Feral Children Research Paper

Running Head: FERAL CHILDREN Feral Children Ana Karina Sifuentes California Baptist University Abstract Feral children are children that have been neglected and/or abused. There are some cases in which a child is left to fend for himself and is sometimes taken in by wild animals. These animals treat these children as their own and raise them. Because the children have no human contact they become feral children. After being neglected for so long, a part of the child’s brain will eventually close off and the child will not be able to learn how to socialize as a regular human. There have been many experiments done to try to help these feral children. Psychologists have made progress, but never enough to where the child is ever going to be …show more content…
These feral children are able to copy what they see the other animals do because these are “hard-wired” through our sensory and motor skills (“Feral Children”). However, language and communication are more dependent on postnatal experiences and the environment that the child is born into (“Feral Children”). The child will then develop skills and develop according to the environment he or she is growing up in. When a child is growing up, there is a time when he or she is primed for acquiring language and communication skills. If the child is deprived of human contact during this time, he or she will probably never learn to speak. Because one must be able to speak in order to learn to read or write, feral children will never be able to read and write. It is very sad to see how the life of an individual is so dramatically altered when he or she is abused and neglected. Feral children are those children that will never live healthy lives. They do not know how to act normal. Those raised by animals will only know how to act like an animal. Yes, they can learn how to socialize themselves a little bit but not enough to function in society. Those children that were closeted do not understand what emotion is or what …show more content…
Humans usually take this for granted as well. The brain works very hard to absorb all the information that is can get during the cumulative years of a child’s formative years. The first five years are crucial to the development of a child. Feral children do not get this because it is very important to have human contact. Most feral children did not get the love that children need. The neglect that feral children receive greatly affects them for the rest of their lives. Neglect can be failure to thrive, filth and infestation, environmental deprivation, medical deprivation, and closeting. Feral children need to learn how to fend for themselves and are never going to be “normal.” Because of the neglect, children that experience this will probably not fully develop their language skills. Without the ability to speak, feral children will not be able to learn to read and write. This is because the left side of the brain is responsible for all of these things. If one cannot speak, he or she has no reason to learn to read or write anyways. Even if a feral child develops a little bit of speech, it will never be enough to be able to go back into society. A feral child may learn maybe one hundred words, like in the example