A Feral Child With A History Of Near Total Social Isolation

In conclusion, book Schooling Children with Down Syndrome has made me question my other identities, see minute 0: 21- 0:44, that conform to dominant culture; am I conforming these popular socially accepted identities because I truly want to? or because I want to exploit and enjoy the social privileges associated with those

While reading Dr. Bruce Perry’s The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, I found the case of Peter to be the most interesting. At the age of three Peter was rescued from the inhumane conditions of a Russian “baby warehouse” in which one caretaker was responsible for the wellbeing of thirty wailing newborns (Perry and Szalavitz 218). This less than ideal solution for the issue of finding appropriate childcare left Peter and hundreds of other infants deprived of human interaction. During such a crucial period of brain development, this lack of attention had serious repercussions. Luckily, Peter was adopted by extremely devoted American parents who would help pave

Raising children is one of the most important responsibilities in any society. Today, working parents have many options, but what about those children who have neither a mother nor father? What about those children who come from broken and abusive homes? In such cases there are often few choices. Parentless children may be placed in orphanages or in foster homes. Ideally, foster care offers children more personalized attention than would normally be available at a public or private situation. However, orphanage care is notoriously uneven. While some children are indeed in loving homes, others find themselves neglected or

The TLC documentary Wild Child; the Story of Feral Children is a documentary that tells the few of many stories of children that have turned to a feral lifestyle due to parental negligence. Feral, meaning undomesticated, is the used term to describe these children because of the actions they exhibit. The accounts in this documentary range from a young girl who “was raised with the wolves” per say, but instead with her dog, to a little boy who was abandoned in a Ukrainian loft and provided the town strays with food and shelter in return for protection from them and other strays. In some of the cases detailed in this video, these children were far too old by the time they were discovered and missed an extremely crucial time frame in which

The author, Nina Biehal, tells of the treatment in foster care and the need for correction in her article, "Maltreatment in Foster Care: A review of the evidence." The author gives many facts about how the government needs to change the level of care provided for the children. This article is more of a constant reminder of how much still needs to change and the level of care offered to children of abuse today. Unlike the article by authors Kristen Turney and Christopher Wilderman, which bases their article on the number of children in foster care receiving mental health care, Biehal gives evidence to support the problems that result from being in foster care. My essay can use this article to paint a picture of the number of children in detrimental conditions and how foster care developed problems with their system to support my argument.

Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) was first introduced just over 20 years ago, with the publication of DSM-III (American Psychiatric Association, 1980). In the DSM-IV. The disorder is defined by aberrant social behavior that appears in early childhood and is evident cross contextually(1994). The disorder describes aberrant social behaviors in young children that are believed to derive from being reared in caregiving environments lacking species-typical nurturance and stimulation, such as in instances such as maltreatment or institutional rearing. (First, M., & Tasman, A. 2010) . In cases of RAD two major types of abnormalities have been cited; these include an emotionally withdrawn/inhibited type and an indiscriminately social/disinhibited pattern (First, M., & Tasman, A. 2010).Conditions in in foreign orphanages and institutions such as, multiple caregivers, maltreatment, abuse, neglect, and others contribute to the inability for internationally adopted children to form secure attachments. All of these factors contribute to internationally adopted children being at a higher risk to develop attachment disorders such as RAD and other behavioral problems.

Children suffer significantly until someone decides to protect them. The government allocates funds to establish the foster care system and that system advances to enforce rights for children. When the right to remove children from an abusive situation first originated, the foster care system established a separation procedure for children from their abusive homes. This act of removing children from their families brought about psychological issues and trauma. Throughout earlier years, the foster care system adjusted their program according to the rules and regulations established to provide for the needs of children. However, problems keep appearing elsewhere. These children endure the brunt of every new philosophy in behavioral health management. Often, the biological parents will be left out of the solution. The foster care system develops services to train foster families in caring for foster children and behavioral issues. For some reason, the foster care system believes improvement simpler to reform the children and makes a trivial attempt of the reformation with family. The foster care system needs to try to achieve bonds within the biological family instead of the sole reliability on removal of children to be an adequate answer. The foster care system’s obligation should be to develop a training system for the rehabilitation of families and offer support to achieve the greatest outcome in child rearing. Foster care needs to adapt to supporting families emotionally,

Question #2: The reading also cites a study by Chisholm et al. (1995) that indicated that children who had lived in an orphanage at least 8 months had lower scores on attachment security measures than did children who were adopted before 4 months of age. [Full reference: Chisholm, K., Carter, M., Ames, E. W., & Morison, S. J. (1995). Attachment security and indiscriminately friendly behavior in children adopted from Romanian orphanages. Development and Psychopathology, 7, 283−294.] How might this finding be related to the development of separation anxiety and fear of strangers?

