Nurture and Human Interaction

This week in class we talked about nature vs. nurture and the importance of human interaction.  We learned about several cases of feral children and how they don't know how to speak, eat like a human and how they don't understand the social norms of our society.  Feral children grew up in the wild and adapted the behaviors of animals instead of humans.  We watched an Oprah episode where we met a girl who was raised by wild animals and she adapted their behaviors such as snarling at the camera men, walking on her hands and feet and eating small animals raw.  In these cases, these children were deprived of the human interaction they needed to learn how to speak, eat, chew and live in our society.  Since their parents were never around they weren't able to pick up the attributes necessary to survive in a world outside of the animal one they grew up in.  These cases are very sad to hear about because they could have been normal functioning adults and now they have the knowledge of a first grader when they are thirteen years old.

~Liv