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Domain: feralchildren.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to feralchildren.com.
Comments · 10
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Re:intelligence doesn't matter, communication does
The study has been done, but not intentionally. feral children
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Re:Uh.
If you're a bad parent, and you have an idiot kid, they're invariably going to grow up to be idiots.
If you're a bad parent, and you have a good kid, they'll know better than to kill someone because they saw it on TV.
You're right, environment has nothing to do with how people turn out, contrary to all established psychology.If you're a good parent, and you have an idiot kid, you'll be able to regulate their exposure to violence. If you're concerned about TV violence, just don't let them have one in their room.
IMHO no kid should have a TV in their room. What if you're a good parent who can't afford child care, but your kid is a teenager now so you let him/her be a latchkey kid until you get home from work, should you just not have a TV (not that I necessarily think that's a bad thing)? Or perhaps every good parent is at least middle class.If you're a good parent, and you have a good kid, you'll be just fine.
It's true, and I doubt such restrictions would really be targeted at such people.
Exactly where genetics' and environment's realms of influence on the outcome of human beings lie is still up for much debate; the sorts of experiments which would lend the most insight into these areas are unethical (for example, the Forbidden Experiment). However there's no doubt that environment has a substantial impact on outcome of psychological traits (see Twin Study, particularly the correlational charts on psychological characteristics [Fig 2]).
In the end, no matter what else you examine, environment is a substantial factor in child raising, and not all parents have the luxury of establishing a police state in which to raise their children, even good parents. As such even if an excellent parent could pull their child out of a damaging psychological state which was partially induced by exposure to material the child was mentally ill-equipped to experience, they will be devoting their efforts here instead of some other effort that otherwise benefits their child.
All this is to say that parenting, environment, and genetics are each contributing factors. A good kid raised in a good environment by a good parent will turn out better than the same kid raised in a bad environment by the same parent. Likewise a bad kid raised in a good environment by a bad parent will turn out better than the same in a bad environment. A good middle class parent will make sure their child's environment is good. A good lower class parent probably doesn't have this option. -
Re:chimps & sign language
I seriously doubt you can point to any conclusive, scientific language studies on children that really, definitively, show what level of language development a child would develop on it's own, because such a study would be scandalously immoral and unethical.
And yet there are scandalously immoral and unethical situations that have been studied (though perhaps not scientifically, since there's no control over variables, etc.) Of most recent note is the case of Genie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)) who essentially spent the first 13 years of her life locked in a small bedroom, usually restrained and only rarely hearing words. As is often true of cases like Genie, the course of normal language acquisition has been disrupted, giving researchers and opportunity to see if various theories properly predict what would happen in the abscence of certain events.
And if that isn't disturbing enough, there's a whole website on similar stories (including Genie) at http://www.feralchildren.com/en/index.php. -
Re:Give those with low IQ jobs.
An illegitemate child named Isabelle was locked in a dark attic for years with her deaf and mute mother and no toys. http://www.google.com/search?q=%22locked+in+an+at
t ic%22+iqShe caught up with her peers within two years of being rescued and was found to have a normal IQ. Apparently her brain continued developing normally in the absence of intellectual stimulation in the dark attic.
Then she was the exeption and not the rule. Most feral children (the ones that don't learn speech, etc. in the formative years) never learn speech and basically behave like animals for the rest of their lives.
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Re:Won't make a real human.
Agreed. Try to take into account social cues as well.
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Ferral Children
Some cases have been known of children raised with no language at all, often by animals. They have severe developmental delays.
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Gazelles 1 (kind of)
They've been known to kidnap humans and raise them as their own.
What better way to subvert your enemy than raise their children, and instill your ideas into their heads? -
Re:Question to the anthropologist nerds...I hadn't looked at that site in a while. I just did and found this example about Saturday Mthiyane, a child in South Africa who lived with monkeys:
Saturday's feral characteristics
Saturday exhibited characteristics in common with many other feral children. "He was very violent during his first days here. He used to break things in the kitchen, get in and out through windows. He didn't play with other kids and instead he used to beat them. He liked uncooked red meat", said Ethel Mthiyane. "He didn't like blankets. He wanted to sleep naked and he hated clothing."Ten years later
Saturday is one of the few modern children to have been followed up. When the Johannesburg Mail and Guardian visited the school ten years later, they found that Saturday was still unable to speak. He had been taught to walk, but was still refusing to eat cooked food, preferring raw vegetables instead; bananas remained his favourite fruit. -
Re:Question to the anthropologist nerds...If you take a look at how modern human bodies are constructed, the fact that we're bipedial by nature (as opposed to nurture) is pretty obvious.
The observed characteristics of feral children raised by animals evidences that walking upright is a behavior learned from example; it's by nurture. It appears that babies learn to walk your walk in the same manner that they learn to talk your talk (language and accent).
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Re:better way to do it
Just FYI, there is a web site devote to feral children.
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