How was childhood before we were born?

Question

Was childhood very different from ours?Will it have meanings of changing our childhood?Is there anything that is similar between our childhood and the childhood before we were born?These questions may not be similar to the question I have asked. But they are good enough for me to ask.

Answer 1

Childhood in the past (in the Western world) was very different than it is today:

"In 1974, a psychologist and historian named de Mause wrote an influential book on the history of childhood. In it, he sketched five stages of evolution in the treatment of children, from the first stage--infanticide and child abuse in antiquity--to the fifth stage-- loving attention to the best interests of children today. This progressive history is no more accurate than Bodin's, and is equally political. It is no more accurate because de Mause completely ignored all of the Roman advice against corporal punishment of children. It is political insofar as it represents as retrograde the physical punishment of children.

Most of us probably have the sense that children are beaten less often today than in past generations, and that children are less obedient, but in fact those propositions are very hard to prove. We don't know how often children are physically punished or abused today, and we don't have the slightest idea how often children were beaten in antiquity. All we can do is trace the advice, and that advice over the centuries has fluctuated, rather than evolved from severity to indulgence. The earliest Latin prose author, Cato, said that a man should never lay hands on what was most precious to him--his wife and children. Then, 500 years later, the Christian theologian Augustine recommended that the father apply corporal punishment for his children's sins, on the grounds that it was far better for a child to suffer a beating than eternal damnation. Arguments for beating the sin out of children can be found into the early modern period. Today, the debate about the role of corporal punishment in the socialization of children continues, with family morality invoked by both sides."
"lthough I have spent a good part of my adult life searching in libraries for evidence of what it might have felt like to have been a child in past times, I actually never planned on being an historian of childhood. How I came to research childhood history, and the response by others since then to my findings, tells, I think, something about the emotional resistances encountered in beginning a new discipline.

While working on my doctorate in political theory at Columbia University in the late 1950s as well as taking courses at a psychoanalytic institute. I found that neither institution welcomed the combining of the two fields, so I decided to leave them both in favor of a life of independent research. At the same time, I discovered that the main journal of applied psychoanalysis, the American Imago, mainly published articles on works of literature. When I joined the staff of the journal and attempted to broaden their coverage, my efforts unfortunately proved fruitless.(1)

Facing the need for both a source of income and a place to publish, I borrowed some money and started my own publishing company, planning to build it up to a size which could both support my scholarly work and also publish it if I could find no other journal or book publisher-a prudent decision, it turned out, since I have yet to find a journal or book publisher which would publish my work.

Ten years later, when my publishing company was viable enough to run without my full attention, I was able to return to my scholarly research. Having fallen behind in reading during the previous decade, I bought a set of Books in Print, went through it and checked off about two thousand books I wanted to read and then purchased them all and spent the next year reading them. Since little had been published in psychohistory at the time, I read mostly psychoanalytic anthropology, devouring Roheim, La Barre, Devereux and others in an effort to understand how "culture and personality" were related and how psychoanalysis might be more fruitfully applied to a more scientific understanding of politics, religion and history.

However much I admired the scholars I read, my initial research only lead me to a number of dead ends. To begin with, I soon realized that all the attempts to relate "culture and personality" had foundered on the basic problem that statements relating the two concepts were in fact tautological; culture and personality couldn't cause each other because they were both abstractions from the same individual psyches.(2) But if the two concepts were actually equivalent, what, then, caused historical changes in culture/personality?(3) Freud's historical model, repeated by the psychoanalysts who followed him, was that history proceeded through more successful repression: "civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct," he said, adopting a Hobbesian stance; "progress can be described as a repression that progresses over the centuries."(4) Geza Roheim stated the pessimistic implications of the Freudian view of history most succinctly:

I regard the evolution of mankind as proceeding from bad to worse . . . the factor which since the dawn of humanity has been at work at developing civilization at the expense of happiness is the death impulse or destructive impulse as active through the superego.(5)

Following this Freudian model, I looked at the ethnologists for evidence that the less civilized people were, the happier they were, the less repressed, the less powerful their superegos. What I found was precisely the reverse: most of the people studied by anthropologists, it seemed to me, were as fearful and magical thinking as contemporary borderline per-sonalities, were so repressed that their feelings had to be continuously projected into objects around them, had extremely punitive superegos with constant guilt about their wishes and were quite unloving toward their children and spouses. Where was the happy, healthy aborigine Roheim said he had found?"

