Feral Children Research Paper

Running Head: FERAL CHILDREN Feral Children Ana Karina Sifuentes California Baptist University Abstract Feral children are children that have been neglected and/or abused. There are some cases in which a child is left to fend for himself and is sometimes taken in by wild animals. These animals treat these children as their own and raise them. Because the children have no human contact they become feral children. After being neglected for so long, a part of the child’s brain will eventually close off and the child will not be able to learn how to socialize as a regular human. There have been many experiments done to try to help these feral children. Psychologists have made progress, but never enough to where the child is ever going to be
normal. Feral Children Most children grow up with parents or at least some kind of human interaction. What happens when a child is neglected and left to fend for him or herself? The children that grow up without human contact or that have been lost in the wilderness are known as feral children. Feral means “wild.” These children may have been brought up by animals and have adapted to live lives like they have seen. Most feral children have had little or to human contact. Humans need human contact because it helps socialize them. Without this contact, children will not learn basic social skills needed to survive in the world. If these children ever get a chance to enter society, they will have a very difficult time. They will have to learn to interact with people, learn to speak, learn how to show emotion, and learn the common knowledge that most humans learn in the first five years of their lives. The brain of a feral child is very different than that of a regular child. The first five years of a child’s life is very important to how the child will grow up and live the rest of their lives. After a certain age, feral children will not be able to learn to read and write because the part of the brain responsible for that section will close off due to the lack of use. The brain is very complex. There are parts to it that are responsible for everything humans do. The brain controls reflexes, voluntary body movements, perception, language, and thought (Healy, 1994). The brain is divided into four lobes. They are the occipital lobe, the parietal lobe, the temporal lobe, and the frontal lobes. The occipital lobe is the part of the brain that is responsible for vision. The parietal lobe is responsible for touch and spatial understanding. The temporal lobe is responsible for hearing and language. The frontal lobes are divided into two cortexes, the motor cortex which is responsible for planning and regulating body movement and the prefrontal cortex which is responsible for reasoning, memory, self-control, attention, planning and judgment. The image shows how the brain is divided into the two lobes and what side is responsible for what functions. {draw:frame} The story of Genie shows how scientists have been working and trying to figure out what exactly goes on in the brains of feral children. With Genie, a lot of the funds were taking away from the Genie Team, and that forced them to stop researching. With the research they did do, this showed that language is very difficult to master if it is not learned when a child’s brain is first developing. With language not being mastered it would be impossible for a feral child to learn to read and write. Because of their lack of human contact, a feral child cannot develop normally. A “normal” child is dependent on hearing, observing, mimicking, and reinforcement to fully develop (“Feral Children”). A feral child is deprived of these things, or they mimic the things they see. For example, if a child is raised by a wild animal, he or she will mimic what the animal does. This includes eating habits, the noises they make, bathing, and walking.
These feral children are able to copy what they see the other animals do because these are “hard-wired” through our sensory and motor skills (“Feral Children”). However, language and communication are more dependent on postnatal experiences and the environment that the child is born into (“Feral Children”). The child will then develop skills and develop according to the environment he or she is growing up in. When a child is growing up, there is a time when he or she is primed for acquiring language and communication skills. If the child is deprived of human contact during this time, he or she will probably never learn to speak. Because one must be able to speak in order to learn to read or write, feral children will never be able to read and write. It is very sad to see how the life of an individual is so dramatically altered when he or she is abused and neglected. Feral children are those children that will never live healthy lives. They do not know how to act normal. Those raised by animals will only know how to act like an animal. Yes, they can learn how to socialize themselves a little bit but not enough to function in society. Those children that were closeted do not understand what emotion is or what
language is. They only know what they have experienced. Most children experience a lot during the first five years of their lives, but a normal child’s childhood is very different from that of a feral child’s childhood. The brain is a very complex piece of the body of a human. Many times humans do take it for granted and do not realize all that the brain does for them. The brain helps humans to do simple things. Feral children are not always as fortunate. The brain of a feral child is not fully developed which keeps the child from being able to fit in with society. Because the brain is not fully developed, this keeps the child from learning language.
Humans usually take this for granted as well. The brain works very hard to absorb all the information that is can get during the cumulative years of a child’s formative years. The first five years are crucial to the development of a child. Feral children do not get this because it is very important to have human contact. Most feral children did not get the love that children need. The neglect that feral children receive greatly affects them for the rest of their lives. Neglect can be failure to thrive, filth and infestation, environmental deprivation, medical deprivation, and closeting. Feral children need to learn how to fend for themselves and are never going to be “normal.” Because of the neglect, children that experience this will probably not fully develop their language skills. Without the ability to speak, feral children will not be able to learn to read and write. This is because the left side of the brain is responsible for all of these things. If one cannot speak, he or she has no reason to learn to read or write anyways. Even if a feral child develops a little bit of speech, it will never be enough to be able to go back into society. A feral child may learn maybe one hundred words, like in the example
of Genie. However, even with the one hundred word vocabulary, Genie would still not be able to learn to read or write because her brain cannot fully comprehend that. In conclusion, feral children do exist in our society, and it is very sad to see how parents can treat their children in such a horrible way. Because parents abuse and neglect their children in this way, it keeps their children from socializing in society and this affects them for the rest of their lives. This does raise the question: Are feral children the way that they are because of the abuse and neglect or because of their brain? The answer is that it is a combination of both. Due to the neglect and abuse of the parents, the brain of a feral child will not fully develop or it will not develop normally. Due to the lack of development, language will not be acquired which means that reading and writing will not be possible either. Resources Brian, H. (2006). The feral child. Retrieved March 10, 2008, from Burns, M.S. (2008). Language and reading in the brain. Retrieved April 7, 2008, from Campbell, C.E. (1983). Child abuse and neglect. Brea, CA: For Kids Sake Press. Corrick, J.A. (1983). The human brain. New York: Arco Publishing, Inc. Language and the Brain: Neurocognitive Linguistics (2007, April 10). Retrieved March 12, 2008, from http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lngbrain/main.htm Healy, J.M. (1994). Your Child’s Growing Mind. New York: Doubleday. Posner, M. I. (2005). _Developing Individuality in the Human Brain. _Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association. Stewart, H. (n.d.). Feral children. Retrieved March 10, 2008, from http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/moviesfc.html Wang, W. (1991). The Emergence of Language Development and Evolution. New York: W. H. Freeman and Co. Ward, A. (n.d.)._ John Ssebunya, the Ugandan Monkey Boy._ Retrieved April 7, 2008, from