The emerging social behaviour of the child must reflect the interaction between the child’s disposition and the environment. Parents instinctively adapt to the temperament of their children, but this can be shaped by cultural norms. For example, some cultures, such as in Germany, seem to encourage independence, whereas Japanese children traditionally spend more time with their mothers and do not cope with Ainsworth’s strange situation so well. This indicates that both the natural disposition of the child and the environment work together to shape the emotional and social behaviour of the child.
Remarkably, studies of infants followed up as adults reveal that the way we respond as infants to social separation stays with us to some extent as adults. Our infant attachment patterns appear to influence our emotional attachment to partners later in life.49 Those infants who develop a normal pattern of wanting their mother, and then settling easily back in when they are reunited, are more likely to go on to form relatively stable relationships as adults. They find it relatively easy to get close to others and are comfortable being dependent on others and having others depend on them. They do not worry about being abandoned and are comfortable in intimate relationships. In contrast, those who had formed an insecure attachment to their mother are either too needy and clingy for fear of being abandoned or, if they were avoidant as infants, they typically do not want to get too close to others or allow others to get close to them.50 Of course, if these adults go on to have children, then it is easy to see how adult attachment can influence the shape of the environment of the next generation.
Who would have thought that our first love would be the deepest, having long-term effects on how our romantic relationships work out as adults? You can just hear Freud tutting in the background, ‘I told you so.’ However, not everything is cast in stone. Relationships come and go and can change over the course of a lifetime, and some may have more impact than others. Circumstances and environments are constantly changing and unpredictable. The early attachment effects, like other individual differences, are more likely to be dispositions that interact with the multitudes of factors that shape our personality over a lifetime. These early attachment effects may reflect temperaments, cultural variations, parenting styles and all of the above but it seems unlikely they will determine how we turn out with any certainty. One thing that is certain is that whatever may be the role of early factors, it is critical that they play out in some form of social environment. We need others in order to develop, not just for nurturing and care, but to become socialized.
Babes in the Woods
In 1798, a naked boy, aged somewhere around ten years, wandered out of the forest in the province of Aveyron in France.51 The villagers had periodically spotted him but no one knew who he was. More likely or not, he was one of the many abandoned children left to die in the woods during these hard times when infanticide was commonplace during the French Revolution. But somehow ‘Victor’, as he was later called, managed to survive. When the local villagers eventually caught him, news of Victor reached Paris where his plight became a cause célèbre. In the spirit of the Revolution, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau had argued that man was born inherently good but that society corrupted the noble savage within all of us. Victor was the first test case of this argument and so the Parisian intelligentsia was eager to meet him. As a child uncorrupted by society, Victor could be the living embodiment of Rousseau’s noble savage.
However, Victor was far from noble. He was violent, made animal noises and defecated indiscriminately. At first, it was thought that he might be deaf and mute, so he initially spent time in the National Institute for the Deaf and Dumb, but it soon became apparent that Victor’s problem was more than simply not being able to communicate. A young Parisian doctor, Jean Itard, who had been treating children at the Institute, described Victor in his memoirs as:
a disgusting, slovenly boy, affected with spasmodic, and frequently with convulsive motions, continually balancing himself like some of the animals in the menagerie, biting and scratching those who contradicted him, expressing no kind of affection for those who attended upon him; and, in short, indifferent to every body, and paying no regard to any thing.52
Itard believed that with patient training, Victor could be integrated back into society. At first, progress looked promising as Victor started to understand spoken commands. He even managed to wear clothes. However, his ability to communicate did not develop further and after five years of intensive training, Itard abandoned his attempt to reintegrate Victor into society. Victor remained in the care of Itard’s housekeeper until his death in 1828.
Wild or feral children like Victor have periodically cropped up to stimulate public interest. What would a child without any parenting or experience of other humans be like? Would they ever acquire a language? It is reported that, in 1493, James IV of Scotland ordered two infants to the island of Inchkeith in the Firth of Forth to be raised by a mute woman because he wanted to know what language the children would end up speaking if they never heard another human talk. According to the diarist, Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie, who reported the incident some years later, ‘Sum sayis they spak goode Hebrew.’53
Clearly feral children have been sparking the imagination of intellectuals interested in nature and nurture for centuries. It makes good fiction – remember the young boy Mowgli raised by wolves in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book or Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes. We are interested because we want to know the natural dispositions of humans and what they learn from the environment. What is their self like in the absence of parental influence?
One problem in answering this question is that many of these cases come from poor, isolated, rural communities and so it is difficult to get sufficient background information and details. In one of the better-documented cases from the 1970s, psychologists studied ‘Genie’, a fourteen-year-old girl who had been kept in social isolation from infancy in the backroom of her psychotic grandfather’s condo in Los Angeles. Like Victor, she had limited communication and understanding, despite the concerted attempts of speech therapists and child psychologists to rehabilitate her.
The case of Genie has been used as evidence to support the critical period of social development, but without knowing the initial state of these children, it is still difficult to draw firm conclusions.54 Maybe they were abandoned because they were already brain-damaged. In reviewing the case of Victor, child development expert Uta Frith observed that he displayed many of the characteristics of severe autism.55 We also do not know whether and to what extent early malnourishment of feral children contributes to potential brain damage. Maybe it was not the lack of social interaction so much as the damaging consequences of not being cared for by others who provide the necessary nutrition to develop normally. However, the fall of a Romanian dictator in 1989 would reveal that both physical and psychological nurturing is essential for long-term social development.