"At the beginning of Victorian times, children without rich parents would be working, often when still very young. What they wore and what they did would not seem like childhood to us - they just did jobs they were supposedly suited to; and they wore smaller versions of the clothes adults wore, or even adult clothes cut down and rolled up to make them fit.
Children of richer families would have education, and many other things, though their clothes were still mostly smaller versions of what the adults wore.
By 1901, all children were legally supposed to be attending school.
The Earl of Shaftesbury's reforms meant that it was illegal for young children to have to work such long hours as they had earlier.
Rich children would still have education at fee paying schools.
Clothes were beginning to be more different for children.
Many Victorians themselves realised that life was tough on working children. These pictures are typical of their sort. It's interesting that most pictures like this, published in magazines of the times, were meant to make you feel sorry for the children in the pictures... but not intended to be too realistic. They very often look far too clean!
The experiences of childhood in Victorian times depended on where children lived geographically, and the social and economic situation of their parents. It also depended on when they lived in Victoria's long reign. The website provides opportunities for the children to look for similarities and differences in the lives of those who lived at the same period of time as well as thinking about the differences and similarities between 'them' and 'us'. Children born at the beginning of Victoria's reign would also have had completely different expectations from those born after 1870, when schooling became compulsory.
There were some similarities about attitudes to children, which transcended class divisions, particularly, as the century advanced. Victorian standards of behaviour, views on how children should be controlled and a general lack of consumer goods, will astonish the modern child."

For childhood in the Middle Ages, please see link 5

For the rest of the article, On Writing Childhood History by Lloyd deMause, please go to link 6

Answer 2

I am sorry to tell you that most probably you have missed your childhood as us ancient perceived it.

We learnt from our mistakes (Occasionally)
We learnt how to share (If you did not share they were fighting off you or you were sent to Coventry).
We accepted life in a community( The only way to make friends)
We were happy with what we had (Nobody had anything therefore we could not be jealous for what the others had).

On the other hand the society (The adults) where even more classist than now. But they were quick to remind people that money can not buy "CLASS".

This are but a few of the differences

Loock though what that childhood has done to this Grumpy old man

Answer 3

Child hood back in the 40's 50's and 60's was totally different to childhood nowadays. Totally totally different. In fact there is very little similarity.. what with wars and war rationing... horse and cart etc. Capital punishment, no heating, several kids in one bed... family sizes was very different. Out to work when 12 or 14 years old. NOTHING was the same so its all different. Then national service etc. No contraception... its endless.

Just look in a history book mate.

Answer 4

Each generation's childhoods will be vastly different from others. I'm thirty-three and grew up in the late seventies and eighties. My childhood couldn't compare with children of today, both socially and economically. Especially now with the rise of 'chav' culture in England.

When I was a kid, I wouldn't have even considered giving adults any verbal abuse. Discipline was still around.

Now days, children's innocence doesn't last that long.

Answer 5

There was no childhood before we were born, there were children, and they had a good childhood, The difference now is that we get trained to be greedy too soon in life, and that ruins modern childhood.

Answer 6

each generation and each culture has it's own 'childhood'. my childhood was in London after WW ll when children were still children and not little adults. we were taught to respect our elders and a child was always second to any adult. we only had choices as to what we wore or what we ate when we were given them. l enjoyed my childhood. ... l could go where l wanted without fear. l had no responsibilities, l was unaware of man's inhumanity to man [not considered of suitable interest for children], so rightly or wrongly lived in a children's world. For all their material advantages, l would not want to be a child today.

Answer 7

well children today are born into the materialism and negative values of society,childhood would have been a more pure and good time before,based apon inner qualties and ideals!

Answer 8

of couse your not yet born so there's no childhood before..and look, who do you think could give you direct answers?

Answer 9

it was great

Answer 10

Idk