Feral Children: Abandonment, Abuse, and Isolation

In the Wikipedia the definition of a feral child is a human being that was raised in an isolated environment away from human interaction from an early age, and has no familiarity of human behavior, human care and human language. Feral children are completely different from other children. They were born and raised in a different environment. The guardians the feral children had were abusive and unloving towards them. The pain and abandonment they felt is something no one should ever go through, especially young innocent children. These feral children don’t have the opportunity to learn the basic stuff like other children do. The first years growing up as a child have a huge impact on our development like learning some language skills, eating

Especially nurture which means to care for someone. Everyone needs to feel nurture in his or her life in order to have some full potential. With nurture, it is how we develop our behaviors, personalities, and our intelligences. Genie didn’t have anyone to care for her or love her; everything was taken away from her. For a proper development and attention a parent gives to their child, it was all absent in Genies childhood. At the age of 13 after she was discovered, she could barely say a word yet alone understand one word, but was so eager to learn some new words to start speaking again. The test she had taken of her brain at the Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles showed that her left side of the brain was not working and that’s where the language takes place in the brain. Her brain looked similar to some of the children that had their left hemisphere removed. The reason why it looked like this was because she didn’t start to use her left side of the brain until she was 13 years old. It is the reason why she couldn’t fully talk and make conversations with others. Critical period hypothesis basically means that a human have a window to master learning their first language. If that window is passed than the opportunity is gone to fully function. “This indicates that although certain cognitive and behavioral skills are hardwired (nature), they must be enriched through the practice of loving and caring nurture” (St. Rosemary). “On broader levels Genie followed some of the normal patterns of young children acquiring a first language, but researchers noted many marked differences with her linguistic development” (Wikipedia). She missed the most sensitive years for her functional development but slowly working to get some of that