Feral Children

In class yesterday, we watched a video on Feral children, that is, children that grew up without human contact. The video theorized that after a certain age, children are not able to aquire many skills that regular humans have been taught and obtained. There was a story of a girl named Jeanie. She had been kept in darkness without any human contact for quite some time, and when the authorities finally found her, she was about 13 years old. Many specialists worked with her to try and help her learn all of the skills that most people are taught as babies. Jeanie made a lot of progress, but at a certain point was unable to obtain anymore information. Humans learn most of the basic things, such as walking upright, social manners, and talking, as a baby. When one is not taught these skills by a parent or adult, they fall behind, and may be lacking in these skills. In other cases like we saw in the video, children turned to animals that were living by them and actually picked up their behavior and began acting like the animals they were with. If you are thrown out into the street as a child and are raised and nurtured by dogs, then you will act like a dog, even if you are born a human. In the article we read, it said that we are one of the only species that will take on characteristics of another if we are subjected to them or raised and nurtured by them. We would take on the characteristics of a dog if we are nutured by them for a long time, but a cat would not.
I don't find it surprising at all that we can so easily learn to take on the mannerisms of another species or that it's so easy for us to drastically fall behind if we are not taught as an infant how to be a human. Generally, we spend about 18 to 20 years of our lives with our parents, being taught, in a sense, how to be a human. When some of those 18 to 20 years are taken away, we lose a lot of time to learn human skills. If those years that are taken away from human parents are replaced by another species, it only makes sense that we will pick up their characteristics and behavior. Yesterday's video and today's article really made me think about how fragile the human mind really is and how easy it is to alter what we think and change the way we live completely just by changing who it is we are raised by.