The History of Child Abuse

THE HISTORY OF CHILD ABUSE
By Lloyd deMause

...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 length of time of swaddling was 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 tried 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 usually happens, complains that his wife's breast belongs to him not the baby, these mothers suggested that he should be allowed to hold the baby too!
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Definitely stomach-turning and hard to read, but worth it.