Previously unnoted, abandonment and the resulting loneliness in children have lasting impacts on adult life. As abandonment becomes increasingly more common, studies place emphasis on such impacts. Dr. Frankenstein’s monster is essentially a newborn baby when created. Caregivers teach infants to seek comfort,

Genie’s case is heartbreaking. Not only did she suffer unimaginable traumas during the first 12 years of her life, but her case resulted in a tug-of-war from researchers who wanted to help her, yet wanted to further their own agenda. It was particularly sad to hear that she had returned to live with her mother at age 18, and then entered the foster care system when her mother realized that she was ill equipped to care for her daughter. She was subjected to further trauma and abuse,

Feral or wild children are a rare phenomenon that has been seen on occasion for centuries. They are defined as a human child who has lived in isolation from human contact from a profoundly young age. These kids have had little or no experience of human care, behavior, and language. The three categories of feral children are: children who are raised by animals, isolated children, and confined children (FERAL CHILDREN). A child who wasn’t left on their own purposefully would be classified as isolated; whereas if they had been left alone purposefully the classification would then be confined.

Humans require nurturing and human interaction in order to live a normal life. Once an infant is born, a parent cares and watches for the child. The parents teach the child how to communicate, walk, and know what’s right and wrong. Humans require their humanness through social interaction. Without socializing, a human can be brought up differently. Even though children are biologically human, they don’t have the instincts or natural drive that makes them human. Social interaction is needed such as personality, love, freedom, justice, right and wrong, and reality. Humans are the social creations of society. For example, feral children. There are hundreds of documentations on cases of feral children all throughout history. These feral children had been raised without human interaction or by other animals they have come in contact with. There was a case in 1974 about a young boy whose story was similar to Tarzan. In central Africa, he was discovered at only six years old with a group of gray monkeys. For many years, he still remained a monkey by eating only fruits and vegetables and jumping up and down in excitement. Also another case with a young girl named Anna. Throughout her life she lived in seclusion and loneliness. Her grandfather refused to acknowledged her existence while her mother ignored her and kept her in an attic. Once she was discovered by a social worker they

Research conducted by Webb and Brown (2003) into the effects of hospitalised children ranging from between the ages of one to ten years has ascertained that for these children who have been neglected with limited social interaction, were compared to Harlow’s 1960s research into neglected and social isolated

But what if we were completely untouched by society, isolated from all forms of humanity? Without other people to interact with and learn from, babies would grow to be nothing more than a wild animal. Every human being is born with the potential to develop into an intelligent, social creature, but without human influence a person can never develop into what we consider to be a member of human society. One can clearly see this through the reports of feral children. There has been only a few cases reported and very few studied. In cases from the past feral children are reported as wild children who could not speak or communicate in anyway. These children bit, scratched, growled, and walked on all fours. In addition to this primal behavior, they ate grass, ravenously tared apart small animals and devoured the raw meat. The most shocking quality of the children was their apparent lack of sensitivity to pain or cold. (Henslin 66-7) The most famous case of a feral child was “The wild boy of Aveyron” in 1798. At first this case would have been written off as just another folk tale, but a French scientist, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, conducted immense studies of the

While a mother was escaping an abusive relationship in search of welfare assistance, she took her thirteen-year-old daughter along with her. “Genie,” as she was called, intrigued the social worker in the welfare office. She was mesmerized by Genie’s posture, size, and stance. Curiously enough, the worker thought Genie might have been a case of unreported autism in a possible six- to seven-year-old (Rymer 1993). As a result, the worker notified her supervisor, who contacted the police.