ABSTRACT
Heredity or Environment Alone Can Produce Large Personality Differences. Families of low economic status produce more than their quota of low I.Q.'s, school retardation, truancy, and delinquency. Families of high status produce children who are more competent, especially in the handling of words. They produce at least their quota of emotional problem children. There is abundant evidence that the cultural environment of underprivileged groups is mainly responsible for the inferiorities they show on being tested.
Ten years ago, Gesell discussed the possible future development of thirty-three infants. Today he checks on his prognosis of thirty of these children and his findings seem to indicate that there is reliability in early predictions of future mental growth. These are based on evidence of infant behavior in test situations dealing with “posture, locomotion, prehension, manipulation, and adaptive language, and social behavior.” [Gesell et al., 1939.]
Seen as a whole, these biographies seem to indicate that there exists at birth an inherent capacity for a particular rate and limit of growth and that environmental conditions, although they play an enormous part in the development of this capacity, are nevertheless limited in the extent of their influence by the hereditary constitutional factors. *
In his Developmental Diagnosis Gesell provides a description of tests which the average baby should be able to pass at each given age level. These can be given in 20 minutes' time, and afford a measure, the developmental quotient (D.Q.), which, like the I.Q., is the ratio of test age to actual age.
Thus at twenty-eight weeks, the average baby is “socially pretty wise, recognizing strangers, grows impatient as he sees his mother prepare food, shakes a rattle, sucks his toes, plays with his image in a mirror, talks to his toys.” At forty weeks he “uses the index finger, poking and prying, sits up by himself, plucks a string, creeps, pulls himself to his feet against the railing of his pen, can say 'mama, dada,' and one other word; at mealtime, holds, his bottle.” At eighteen months, “walks alone, seats himself with care, looks at pictures, turns pages two or three at a time, knows ten words, helps feed himself, hands his empty dish to his mother, runs stiffly, constantly shifts his attention.” *
Kingsley Davis [1940] actually observed a child who, for the first five years of her life, had been kept in a remote room of a farmhouse away from other people, with very inadequate care. After being taken to a country home, then to a foster home, and then to a school for defective children, the little girl improved slowly. She is still, however, at this report, on an idiot level.
Putting together the various facts of the case and comparing it with several others which have been reported in literature, Davis believes that the backwardness of the child is due mainly to her isolation and not to a congenital defect. The case furnishes additional evidence for the Cooley-Mead-Dewey-Faris theory of personality development, namely, that personality develops mainly through contact and communication with other persons. If this communication has been absent or seriously defective up to the age of eight or ten years, there is little or no hope of the child's ever “catching up.” Davis thinks that with this child, who was removed to a better environment before the age of six, there will be some improvement, but never the development that could otherwise have been expected. †
In 1920 Rev. J. A. L. Singh, a missionary in India, discovered two, children living in a den with wolves and brought them up in his orphanage. They habitually went on all fours and had to be taught to walk upright. They craved raw meat and preferred the company of dogs to that of children. In time one of them became socialized to the extent of a fifty-word vocabulary, ability to run simple errands and play with other children. Neither became “normal” (nor lived beyond seventeen). [Zingg, 1941.]
A study by Marie Skodak found sixteen children, whose mothers were feeble-minded,- and who had been placed in a foster home above the average economically and socially at an early age (under six months) “indistinguishable in mental development from children whose mothers are not feebleminded. The results indicate that if a child is physically normal and if placement is made at so early an age that the child experiences essentially only the environment of the foster home, the mental status of the mother ought to be no bar to the placement of the child in a permanent foster home.” ‡
