EVIL PARENTING OF YORE (PART 1)

CHRISTIAN FAMILY VALUES...NOT! PART 1

I stumbled across the following theory "Psycho-genetic Evolution" while trying to research the history of child rearing to refute today's "Christian Family Value" argument. I knew that the so called 'nuclear' family so heralded and held up as the ideal christian family was a recent 'invention'. Invented to deflect Christianity's real effect of harming children emotionally, stunting intellectual growth, and keeping society stagnant in ignorance. Fabricated to justify their patriarchal institution of marriage where the FATHER plays the lead role and used as the modern justification against gay couples adopting children.

You know the stereotypical, loving father, adoring mother, dutiful son and caring daughter we see in Rockwell paintings. We have been conditioned to believe it has been that way since well 'Adam & Eve'. That contrived happy family is historically inaccurate and boldface fabrication from a church trying to improve its image. History has been purposely hidden, changed and made up to fool us into our modern way of thinking. Boy was I surprised, my image of past family life wasn't even close! I imagined an aloof and stern father and the phrase "children should be seen and not heard" (familiar to those raised on Disney films). It was much much worse.

Throughout most of history children were scorned, neglected, abandoned, considered evil or a curse, sexually abused, or sold as slaves. It wasn't until free-thinkers and unbelievers began to question the status quo that our idea of the nuclear family began to transform family life (for the better) beginning around the 18th century and that's when scientific progress and human inventiveness was finally allowed to blossom. NO THANKS AND NO CREDIT TO THE CHURCH CAN BE GIVEN. DO NOT LET THEM FOOL YOU. The only way we can evolve our potential as humans is if todays parents foresake and abandon religion outright and give their children the gift of a guiltless, constructive and purposeful life, free of superstitious dogma.

We will see that fathers played little role if any in raising children. It was the mothers that raised children. In societies that permitted love between mother and children, they thrived and the next generations benefited. While those societies that fostered ill-will between mothers and children they stagnated under emotional deprivation and the next generations fared even worse.

Since for most of history mothers raise boys who then go off and hunt, farm, build things and fight wars rather than directly contributing much new to the psyche of the next generation, the course of evolution of the psyche has overwhelmingly been dependent upon the way mothers have treated their daughters, who become the next generation of mothers. Since early emotional relationships organize the entire range of human behavior, all cultural traits do not equally affect the evolution of the psyche, those that affect the daughter's psyche represent the main narrow bottleneck through which all other cultural traits must pass. The study of the evolution of the psyche depends more on developing a maternal ecology than on studying variations in the physical environment.

The evolution of the psyche and culture has been crucially dependent upon turning the weak bonds between mother and daughter of apes and early humans into genuine love for daughters (and sons). This means that historical societies that create optimal conditions for improving the crucial mother-daughter relationship by surrounding the mother with support and love soon begin to show psychological innovation and cultural advances in the next generations, so that history begins to move in progressive new directions. In contrast, societies that cripple the mother-daughter emotional relationship experience psychogenic arrest and even psychogenic devolution. Only in modern times have fathers, too, begun to contribute to the evolutionary task of growing the young child's mind.

Paralleling the term "hopeful monster" that biologists use to indicate speciating biological variations, the idea that the mother-daughter emotional relationship is the focal point of epigentic evolution and the main source of novelty in the psyche can be called the "hopeful daughter" concept. When mothers love and support particularly their daughters, a series of generations can develop new childrearing practices that grow completely new neural networks, hormonal systems and behavioral traits. If hopeful daughters are instead emotionally crippled by a society, a psychogenic cul-de-sac is created, generations of mothers cannot innovate, epigenetic arrest is experienced and meaningful cultural evolution ends.

The task of "fathering" of playing a real role in forming a child's psyche is in fact a very late historical invention. Most fathers among our closest ape relatives don't have much to do with their children, and a nurturing role during early childhood for the human father turns out to be a far more recent historical innovation than has heretofore been assumed. The major epigenetic changes in the structures of the brain, therefore, have mainly been evolved by females, not males. Fathers until recently have affected their children's psyches mainly through family provisioning and by establishing some of the conditions for mothering, but it has mainly been the mothers who have produced epigenetic novelty; so to discover the laws of cultural evolution one must "follow the mothers" through history. This is why only the psychogenic theory posits that for most of history women and children are the ultimate source of historical change.

Imagine how the U.S. could progress if we could rid ourselves of RELIGIOUS dogma and the attendant emotional damage once and for all and not pass it down to our children.

I'll give two examples here, more insidious and horrendous examples in PART 2. Some parts will be very graphic and disturbing...but true. This will be a extreme eye opener for most of us.

