Reality
Feral children lack the basic social skills that are normally learned in the process of enculturation. For example, they may be unable to learn to use a toilet, have trouble learning to walk upright and display a complete lack of interest in the human activity around them. They often seem mentally impaired and have almost insurmountable trouble learning a human language. The impaired ability to learn a formal language after having been isolated for so many years is often attributed to the existence of a critical period for language learning, and taken as evidence in favor of the critical period hypothesis.
There is little scientific knowledge about feral children. One of the best-known examples, the “detailed diaries” of Reverend Singh, who claimed to have discovered Amala and Kamala (two girls who had been “brought up from birth by wolves”) in a forest in India, has been proven a fraud to obtain funds for his orphanage. Child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim states that Amala and Kamala were born mentally and physically disabled.
Read more about this topic: Feral Child
Famous quotes containing the word reality:
“That reality is ‘independent’ means that there is something in every experience that escapes our arbitrary control. If it be a sensible experience it coerces our attention; if a sequence, we cannot invert it; if we compare two terms we can come to only one result. There is a push, an urgency, within our very experience, against which we are on the whole powerless, and which drives us in a direction that is the destiny of our belief.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)
“A major misunderstanding of child rearing has been the idea that meeting a child’s needs is an end in itself, for the purpose of the child’s mental health. Mothers have not understood that this is but one step in social development, the goal of which is to help a child begin to consider others. As a result, they often have not considered their children but have instead allowed their children’s reality to take precedence, out of a fear of damaging them emotionally.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)