PSYC 2110 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Special Period
30 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
PSYC 2110 Lecture 9 Notes
Introduction
Adulthood
• Parents focus much of their lives on their children, spend a great deal of money to care
for and educate their children, and excuse children from shouldering the full
responsibilities of adulthood until attaining the legal age of 14 to 21 (depending on the
society), when they have presumably gained the wisdom and skills to adapt to adult life.
• Childhood and adolescence were not always regarded as the very special and sensitive
periods that we regard them as today.
• To understand how developmentalists think about and approach the study of children,
it is necessary to see how the concept of childhood has changed over time.
• You may be surprised just how recent our modern viewpoint really is.
• Of course, it was only after people came to view childhood as a very special period that
they began to study children and the developmental process.
• Childhood in Pre-modern Times In the early days of recorded history, children had few if
any rights and their lives were not always valued by their elders.
• Archaeological research, for example, has shown that the ancient Carthaginians often
killed children as religious sacrifices and embedded them in the walls of buildings to
stregthe these strutures Bjorklud & Bjorklud, 99.
• Until the fourth century CE, Roman parents were legally entitled to kill their deformed,
illegitimate, or otherwise unwanted infants.
• After this active infanticide was outlawed, unwanted babies were often left to die in the
wilderness or were sold as servants or as objects for sexual exploitation upon reaching
middle childhood (deMause, 1974).
• Ee ated hildre ere ofte treated harshly y today’s stadards.
• For example, boys in the city-state of Sparta were exposed to a strict regimen designed
to train them for the grim task of serving a military state.
• As infats, they ere gie old aths to toughe the.
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