For example, in China before the tenth century A.D. men began to footbind little girls'feet as a sexual perversion, making them into sexual fetishes, penis-substitutes which the men would suck on and masturbate against during sex play. Chinese literature reports the screaming cries of the five-year-old girl as she hobbles about the house for years to do her tasks while her feet are bound, because in order to make her foot tiny, her foot bones are broken and the flesh deteriorates. She loses several toes as they are bent under her foot, to emphasize the big toe as a female penis. This practice was added to the many brutal practices of what was perhaps the world's most anti-daughter culture, where over half the little girls were murdered at birth without remorse and special girl-drowning pools were legion, where beating little girls until bloody was a common parental practice, and where girl rape and sex slavery were rampant. This vicious anti-daughter emotional atmosphere extreme even for a time that was generally cruel and unfeeling towards daughters was obviously not conducive to mothers producing innovations in childrearing when the little girls grew up. Therefore China which was culturally ahead of the West in many ways at the time, became culturally and politically "frozen" until the twentieth century, when footbinding was stopped and boy-girl sex ratios in many areas dropped from 200/100 to near equality. The result was that whereas for much of its history China punished all novelty, during the twentieth century rapid cultural, political and economic evolution could resume.

Japan, which shared much of Chinese culture but did not adopt footbinding of daughters, avoided the psychogenic arrest of China and could therefore share in the scientific and industrial revolution as it occurred in the West.

The same kind of epigenetic arrest can be seen in the damage caused by genital mutilation of girls among circum-Mediterranean peoples that began thousands of years ago and continues today. Since "hopeful daughters" do not thrive on the chopping off of their clitorises and labias, the present cultural and political problems of those groups who still mutilate their daughters' genitals are very much a direct result of this psychogenic arrest.

THE SIX CHILDREARING MODES
"Psycho-genetic Evolution" proposes six modes of childrearing which societies unevenly evolve. Most modern nations today contain all six stages in varying proportions. They have been empirically confirmed by five book-length historical studies in addition to the over 100 scholarly articles on the history of childhood during the past 26 years in The Journal of Psychohistory. The following list summarizes the historical evidence on childrearing modes.

1a. Early Infanticidal Mode (small kinship groups): This mode is characterized by high infanticide rates, maternal incest, body mutilation, child rape, tortures and emotional abandonment by parents when the child is not useful as a an erotic object or as a poison container. The father is too immature to act as a real caretaker and is emotionally absent. Prepubertal marriage of little girls is common, similar to cults like The Children of God. The schizoid personality structure of the infanticidal mode is dominated by alters, in which adults spend much of their time in ritual and magical projects, so they are not able to evolve beyond foraging and early horticultural economic levels nor beyond Big Men political organization.

1b. Late Infanticidal Mode (chiefdom to early states): Though infanticide rates remain high and child rape is still often routine, particularly royal and pedagogic pederasty the young child is not as much rejected by the mother, and the father begins to be involved with instruction of the older child. Child sacrifice as a guilt-reducing device for social progress is found in early states as the use of children as poison containers became more socially organized. Infant restrictions devices such as swaddling and cradle boards begin, sibling caretakers replace child gangs and sibling incest is widespread. Various institutionalized schemes for care by others become popular, such as adoption, wetnursing, fosterage, and the use of the children of others as servants. Beating is now less impulsive and used as discipline, and because the child is now closer emotionally and used more for farming chores, discipline becomes more controlling and brutal, leading to complex societies whose innovations are paid for by genocidal slaughter and the enslavement of women and children.

2. Abandoning Mode (beginning with early Christianity): Once the child is thought as having a soul at birth, routine infanticide becomes emotionally difficult. Early Christians were considered odd in antiquity: "they marry like everybody else, they have children, but they do not practice the exposure of new-born babes."These Christians began Europe's two-millennia-long struggle against infanticide, replacing it with abandonment, from oblation of young children to monasteries, a more widespread use of swaddling, wetnurses if one could afford them, fosterage, wandering scholars and child servants. Child sacrifice was replaced by joining in the group-fantasy of the sacrifice of Christ, who was sent by his father as a poison container to be killed for the sins of others. Pederasty continued, especially in monasteries, and girl rape was widespread. The child was thought to be born full of evil, the parent's projections, so was beaten early and severely. Abusive child care was not mainly due to economics, since the rich as well as the poor during the middle ages had high infanticide, abandonment, sexual molestation and physical abuse rates. The borderline personality structure of Christianity stresses clinging to authority figures as defense against emotional abandonment and constant warfare against enemies to punish others for their own imagined sinfulness for deserving abandonment.

