Nature versus Nurture. Which plays a bigger role in shaping a person?
When it comes to opinions on what shapes a person, there are two dominant ones, and each has plenty of supporters. One of them suggests that Nature (or Genetics) plays the biggest role in shaping who a person would become. They justify it by stating that just like certain traits like height, hair, and eye color and vulnerability to certain diseases, certain talents, and character traits are inherited from parents (McLeod par. 5).
The proponents of that theory are called Naturalists. On the opposite side of the spectrum, there are the Behaviorists. They believe that conditioning and nurturing is what determines who a person would become. The basis of their theory relies on a statement that the mind of a child is a blank slate, and what fills that slate determines the future of individuals (McLeod par. 8).
Personally, I believe that both factors play an equal part in shaping a person. There is plenty of evidence to prove so. I have known people who grew up in a family of alcoholics but ended up being decent human beings, due to positive influence from their teachers in public schools. I have also heard of people who have wonderful parents, but who ended up becoming criminal due to falling in with a bad crowd.
The fact that there are so many controversial cases indicates that neither side is completely right and that the truth is somewhere in the middle. It is nearly impossible to make a general correlation between the genetic factors, conditioning factors, and what the outcome is. This is why I think that each case should be considered separately, instead of making a gross generalization.
Reading to babies and Jean Piaget’s cognitive theory of language development
It is widely recommended by many psychologists worldwide to read to their children, while they are little, usually when they are under 1 to three years old. This has to do with the cognitive theory of language development, introduced by Jean Piaget – a Swiss psychologist that studied the development of cognitive processes of human beings. Her reasoning is that at the very beginning of life, a child’s mind is like a blank slate, and during the first year of infancy, it is only learning to control its own body. The same goes for the mind – the child will memorize and will try mimicking sounds made by parents, without understanding them, like a parrot. The more sounds and words an infant hears, the more it will memorize and replicate (Thompson par. 2). It becomes important when a child is being taught to speak.
I have a foreign friend, who had been read books to when he was very little. His parents told me he was a bit of an oddity – he did not speak at all until he was three years old. However, when he finally did, it was not with singular words or primitive sentence constructions. They read whatever classical literature that could be found around the house. When I asked the parents why they did so, the answers differed. The father said he was raised the same way, and such a practice was common in his family. The mother said she was initially skeptical, but was convinced by a doctor to change her mind. This difference in opinion is due to a difference in cultures – the father is from a well-educated family in France, while the mother is a migrant from a rural area somewhere in Poland. Her family did not have many books.
The second example would be another friend of mine. She is a single parent and did not have the time to read to her child. She regrets deeply not doing so, as her child ended up having trouble learning to speak. He was unable to properly communicate even at the basic level until reaching the age of five.
Works Cited
McLeod, Saul. Nature vs. Nurture in Psychology. Web.
Thompson, Scott. Jean Piaget’s Theory on Child Language Development. 2016. Web.