed by parents who said "It didn't hurt me."
Those who tried to pass child labor legislation to reduce horrendous
working conditions and hours were labeled Communists. And those who
thought one could bring up children kindly were considered impractical
visionaries.
Even so, the decrease in parental seduction and
beating during the intrusive mode produced an explosion of social
innovation, allowing nations to produce the democratic and industrial
revolutions of the modern period. As Hanns Sachs pointed out long ago in
his paper "The Delay of the Machine Age," when people in antiquity first
invented the steam engine, they dared to use it only for children's toys.
It was only after fifteen centuries of childrearing evolution that steam
could finally begin to be used by less fearful and more individuated
adults to provide power for the benefit of mankind. As hellfire and
physical discipline were replaced by other childrearing methods, it was
the socializing psychoclass that built the modern world, with its
democratic, innovative and class-dominated society.
What kind of
society might be envisioned by children brought up under the latest
childrearing mode--what I have termed the helping
mode --whereby a minority of parents are now trying to help their
children reach their own goals at each stage of life, rather than
socializing them into adult goals--is yet to be seen. I suspect it will be
far less class-centered and more emphatic of others than is the
socializing modern world with which we are familiar. That helping mode
children grow up to be incapable of creating wars is also becoming evident
from watching the anti-war activities of my children and those of their
friends who have been brought up by other helping mode parents. For war is
only understandable as a sacrificial ritual in which young men are sent by
their parents to be hurt and killed as representatives of the
independence-seeking parts of themselves. Psychohistorians have regularly
found that images on the magazine covers and in political cartoons in the
months prior to wars reveal fears of the nation becoming "too soft" and
vulnerable, with images of dangerous women threatening to engulf and hurt
people. These regressed group-fantasies eventually produce so much anxiety
that a sacrifice of innocent victims is deemed necessary, and another
nation who also needs a sacrifice is located. So regular are these
group-fantasies in the media that I was able to forecast, for instance,
the recent Persian Gulf War months before Iraq invaded Kuwait by locating
in the American media an upsurge in imagery of devouring mommies and
guilty children needing punishment.
That periodic sacrifices are,
in fact, lawful is suggested by the regularity with which they occur,
nearly every state producing a major war on the average of about every 25
years throughout the past two millennia. In between wars, periodic
economic sacrifices serve to relieve our guilt for too much prosperity and
to cleanse us of our dangerous economic and social progress. Depth
psychology has shown that in individuals progress toward individuation and
success often produces regression, including both fears of leaving mommy
and wishes for maternal re-engulfment, along with fears of losing one's
self. In nations, the same thing occurs after periods of rapid change and
prosperity, and is defended against by the sacrificial ritual called war.
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That all social violence--whether by war, revolution or economic
exploitation--is ultimately a consequence of child abuse should not
surprise us. The propensity to re-inflict childhood traumas upon others in
socially-approved violence is actually far more able to explain and
predict the actual outbreak of wars than the usual economic motivations,
and we are likely to continue to undergo our periodic sacrificial rituals
of war if the infliction of childhood trauma continues. Clear evidence has
been published in The Journal of Psychohistory that the more traumatic
one's childhood, the more one is likely to be in favor of military
solutions to social problems. Technologically, the human race is now quite
able to satisfy its needs--if we can live together without violence. But
unless we now employ our social resources toward consciously assisting the
evolution of childrearing, we will be doomed to the periodic destruction
of our resources, both material and human. To Selma Freiberg's dicta that
"Trauma demands repetition" I would only add "repetition in social
behavior." We cannot be content to only continue to do endless repair work
on damaged adults, with more jails and police and therapists and political
movements. Our task now must be to create an entirely new profession of
"child helpers" who can reach out to every new child born on earth and
help its parents give it love and independence.
Such a parent
outreach movement is already under way in a few cities, and special issues
of The Journal of Psychohistory have been published to document its
operation. A special issue on "Changing Childhood" is the most recent to
be published, showing the success of parent outreach
projects in several states. The success of parenting centers such as the
one pioneered in Boulder, Colorado, for instance, has been astonishing.
Through parenting classes and home visiting by paraprofessionals, they
have measurably reduced child abuse, as shown by careful follow-up studies
and by reduced police reports and hospital entrance rates. All this has
been accomplished with very small monetary outlays,
since these parent outreach centers operate mainly with volunteer labor,
while it has the potential to save trillions of dollars annually in the
costs of social violence, police enforcement, jails and other consequences
of the widespread child abuse of today.
Such a parent support
movement would resemble the universal education movement of over a century
ago. People then objected to providing universal education, by saying,
"Well, yes, perhaps free education is useful for all children--but that
would require hiring millions of teachers. How can we afford it?" We, too,
admit that we will eventually need millions of parent helpers to teach
parents how to bring up children and produce non-violent adults. But the
teaching of parenting is just the unfinished half--the most important
half--of the free education movement of the past, with its goal the
empowerment of children to realize their innate capacities for love and
work.
Changing childhood is a communal task. And it works. In
1979, Sweden passed a law saying that hitting children
was as unlawful as hitting adults! Imagine the audacity! Children were
people, just like adults! Parents who hit their children weren't put into
jail--that would just deprive the children of their caretakers. But the
parents were taught how to bring up children without hitting them. And at
the same time, high school students were taught how to bring up children
without violence. By now, 20 years later, these high school students have
their own children, and...surprise! They don't hit them! To those who
object to the cost of communities helping all parents, we can only reply:
Can we afford not to teach parenting? What more important task can we
devote our resources to? Do we really want to have massive armies and
jails and emotionally crippled adults forever? Must each generation
continue to torture and neglect its children so they repeat the violence
and economic exploitation of previous generations? Why not achieve
meaningful political and social revolution by first achieving a parenting
revolution? If war, social violence, class domination and economic
destruction of wealth are really revenge rituals for childhood trauma, how
else can we remove the source of these rituals? How else end child abuse
and neglect? How else increase the real wealth of nations, our next
generation? How else achieve a world of love and laughter of which we are
truly capable?
It appears we have our work cut out for us.
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