3. Ambivalent Mode (beginning in the twelfth century): The twelfth century ended the oblation of children to monasteries, began child instruction manuals, began to punish child rape, expanded schooling, expanded pediatrics, saw child protection laws, and began to tolerate ambivalence, both love and hate for the child, marking the beginnings of toleration of a child's independent rights. The child was seen less as a sinful poison container and more as soft wax or clay that could be beaten into whatever shape the parent wished. The reduction of splitting defenses of the late medieval narcissistic personality structure produced the advances in technology and the rise of cities associated with the period and eventually the rise of the early modern state.

4. Intrusive Mode (beginning in the sixteenth century): The intrusive parent began to unswaddle the child and even the wealthy began to bring up the infant themselves rather than sending it elsewhere or at least have the wetnurse come in to the home thus allowing closer emotional bonds with parents to form. The sixteenth century particularly in England represents a watershed in reduction of parental projections, when parents shifted from trying to stop childrens' growth to trying only to control it and make it "obedient." The freedom of being allowed to crawl around rather than being swaddled and hung on a peg and the individuation of separate child beds and separate child regimens meant parents approached closer to their children and could give them love as long as they controlled their minds, their insides, their anger, their lives. The child raised by intrusive parents was nursed by his or her mother, not swaddled, not given regular enemas but toilet trained early, prayed with but not played with, hit but not battered, punished for masturbation but not masturbated, taught and not sent out as servants to others and made to obey promptly with threats and guilt as often as physical means of punishment. True empathy begins with intrusive mode parents, producing a general improvement in the level of care and reduced child mortality, leading to the early modern demographic transition to later marriage, fewer births and more investment in each child. The end of arranged marriages, the growth of married love and the decline of domestic violence also contributed to the child's ability to achieve emotional growth. A healing of splitting and an increase in individuation produced the scientific, political and economic revolutions of the early modern period, so much so that some British and American parents were often called "strange" by visitors because they "pampered" their children so much and hit them so little. Men didn't cling to their hypermasculine social alters as much and discovered they had a "private self" that was emotionally involved with their family life.

5. Socializing Mode (beginning in the eighteenth century): Obviously something new had entered the world when society could claim that "God planted this deep, this unquenchable love for her offspring in the mother's heart." During this period the number of children most women had dropped from seven or eight to three or four, long before any medical discoveries were made in limiting reproduction, because parents now wanted to be able to give more care to each child. Their aim, however, remained instilling their own goals into the child rather than producing individuation: "Is there not a strange fullness of joy in watching the reproduction of your traits, physical, mental and moral, in your child?" The use of mainly psychological manipulation, along with spanking of little children, remains the most popular model of "socialization" of parents in Western European nations and the Americas today, training the child to assume its role in the parents' society. The socializing mode built the modern world, and its values of nationalism and economic class-dominated representative democracy represent the social models of most people today.

6. Helping Mode (beginning mid-twentieth century): The helping mode involves acknowledging that the parents' main role is to help the child reach at each stage of its life its own goals, rather than being socialized into adult goals. Parents for the first time consider raising children not a chore but a joy. Both mother and father are equally involved with the child from infancy helping him or her become a self-directed person. Children are given unconditional love, are not struck and are apologized to if yelled at under stress. The helping mode involves a lot of time and energy by parents and other helpers during the child's early years, taking their cues from the child itself as it pursues its developmental course. Birth rates tend to drop below replacement as each child is recognized as requiring a great deal of attention. The helping psychoclass, though few in number today, is far more empathic toward others and less driven by material success than earlier generations. Though Dr. Spock's child care book was late socializing mode, some of the "Spock generation" adolescents after the mid-century were actually products of helping mode parents and felt empowered to explore their own unique social roles and go beyond nationalism, war and economic inequality.

Parents from each of the six childrearing modes co-exist in modern nations today. Indeed, much of political conflict occurs because of the vastly different value systems and vastly different tolerance for freedom of the six psychoclasses. Cyclical swings between liberal and reactionary periods are an outcome of a process whereby more evolved psychoclasses introduce more innovation into the world than less evolved psychoclasses can tolerate. The latter try then to "turn the clock back" and reinstate less anxious social conditions to reduce their growth anxiety, and when this fails, the nation attempts to "cleanse the world of its sinfulness" through a war or depression.

Now that you are familiar with the history and terms used discussing this 'theory' read PART 2 where the historical horrors and abuse will be exposed further. No matter how rough you THINK your childhood was...you ain't got nothing on history's kids (most of whom didn't live to tell about it).

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Condenced and inspired from http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/eln07_evolution.html