Images of childhood in contemporary childrearing.

The article focuses on the images of childhood held by mothers of babies and very young children. The Dionysian image of childhood is defined by an assumption that children enter the world with a bias towards evil as opposed to Apollonian infants who are angelic, innocent and untainted by the world which they have entered. In simple words, the Apollonian child is born with a bias towards good and the Dionysian is born with a bias towards evil. Most mothers opine that the move from Apollonian innocence to Dionysian self-indulgence is a developmental stage. It has been discovered that images of childhood are emergent and linked to stage of development which children are deemed to have reached at particular ages.