neglect

Wow. If I may make a suggestion-- when Vnutz gives you a non-porn screen name, maybe you should repost the above...post, so's we can give it a high score. I'd give it a 6:Academic myself...

Maybe you should get a name, there's a lot of Anonymous. I didn;t read what you said because i'm lazy. :)

First off...my user name needs to be changed by the person who made my account for me ...uh hem...vnutz79....it sounds like a bad porn name, yay though it's a joke.

Next, I used to work with a child in Montana who could qualify as a "feral child". We'll call her Tabitha. When we finally convinced the state to take Tabitha from her family and put her in a state facility (which may not have been better for her in some ways, but our options were limited) the head psychiatrist told us that "she is the closest thing to a closet child as I've ever seen".

In the US, we dub them closet children due to the outrageous numbers of children through our history that have been punished by parents by locking them in closets or attics. They exhibit odd social behaviors, generally lack progressive vocabulary (i.e. - 25 cent words) and in general stress situations they seem to revert to animal like behaviors.

With this particular child, where she didn't grow up in a dog house, all we could ever do was speculate as to the circumstances that surrounded her upbringing. We suspected that Tabitha and her 2 other sisters were locked in a bedroom much of the time with a few young cats, food was withheld as a punishment and that there was physical abuse that we could never prove. It was obvious that the family was ill equipped when it came to parenting skills.

However, when stressed, between the ages of 2 and 5, Tabitha would exhibit like a monkey, stripping her clothes off, throwing feces and biting, and she would howl like a dog. At 6 and 7, the first warning sign that she was deteriorating in a situation was that she would drop her chin to her chest, squint her eyes, hiss like a cat and scratch the air in front of her as if she had claws. Sometimes she would growl. If she escalated completely, she would howl like a dog and swear. It was not just any howl either, it was perfectly pitched like she had learned it straight from the source.

When she would get excited she would pant like a dog with her tongue hanging out and walk around in circles. She loved dogs.

When I worked with Tabitha, she lived in a house with several young cats that I can imagine she learned many of her behaviors from. Whenever I saw her interact with the cats, she was always heavy handed with them and rarely failed to illicit a hiss from one of them before we could intervene. So whatever it was that she was experiencing at home that deemed such an extreme defense response, she learned it from cats and dogs. Nature nurtured.

I won't even begin to tell you about her short attention span, capacity to learn, her expulsion from the public school system at the age of 5 for her behavior problems (or rather the school system’s inability to cope with her) and everyday interactions with her.

But, all that said, I’ll get back to nature versus nurture and a resolution.

I don't see how science could do anything other than map genes to predetermine cognitive disfunction and physical disability and then make hypothesis from there. If they can determine that an unborn child has Downs Syndrome, then maybe one day they will be able to pre-determine mental retardation, ADD and OCD. The true problem researchers face is that the child must then go out into the world.

In my opinion, the main factors in resolving this issue are:

 the child’s innate capacity to learn and IQ

 the child’s genetically predetermined character, personality and physical traits

 all pre-birth internal stimuli – mercury, alcohol, cigarettes, folic acid, balanced nutrition

 who raises the child – man or animal

 how the child is raised

 all external stimuli

You’d need to employ a team of statisticians, psychologists, and geneticists that could fill Yankee stadium to map out what is most important in the development of a person.

The world is too random a place.

In my experience with the roughly 35 clients that I worked with, I would classify 25ish of 35 were nurture problems. Another 5 were probably cognitive disfunction problems stemming from things like fetal alcohol syndrome and slight birth defects and thus qualifying them as nature and nurture problems. The last 5, well, I would qualify them as "wired wrong" and thus they would be nature problems. They had no apparent family problems or mental challenges, but would "win" themselves a diagnosis of "borderline personality disorder". In other words, "we don't know why your child behaves like this" and no matter what, b/c they now have a diagnosis, it's next to impossible to eject them from society b/c they have a “label”.

In closing, in modern times, most of the problems in our world are nurture problems. When a child comes into the world, regardless of its physical and emotional attributes, it will react accordingly to the energy of its welcoming committee. Unwanted children, in my experience, behave as if they are unwanted by the world and then develop accordingly. When it comes to human nature, the famous quote should be rewritten to say:

To every action, there is a reaction.