Child abandonment
From Free net encyclopedia
Child abandonment is the practice of abandoning offspring outside of legal adoption. Causes include many social, cultural, and political factors as well as mental illness.
Child Abandonment In Real Life
The abandoned child is called a foundling or throwaway (as opposed to a runaway). Image:Foundling Hospital.jpg
Poverty is often a root cause of child abandonment. Persons in cultures with poor social welfare systems who are not financially capable of taking care of a child are more likely to abandon him/her. Political conditions, such as difficulty in adoption proceedings, may also contribute to child abandonment, as can the lack of institutions, such as orphanages, to take in children whom their parents can not support.
Societies with strong social structures and liberal adoption laws tend to have lower rates of child abandonment.
Historically, many cultures practice abandonment of infants, called "exposure." Although such children would survive if taken up by others, exposure is often considered a form of infanticide -- as described by Tertullian in his Apology: "it is certainly the more cruel way to kill. . . by exposure to cold and hunger and dogs". This form of child abandonment is much more widely spread throughout societies, being used even by the rich to dispose of unwanted children, particularly girls. Many of these children were indeed taken up, for slavery and prostitution.
Child Abandonment In Literature
Foundlings, who may be orphans, can combine many advantages to a plot: mysterious antecedents, leading to plots to discover them; high birth and lowly upbringing. The commonest motives for abandoning children in literature are oracles that the child will cause harm, or the mother's desire to conceal her illegimate child, often after rape by a god.
From Oedipus onward, Greek and Roman tales are filled with exposed children who escaped death to be reunited with their families -- usually, as in Longus's Daphnis and Chloe, more happily than in Oedipus's case. Grown children, having been taken up by strangers, were usually recognized by tokens that had been left with the exposed baby: in Euripides's Ion, Creüsa is about to kill Ion when a priestess reveals the birth-tokens that show that Ion is her own, abandoned infant.
This may reflect the widespread practice of child abandonment in their cultures. On the other hand, the motif is continued through literature where the practice is not widespread. William Shakespeare used the abandonment and discovery of Perdita in The Winter's Tale, and Edmund Spenser reveals in the last Canto of Book 6 of The Faerie Queen that the character Pastorella, raised by shepherds, is in fact of noble birth.
The strangers who take up the child are often shepherds or other herdsmen. This befell not only Oedipus, but, legendarily, Cyrus the Great, Amphion and Zethus in the legend of Antiope, and several of the characters listed above. Romulus and Remus were suckled by a wolf in the wilderness, but afterward, again found by a shepherd. This ties this motif in with the genre of the pastoral.
In some cases, the child is depicted as being raised by animals.
Moses is unusual in that he is taken up by a princess, who is of superior birth to his mother, but like the other foundlings listed above, he reaches adulthood and returns to his birth family, the usual fate of fictional foundlings.
The opposite pattern, of a child remaining with its adoptive parents, is less common but occurs. George Eliot depicted the abandonment of the character Effie in Silas Marner; despite learning her true father at the end of the book, she refuses to leaving Silas Marner who raised her. Superman, though having many connections to his native Krypton, never abandons Earth.