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Feral Children Research Paper

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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 …show more content…

Skeels and Dye selected thirteen children, from an orphanage, who were so mentally slow that nobody would adopt them. They placed these infants in the care of women living in an institution for mentally retarded women. These women showered the babies with attention and enjoyed taking care of their every need. The researchers also left a control group of infants at the orphanage. Their findings were fascinating. The children who were placed in the care of the wards at the institution ended up gained IQ points while the children at the orphanage, who were somewhat higher in intelligence than the other thirteen, actually lost IQ

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