Development as control and discipline

Since the fourth century AD, the religious doctrine of original sin has seen children as inherently sinful. Children were believed to be born with original sin and therefore had to be disciplined in order to be saved. Christianity was and is often ambivalent about the nature of the child – the newborn can be seen as sweet, pure and innocent, and at the same time both sinful and susceptible to corruption. This ambivalence was exemplified by the Puritans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who were greatly devoted to their children but also sometimes punished them harshly in order to make them ‘good’ and obedient.

They believed that children had to learn obedience to God through obedience to their parents.

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) elaborated on this view of children’s natural tendency towards expressing dangerous impulses which need to be curbed through discipline and strict training. This view was famously expressed by Susanna Wesley in a letter to her son John Wesley (founder of Methodism) in 1732. She wrote:

Break their will betimes: begin this great work before they can run alone, before they can speak plain, or perhaps speak at all ... make him do as he is bid, if you whip him ten times running to effect it ... Break his will now and his soul will live, and he will probably bless you to all eternity.

These views were also expressed in the early nineteenth century, as for example in Hannah More’s writings on child-rearing. More argued that it was ‘a fundamental error to consider children as innocent beings, whose little weaknesses may, perhaps, want some correction, rather than as beings who bring into the world a corrupt nature and evil dispositions, which it should be the great end of education to rectify’ (quoted in Hendrick, 1990, p. 39). More recently, the theories of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) also build on views about the power of children’s nature. Put simply, he argued that the infant is driven by instinctual impulses (or ‘id’). Freud argued that these are only regulated by the development of conscience (or ‘super-ego’), through parental control becoming internalized.