The Enlightenment Age and Its Influence on Attitudes toward Children

The Enlightenment Age, 1500-1800 AD, marked the beginning of the end of such a stronghold on human activities and social institutions by the church. During this time, there emerged scholars and writers who challenged the church and its puppet governments.

In the 1700s, scholars such as Cesare Beccaria, often referred to as the Father of the Classical School of Criminology, had to go into hiding out of fear for their lives at the hands of the Catholic church. Beccaria, for one thing, called for an end to torture and for a more humane method of punishment. He spoke out against the inquisitorial system of justice where people where deemed guilty unless they proved themselves innocent. Public whippings, and more barbarous methods of physical torture, were used to exact an admission of guilt from of the innocent and the guilty alike.

Other philosophers toward the end of the Enlightenment Age also joined Beccaria, calling abolition of strict adherence to Biblical injunctions and toward the use of free, rational, and independent thinking.It was believed that because people were equipped with the ability to reason, unlike the rest of the animal kingdom, they should be able to develop a course of self-government without undue interference by the church and the governments who had allowed its leaders to dominate all social institutions and cultures.

Although it took some time for the church and the state to loosen their stronghold on family life, little by little this did occur. More modern methods of child-rearing practices emerged, parallel with a backing away from a strict belief that acting-out behavior was the result of innate sin, and thus of the devil. Rather, there emerged a belief that perhaps there is something different about a child; that a child is not, after all, just a miniature adult.