Genie: The Secret of the Wild Child Writing assignment

What can studies of feral, isolated, and institutionalized children tell us

about child development? Based on these studies, do children really
need parents to develop normally? Is it necessary for infants to be
around adult human beings in order to become “human” themselves?
-What peculiar habits did Genie have? Did she overcome them? What
aspects of language did Genie learn after she was discovered? What
aspects of language did she not learn?
-In the case of Genie do you consider this to be research or exploitation?
What conflicts developed between Genie's best interests and the
research program? Could both goals have been achieved?

1. Studies of feral, isolated, and institutionalized children enlightened

the importance of how being around your child and teaching them
things that are most common for every individual like speech and
motor skills. Children definitely need their parents in order to develop
normally, if a parent doesn’t teach their child things that happen to be
important in everyday life it becomes harder for them to experience
life, allowing them to have to teach themselves at a later age. It is
especially important for infants to be around they're parent as they
actually know nothing due to the fact they are so new to the world.
Having that adult figure around helps them gain knowledge everyday
without us realizing because it's so normal for us and it seems we've
always had those skills but our parents did the same when we were
younger.
2. A few peculiar habits genie had were, a 'bunny walk', sniffing, not
talking, making odd noises and grunting. Genie did overcome her
habits for a bit. She started to repeat words that were said to her, and
also got better at walking. But, later on she moved back with her
mother, the abuse started again and she became nonverbal again.
This is a sign that she has started to feel more comfortable and that
she wont get any harmful consequences for common human actions.
Genie learned linguistics, she used language to describe what she
 went through when she lived with her parents. Some aspects of
language Genie did not learn were grammar, not being able to put a
full sentence together. So later on after being taken away from her
foster parents and put into an adult caretaker home she learned to
communicate with sign language.
3. I consider the case of Genie to be research, it shows how being very
involved with your child at a young age is very important, although the
researchers did seem to get off track a bit from Genie. Children take
after the actions of their parents, so if they are stripped away from
that, they'll become confused about how things are in society.
Conflicts that have been developed between Genie and the
researchers were the researchers seemed to have cared more about
their needs and benefits coming out of helping Genie, than actually
putting forth the effort and giving Genie the help she whole-heartly
deserves. Both of those goal definitely could've been achieved if the
right people were around, people who weren't just looking at Genie
as a 'cash grab', due to the researchers focusing on the less
important factor, Genie's mother happened to file a lawsuit against
the team of researchers as she felt like they were exploiting her.
Overall I did enjoy this film. It's something very eye opening, because when
you're younger you never realize how important it is to have an adult
guardian to guide you and help you with simple things like being able to talk
in a full sentence or hold a pencil. Speech is such an important aspect in
everyday human life, so growing up and getting abused for the sole reason
of just talking or making any form of sound is quite traumatizing, especially
for a young child that should already know how to communicate fluently
and piece together a full sentence.