titus n. owl

[Error: unknown template qotd]I don't have a firm opinion on the first matter, but whenever the "nature vs. nurture" debate rears its head I come down strong and hard on the "nurture" side of the argument. Most of my siblings have been foster or adopted, all of whom came from very bad backgrounds - my parents are the "high risk kids" specialists for the foster care system they're involved with. Most of them were "crack babies." All of them were from poor families, parents in jail and/or on drugs, the kids themselves underfed, neglected, abused physically or emotionally - these aren't options for each kid, mind you, all of them were underfed and neglected and abused. They've all come to our family with behavioural and emotional problems; they've all been undersized when we got them (the little brother of mine who wants to be a spy when he grows up was wearing "preemie" sized clothes until he was about six months old, I shit you not). They've all turned out just fine. Tiny-tot Spy-boy is now 7 or 8 years old, taller than my mother, hale as a horse; he was developmentally delayed and didn't learn to talk clearly until he was 4, but is now a surprisingly clever conversationalist with a great sense of humour and something of a native genius at science and math problems (I know science and math aren't directly related to speech, but they were saying he was actually retarded when he was younger). My parents take babies with terrible starts, and raise kids who are above average. We also all act related - there's a range of emotional temperaments in my family, with my mother being a person who is Serious and Does Not Talk About Emotions and my dad being a person who is Goofy and Believes In Constant Reassurance Of Affections, and me, for instance somewhere in the middle where I am Goofy but Do Not Talk About Emotions; but all the kids end up sharing elements of the "family temperament," we almost all get my father's quick temper and equally-quick laughter, and given we've had more kids than I can count over the past 15 years I think the odds of every single one of them just coincidentally having been born with those temperamental factors already are pretty slim. So I am definitely a Nurture rather than a Nature proponent.