feral children

Post Reply New Topic

today i was reading about feral children. these are kids that basically are either lost and live with animals for a few years or grow up with limited human contact.

as i understand autism better it seems to me they're basically abandoned in some manner.. which is probably for a reason.. and it would seem to me these kids are undiagnosed autistic.

what do you think?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_of_Aveyron

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_%28feral_child%29

I also have an interest in feral children. It is a huge complex issue, that can't be summed up in a few sentences or even paragraphs. I've read about some disabled children who were abandoned or driven out of their homes by their parents specifically because of their disability. And some feral children who were locked up in a room their whole lives and severely, horrifically abused and neglected. It is never the child's fault that their parents have a mental illness.

I think Genie was mentioned in a documentary (UK) several years back. A famous feral child was 'Peter the wild boy':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_the_Wild_Boy

Scientists now believe he had Pitt-Hopkins syndrome which is quite interesting.

Are those stories reliably documented? Seems to me like it would be close to impossible for a human infant to live with animals ... i.e., without the care of human parents.

But if the stories are reliable ... which kind of animals were they? I suppose I could imagine, for example, a chimpanzee mother caring for a human infant. But wolves or some such? That just seems too far-fetched to me. How on earth is a wolf going to care for a human infant properly?




That situation seems more plausible to me. Terribly tragic, but plausible.

The documented cases of children living with animals were older children, not infants.

I've heard of some cases where abuse and neglect can resemble autism. Abused children engage in many of the same behaviors, such as stimming, may avoid eye contact, and may be mute and/or refuse to talk outside of certain sounds.

From what I was hearing, it may be that autism is essentially a social learning disability. The brain is wired differently such that it does not recognize and cannot engage with the social environment. In the case of abused children, the children don't have anything neurologically different about them, but the social environment just isn't there or is so messed up. Either way, both may lead to similar results. It is also why many cases of autism were originally thought to be due to abuse... it's difficult to tell the difference without knowing the child's history.

It's certainly an area where more research and study needs to be done. As is, though, I find the topic pretty fascinating.

There were also Tarzan and Mowgli. But both wore some sort of panty rather than being completely naked.

Although I found the original Tarzan story to be preposterous hokum, it actually did contain some interesting aspects from an anthropological standpoint (I majored in anthropology in college).

For instance, the matter of language acquisition in the infant Tarzan. The window for language acquisition in young children does not appear to extend indefinitely. If a child does not have some form of spoken language by a certain age (nine or ten perhaps? No one really knows an exact figure), then he/she is not likely to ever do so. This was accounted for in the Tarzan story by having the apes who raised him to be of a fictional species that did in fact have a spoken language.

That in itself is quite a stretch, of course. None of the world's ape species today has anywhere near the physical vocal equipment necessary to speak. Nonetheless, I found it interesting that the author of the Tarzan story took that into account, whether it was intentional or not.

There were other things, as well. But I suppose I'll let it go ...

Feral Children: So much for us lacking empathy and lack of empathy being connected with evil.

We learned about feral children in my Sociology class. These kids are not undiagnosed autistic. They are the unfortunate victims of terrible parents who have neglected them to the animals and abandoned them (except in the rare cases where children geniunely became lost and were raised by animals). These kids live the way they were raised as all children usually do. They are raised by their animal "parents" and have no outside peers to give them another point of reality (as other children who are raised in bad homes might). If one happens to have autism, it is mere coincidence.

I'm still curious as to what types of animals were involved. I could conceivably see young children living with a group of great apes, but it's difficult for me to imagine what other wild animal would accept a human child.

I've seen examples of them being raised by wolves, one boy with a wild cat (cheetah, maybe?), and a few girls raised by packs of street dogs. I'll see if I can find any clips or anything...

This is one of the girls we learned about:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljVd6XS-J0s[/youtube]

Here is part 1 of a documentary:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STn3bpTTU6c You can go to the link and click on the other parts from there.

I wondered that when I saw the movie L'Enfant Sauvage by Truffaunt. It was made in 1970 and is based on a true story of a French doctor who ran a school for deaf kids in 18th century France and wrote a book about a feral child that he took care of for a while.

Here's a clip

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBlGeb_f_jU

The story goes that hunters found a feral boy who looked about age 10 in the woods in the mid 1700's and brought him to the deaf school this doctor ran because the boy couldn't talk. He morphed into a ward of the French government as soon as he was found and was put in this school. The deaf kids rejected him unilaterally (!) so the doctor decided to homeschool him with a grant from the French government for this social experiment.

At first the doctor assumed he was mentally ret*d. But then he noticed the boy had excellent visual memory and revised his asumption to thinking the boy was born with normnal intelligence but ferality made him seem mentally ret*d. In this clip, the doctor is capitalizing on the boy's excellent visual memory to teach him. In a later scene the doctor makes what is essentially a PECS board out of wood blocks and the boy uses it to communicate. He also does what is essentially Lovaas style ABA with aversives- which is hard to watch.

Truffaunt wasn't trying to show an autistic child. The doctor certainly has no concept of that in 1750 (or whenever it was). But he seemed autistic in that he ultimately turned out to be a very visual learner with an excellent memory who craved routine and structure (another observation the doctor recorded and Truffaunt filmed). They never meant to make a movie about autistic feral children but that's what it looked like.

Ultimately the boy did not morph into a speaking, NT-acting French person so the French government took him away from the doctor and institutionalized him. Experiment over.


It made me sad for what could have been. Although he is not credited with it, this doctor seemingly invented IEP education, PECS boards and ABA. And then it all went in the trash when the boy was instiutionalized and had to be re-invented 200 years later. How far could we have come if teaching to a disabled person's strengths had become the norm? What if that wooden PECS board was made broadly available? What if ABA with aversives had 200 years to be refined so that by today, ABA would be unrecognizable from what he invented and actually far, far better than it is today? What if ABA sucks so much because it hasn't had the 200 years to improve that it could have had if these things didn't die with that French doctor?

Maybe people really did chuck children into the woods when they didn't develop as expected and this kid (who was a real kid) was autistic as well as feral? What if he had stayed with that doctor instead of being institutionalized? It made me want to take a time machine back and say "wait, wait, don't institutionalize him. Let him stay with this doctor and then let the doctor go on a lecture tour all over Europe showing off his wooden block PECS board" and then where would we be?

I heard about that kid as well. Saw the documentary years ago--one of the first ones I've ever seen about feral children.

I still don't think it has to do with autism. It said in numerous documentaries that I watched that children who pass a crucial developmental period in the wild will never learn the skills (as NTs would have them) because that crucial time has passed for certain things. Communication and interaction will always be different and lacking, but not because of autism but because of a lack of human interaction and/or neglect. Most of them know communication and social skills that are important in the species they were raised in. Their brains did have the capacity to learn them. From a human perspective this is abnormal, but when you look at it: NT children learn human communication and social skills when raised in a nurturing context. Autistic children do not learn them subconciously in the same way. Those feral kids are just as connected to the species that raised them as NT humans are to theirs. This indicates that most of them likely are NT, who just have passed the developmental milestones to learn the languages and interaction, etc of HUMANS.

what some posters are missing is the reason WHY these children were abandoned and became feral in the first place.

given how overwhelming an autistic child can be to deal with, what surprises me is that this isn't more frequent