[blam]

My mother used to say that some people were 'Born Bad.'

Maybe she was correct.

[blam]

GGG Ping.

[pabianice]

If true, this means that violent and criminal kids cannot be changed but must instead be locked-up for the protection of the rest of us. Gritty stuff.

[Mad_Tom_Rackham]

[Old Professer]

Ayup!

[SunkenCiv]

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[Smokin' Joe]

Observing children and grand children (and now a great-grand!) they all display distinct personality traits early on if people are paying attention.

The nurture part deals with reinforcing the valued traits and putting a lid on the less desireable behaviours.

With so many parents abdicating their role in favor of daycare or other surrogates (at best), it should be no wonder the results are jumbled.

The whole argument was old when Mark Twain wrote Puddin'head Wilson.

Then, too, some folks just ain't wired right...

[SunkenCiv]

nature vs nurture

Google

tabula rasa

Google

[SunkenCiv]

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/genome/debate.html

“We simply do not have enough genes for this idea of biological determinism to be right,” asserted Craig Venter, president of Celera Genomics, one of the two teams that cracked the human genome last February. Indeed, Venter has wasted little time in playing down the importance of the genes he has catalogued. He cites the example of colon cancer, which is often associated with a defective “colon cancer” gene. Even though some patients carry this mutated gene in every cell, the cancer only occurs in the colon because it is triggered by toxins secreted by bacteria in the gut. Cancer, argues Venter, is an environmental disease. Strong support for this viewpoint appeared last year in the New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers in Scandinavia studying 45,000 pairs of twins concluded that cancer is largely caused by environmental rather than inherited factors, a surprising conclusion after a decade of headlines touting the discovery of the “breast cancer gene,” the “colon cancer gene,” and many more.

[Venter actually used his own cells during the billion$ sequencing of the genome, and as a consequence started taking some prevention measures for other possible future illnesses supposedly telegraphed in his own genes. Nice work if you can get it.]

[Swordmaker]

So, a child is born already hard wired to be a liberal or a conservative and the parent’s values have nothing to do with it.

I don’t think so...

[maine-iac7]

Why Home Doesn't Matter Translation: Therefore, the State can take over the training (aka indoctrination) - the parents will legally be only caretakers: feed, cloth and house. But never forget, they belong to the State. (Have they been talking to Hillary)

[AZLiberty]

But this is a mistake: parents influence their children mainly by passing on their genes. The biggest environmental influences on personality are those that occur outside the home

Most of the comments have addressed the first sentence here rather than the second. The second sentence is only true to the extent that parents give their children over to society rather than take responsibility for them themselves.

Home school bump!

[ThanhPhero]

I have one quibble with this and that is language. I have been around many immigrant households from non-English backgrounds, most Vietnamese, some not. Uniformly, those families that insist that only English be used in the household, even thought the parents do not speak it well, produce children with heavy accents in English. Those families that speak only their native language at home produce children who speak both languages without accent, or rather, with the accents of, respectively, their parents in their native language and their peers in English.

It is not that the author is "wrong" but I think he overlooked that difference.

Aside for personal aesthetics: Girls who retain a bit of a Vietnamese accent in English have one of the most pleasing sounds in the language.

[Kevmo]

bmflr

[John Leland 1789]

You know, this is pretty obvious. If you send your children out of the home and away from their parents for most of their waking hours, and then the children sit in front of a TV or computer screen while they are in the home, the parents are not going to be the major influence. This is a big D U H!

But how about home-schooled children that are with at least one loving parent almost all of the time? What if the source of information going into their pea brains is from parents and older siblings, instead of public school teenage sex maniacs and teachers in their 20s who, morally are trained by the humanists in the university systems? What about the children in homes where the HOME has always mattered and still does?