What is a "Feral Child"?
A feral child (also called wild child) is a human child who has lived isolated from human contact from a very young age, and so has had little or no experience of human care, behavior, or human language. There are several confirmed cases and other speculative ones. Feral children may have experienced severe abuse or trauma before being abandoned or running away. They are sometimes the subjects of folklore and legends, typically portrayed as having been raised by animals.
Description
Feral children lack the basic social skills that are normally learned in the process of enculturation. For example, they may be unable to learn to use a toilet, have trouble learning to walk upright after walking on fours all their lives, or display a complete lack of interest in the human activity around them. They often seem mentally impaired and have almost insurmountable trouble learning a human language. The impaired ability to learn a natural language after having been isolated for so many years is often attributed to the existence of a critical period for language learning, and taken as evidence in favor of the critical period hypothesis.
There is little scientific knowledge about feral children. One of the best-documented cases has supposedly been that of sisters Amala and Kamala, described by Reverend J. A. L. Singh in 1926 as having been "raised by wolves" in a forest in India. French surgeon Serge Aroles, however, has persuasively argued that the case was a fraud, perpetrated by Singh in order to raise money for his orphanage. Child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim states that Amala and Kamala were born mentally and physically disabled. Yet other scientific studies of feral children exist, such as the case of Genie.
History
Prior to the 1600s, feral and wild children stories were usually limited to myths and legends. In those tales, the depiction of feral children included hunting for food, running on all fours instead of two, and not knowing language. Philosophers and scientists were interested in the concept of such children, and began to question if these children were part of a different species from the human family.
The question was taken seriously as science tried to name and categorize the development of humans, and the understanding of the natural world in the 18th and 19th century. Around the 20th century, psychologists were attempting to differentiate between biological behavior and culture. Feral children who lived in isolation or with animals provided examples of this dilemma.
Homepage Sources
- Mihai, Andrei (December 1, 2014). "Mind Blowing Cases of Children Raised by Animals". ZME Science. Retrieved February 20, 2015.
- David Birdsong (1999). Second Language Acquisition and the Critical Period Hypothesis. Routledge. p. 74. ISBN 978-1-135-67489-2.
- Susan Curtiss (10 May 2014). Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day Wild Child. Elsevier Science. p. 207. ISBN 978-1-4832-1761-1.
- Bettelheim, Bruno (March 1959). "Feral Children and Autistic Children" (PDF). American Journal of Sociology. 64 (5): 455–467. doi:10.1086/222541. JSTOR 2773433. S2CID 144015209.
- "Feral children". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2018-07-02.