Nature vs Nurture Essay

The controversy of nature vs. nurture has been disputed for years. Nature vs. nurture refers to the question of which factors are most significant in determining development; those related to heredity or environment. It has been reported that some scientists think that “nature” is referred as the importance in heredity as the major determinate also known as “nature” the theory of human behavior. The nurture theory scientists believe that people think and behave in certain ways because they are taught to do so.

This is an ongoing debate and understandably so. I do believe that both nature and nurture play apart in development. Nature in my opinion I’d suggest that one of the reasons that people believe in the nurture effect is that they also believe in an overarching assumption about the importance of timing of experiences. This latter assumption, called “infant determinism”, the belief that experiences that occur in the first months and years of life have a more powerful influence on the individual than later events. In Jerome Kagan’s book, Three seductive ideas, the “seductive idea” ration that notable exception imply young children are occasionally said to be too young to remember unpleasant events. The connection with the nurture assumption, of course, is that the infant years are the period when nurturing places most demands on parents, and when poor care practices have the most immediate and obvious impacts on the child. Understood that evolutionary adaptation is a critical but short time in development. The imprinting process is reported to be resistant to change that the behavior is made to be innate, according to ethnological notions are crucial for human development (Kagan, 2000).

An additional apprehension in parsing the nurture assumption is that there is an clear alternative to the effect of nurture: that children’s genetic make-up determines their personalities and abilities. However, these two factors, heredity and experience, do not always exist independently of each other, and it can be quite hard to tease them apart. For example, one type of relationship between genetic characteristics and experience is evocative in nature. This means that individuals with certain genetic characteristics may behave in ways that cause them to have atypical experiences. An unusually active, rough-and-tumble child may have more physical injuries and more disapproval from adults than a quieter individual (Harris, 2009). Children do not simply receive nurture passively, but actively shape the experiences they have with parents and with the rest of the world.

Inquisitively, even people who believe strongly in the nurture assumption will often blame bad behavior on “bad company”, “getting in with the wrong crowd”, and “peer pressure”. Conversely, the evidence is that children and teenagers who associate with “bad elements” have usually been rejected by more normally-behaved children and have found friends among other rejected children (Harris, 2009). Certainly members of each of these groups will learn from each other once they begin to associate, in my opinion the important question is, what made them associate to begin with?

According to Harris; children are more prominent and that there are behaviors and abilities that kids are likely to learn mostly from peers. For example, a parent may tolerantly participate in compromise about a child’s dinner time, play time or bed time; nonetheless in fact the parent hold the power that the negotiation is only apparent. The real thing is child-to-child negotiation, with two people of similar resources doing their best to figure out a compromise that will give them part of what they really want. Parents may let a child cheat at a game, or tell a transparent lie, but other children will be exceedingly critical and may even refuse to associate with someone who repeatedly does these things. Children are the ethical experts who tell each other when secrets may or may not be told; later, they learn adult standards, but from other children they learn that standards exist and may even preclude telling your mother how you got hurt.

In my outlook, “The nurture vs. nurture” controversy there are a great deal of factors that are important during development. I believe that not all of the dynamics are equally important at every developmental stage. A factor should not be rejected all together because it does not appear influential at a particular period of development. In my view “nature vs. nurture” should be viewed as a combination of genetic characteristics including life experiences and the time the practice took place.

References
Harris, J. (2009). The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn out the Way They Do. New York: Free. New York: Print.

Kagan, J. (2000). Three seductive ideas. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP. Print.

Nature versus nurture at AllExperts. (n.d.). Expert Archive Questions. Retrieved April 29, 2010, Retrieved from http://en.allexperts.com/e/n/na/nature_versus_nurture.htm