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universal history of childhood

"Unfortunately, the story from childhood ever written, and it is doubtful that you can write some day, because of the paucity of historical data about the children."

James Bossard.

children's story yet to be written. Scholars generally agree that childhood is shaped like an Ariadne's thread that is hidden in the labyrinth of time, an invisible object that has avoided getting wet in the waters of historiography. There are several reasons that become especially dry that the historian's task dealing with children. Taking the contribution of the iconography, Phillipe Ariès noted the invisible character of the child in most societies of antiquity. French researcher noticed that, at least during the Middle Ages-artists did not know the children, or at least came to represent her, the child was on the painting not as a being endowed with its own characteristics, but as a sort of miniature adult. Child body deformation and the rejection of its specific features were shared by the aesthetic features of all periods prior to modernity. In the opinion of Aries, it is difficult to attribute this trend to a technical inability of artists, "rather it is conceivable," he said, that in such societies, "there was no room for the children."

The exception could be made by the Greek art of the Hellenistic period, the prodigal in the reproduction of figures of Eros perfectly childish proportions. However, this may be due more to the ideals characteristic of Hellenic art mimics that of the existence of a conception of the child to distinguish the adult world of children. This was revealed in the epics of the classical period in which children are portrayed as epic warriors and do show the same courage and courage that the heroes adults, as well as the invisibility that had children in the works of Hellenistic thought that cemented the foundations of Western culture. Seen as a phase of life that once (which, as is known, was then rare) was relegated to oblivion, the children stayed together in the art of antiquity to a world of representations that the unknown and even rejected . In all cases, ignoring the specificity of children's world.

Another obstacle that comes to pass, who follows in the footsteps of children in historiography, is that the very few references to a child's life are part of the biography of characters famous, usually nobles or kings, whose stories paint a picture idealized romance that lacks historical documentary value and that more could belong to the realm of the miraculous and the fantastic, like the personal diary of Héroard, Louis XIII's physician-in early seventeenth century said that just getting out of his mother, the dolphin took with her umbilical cord so hard that she could not take it away. In addition, while history has favored public events, children remained in the shadow of private account. Add to that the rugged character of the historic site of the child in the civilizations of East and West. Infanticide to sacrifice, the abandonment to the filicide, the emasculation of sodomy, physical torture to the infusion of panic as a form of domination, the child's social place draws a portrait gallery of time in which humiliation and degradation show childhood history could well be the universal history of infamy.

In a vein opposite of Aries, the American Thinker Lloyd deMause, promoter of approach psychohistorical ", argued that anxiety stems from the" psychic distance "between children and adults have played a key role in the formation of parent-child relationships, and proposed to explain, from their evolution, mutation of the historical faces has held the children. To deMause, the child's place in society is analogous to that of a psychoanalyst who receives projection all the anguish, anxiety, love and hate adults as well as a perennial demand to meet what can not be satisfied. "The psychoanalyst" deMauss writes, "is accustomed to use it as a" container "massive projections of the patient. This being used as vehicles for the projections, was what used to happen to children in the past "2. Thus, the child has been seen in different full time as an angel or a devil innocent bearer of all evil, as the product of mere necessity of the body or a deadly intruder in the womb, like a mirror reflecting a premature adult or to an incomplete being required molding, like a rock in a raw state requested the hand of the sculptor and instruments to collect a human aspect. With the best of luck, the child has been considered an adult in power, but perhaps full of future achievement gap.

touched the fate of Jean Jacques Rousseau forward a change in the status quo with the publication of his work or education Emilio in 1762. Enemy widespread education of the molds, Rousseau promoted respect for the child's individuality and attention to its uniqueness, granted, especially a basic essential differences between adult and child. These lines, for example, foreshadowed to some extent the theory of the psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi, who spoke in the first half of the twentieth century the confusion of Babel is born inevitable confrontation between the adult and child language: "If children listen to reason not need to educators, "said Rousseau," but speak from a very young age a language they do not understand, those tend to be content with words, to censor everything I say. "It was a truly revolutionary book (inspired, in fact, the ideals of the French Revolution), ahead of its time in almost two centuries and published two days and deserved the abduction of the police. Rousseau seemed to say that education is for children, and the most innovative Emilio lay in conceiving children and teachers of adults. By understanding the child as an individual whose fate is satisfied in this (and not unlikely in the future), the educational method of Rousseau sought the keys to children's reasoning to be bound. But the momentum of its proposals would not echoes well into the twentieth century. Since that time, the influence of Rousseau's thought begins to be felt in the development of pedagogy and child care, medicine and child psychology. If the object of scorn and abuse, the child went on to become the object of study and attention.

The Second Book of his work, Rousseau recalled that the etymological root of the word "childhood", comes from not having a voice, which is equivalent to not be heard, to have no rights. Today, in the era of "child rights", it is worth stopping once more in the sense of this etymology. The Latin word infans (Child) consists of the prefix "in", which means denial, and the participle of the verb "for", "Faris", meaning "speak." Infans then means "one who does not speak." And he who does not speak, we might add, necessarily spoken. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan once said "each individual bears the mark of how it has been spoken and that will depend on what will crystallize for that subject as unconscious." Psychoanalysis would, in effect, the discipline in the early twentieth century modern culture introduced in the first conception of the child as "subject" ie, a being inhabited by the language and the unconscious desire, as anybody. If the historiography tells us that there is a blurring, a forgetting of childhood, psychoanalysis teaches that before we talk spoken and childhood itself is the first that we tend to forget and repress.

After Freud and Rousseau, of progress and developments in pediatrics and pedagogy, the question arises: How much of the old concepts of childhood lives on quietly in the everyday use of language ? The use of English Dictionary, Maria Moliner, reports that the word "child" applies sympathetic to a person "naive" or "unreasonable" also, in certain jobs could involve "open contempt." The qualifiers "childish", "childish" or the noun "childish", often pointing disdain that what is given little substantiality. The dictionary also find that the word "child" is defined as "non-adult person." In contemporary societies, then what has really failed to see the child as the entelechy of an adult? Exceeded the first half of the twentieth century, Roland Barthes was referring to children's toys: "Toys usual are essentially a microcosm adult, all objects are reduced human reproduction, as if the child in the eyes of the public, if only a smaller man, a homunculus to which objects should provide their size. " In the era of video games and the increasing virtualization of the world-especially the world of children ", the words remain true today semiologist. We still believe that children's play is too serious to be left in the hands of children.

Text published in "Acta Paediatric. Volume 31, Number 6. November-December 2010.