"The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused. It is our task here to see how much of this childhood history can be recaptured from the evidence that remains to us. That this pattern has not previously been noticed by historians is because serious history has long been considered a record of public not private events. Historians have concentrated so much on the noisy sand-box of history, with its fantastic castles and magnificent battles, that they have generally ignored what is going on in the homes around the playground. And where historians usually look to the sandbox battles of yesterday for the causes of those of today, we instead ask how each generation of parents and children creates those issues which are later acted out in the arena of public life."

“Although one anthropologist mentioned that "undoubtedly these rituals are exceedingly painful," they are not usually considered traumatic to children. Since empathy with children's feelings is nearly absent, gratuitous mutilation of the children is common, such as tightly binding newborn infant's heads for months to elongate the skull, or .”

“As with infanticide, the sexual abuse of children is widely reported by anthropologists, but in positive terms. "This would not constitute 'abuse' if in that society the behavior was not proscribed". Like all other anthropologists who report the regular masturbating and sucking of children's genitals, he calls this "love.”

“Written history may, in the course of its narrative, use some of the laws established by the various sciences, but its own task remains that of relating the essential sequence of historical action and, qua history, to tell what happened, not why.”

“But until my Journal of Psychoanalytical Anthropology began to be published and until my book The Emotional Life of Nations came out, few realized how much anthropologists distorted mothering in their tribes.”

“Most historians have been as little able to feel empathy for infants sent to wet nurses as the mothers themselves were.”

“Historians are presumed to be unable to "do psychology," which is "mystical" anyway, so they are forced to accept the most "rational" explanations... "and it is on these that history is built.”