Early infanticidal childrearing
[3] The model was developed by Lloyd deMause within the framework of psychohistory as part of a seven-stage sequence of childrearing modes that describe the development attitudes towards children in human cultures[4] The word "early" distinguishes the term from late infanticidal childrearing, identified by deMause in the more established, agricultural cultures up to the ancient world.
This model is a psychological concept that aims to understand anthropological data, especially from such societies as the Yolngu of Australia, the Gimi, Wogeo, Bena Bena, and Bimin-Kuskusmin of Papua New Guinea, the Raum, the Ok, and the Kwanga, based on observations by Géza Róheim,[5] Lia Leibowitz, Robert C. Suggs,[6] Milton Diamond, Herman Heinrich Ploss, Gilbert Herdt, Robert J. Stoller, L. L. Langness, and Fitz John Porter Poole, among others.
Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and other members of early states sacrificed infants to their gods, as described in the table of the psychopathological effects of some forms of childrearing.
The infanticidal clinging of the symbiotic mother prevents individuation so that innovation and more complex political organization are inhibited.
[13] Melvin Konner wrote: Lloyd deMause, then editor of the History of Childhood Quarterly, claimed that all past societies treated children brutally, and that all historical change in their treatment has been a fairly steady improvement toward the kind and gentle standards we now set and more or less meet.
[...] Serious students of the anthropology of childhood beginning with Margaret Mead have called attention to the pervasive love and care lavished on children in many traditional cultures.
[15] They maintain that what constitutes child abuse is a matter of a general psychological law, it leaves its permanent marks on the human brain structure, post-traumatic stress disorder is not a culture dependent phenomenon or a matter of opinion, and that some of the practices that mainstream anthropologists do not focus on, such as beatings of newborn infants, result in brain lesions and other visible neurological and psychological damage.
