July 13, 2008
Childen See, Children Do

The following may also disturb you, but it explains a lot. It's from The Emotional Life of Nations, by Lloyd deMause - Chapter 8: Evolution of Childrearing.

Since children of the upper classes were sent out to wetnurse and then to school, many adults could agree with Talleyrand when he stated that he "had never slept under the same roof with his father and mother."49 Fathers were so distant that most could agree with Vandermonde, who said, "One blushes to think of loving one's children." When their children died, most fathers, like William Byrd, revealed no signs of grief, writing in their diaries the night of the death only that they had "good thoughts and good humor." Should a father try to play with his child, they were unable to summon the empathy needed to understand its capacities, as seen in the following typical interaction:
A gentleman was playing with his child of a year old, who began to cry. He ordered silence; the child did not obey; the father then began to whip it, but this terrified the child and increased its cries...The father thought the child would be ruined unless it was made to yield, and renewed his chastisement with increased severity.... On undressing it, a pin was discovered sticking into its back.
By the nineteenth century, some fathers began to relate to their children with some empathy, yet even they were seen as rare, as when Grigorii Belynskii was described as "the only father in the city who understood that in raising children it is not necessary to treat them like cattle."

It goes on, and is it any wonder that our world is dysfunctional, considering the emotional roots above and also below:

The problem with having only women raising children is that parenting is an emotionally demanding task, requiring considerable maturity, and throughout history girls have grown up universally despised. When a girl was born, said the Hebrews, "the walls wept." Japanese lullabies sang, "If it's a girl, stamp on her." In medieval Muslim cultures "a grave used to be prepared, even before delivery, beside the woman's resting place [and] if the new-born was a female she was immediately thrown by her mother into the grave." "Blessed is the door out of which goes a dead daughter" was a popular Italian proverb that was meant quite literally. Girls from birth have everywhere been considered full of dangerous pollution-the projected hatred of adults-and were therefore more often killed, exposed, abandoned, malnourished, raped and neglected than boys. Girls in traditional societies spent most of their growing up years trying to avoid being raped by their neighbors or employers and thereby being forced into a lives of prostitution. To expect horribly abused girls to magically become mature, loving caretakers when as teenagers they go to live as virtual slaves in a strange family simply goes against the conclusions of every clinical study we have showing the disastrous effects of trauma upon the ability to mother.

If you are interested, I urge you to read more of The Emotional Life of Nations, by Lloyd deMause, and also dedicate your life to breaking this chain.


Vinessa • 05:42 PM •

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