Nature Vs Nurture Child Development

Child development is a field of developmental psychology that deals with the different changes seen in a child cognitively and biologically. In medical terms, it is defined as “The processes by which a child acquires skills in the areas of social, emotional, intellectual, speech and language, as well as physical development including fine and gross motor skills. The developmental stages refer to the sequential order of acquiring skills that children typically go through during the various stages of life.”1 Childhood development is not limited to the developing stages of a child, i.e. between the stages of birth and puberty; it also includes the stages of the fetus inside the womb and the adolescent stage of children between 13-19 years of

nurture aspects of child development. The argument of the paper is to show the larger influence nurture has on the behaviour of individuals, especially children as compared to the nature(genes and inheritance) of an individual. Though, both nature and nurture have good points to support their stances, it is argued that a person’s environment and surrounding have a greater influence on their development rather than the genes they inherit even though both of them play vital roles in the overall formation and developmental process. This viewpoint is shared by many behaviourists and psychologists. Nature, the physiological aspect of the debate believes that behaviour is innate rather than learned. It is believed that the hereditary traits in genes define children’s thoughts and personalities. On the other hand, nurture stresses on the external influences and surroundings that children come into contact with as soon as they are born as the real foundation of behaviour.3 Though it may seem and look like nature has the upper hand because of the scientific aspect of it, there is no true evidence that shows that genetics has that much of an influence on child development like nurture. “The coding of genes in each cell in us humans determine the different traits that we have, more dominantly on the physical attributes like eye color, hair color, ear size, height, and other traits. However, it is still

In a research study that was published by “faculty at the Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology unit at St. Thomas ' Hospital in London in 2000—Happy Families: A Twin Study of Humour —suggests that a sense of humor is a learned trait, influenced by family and cultural environment, and not genetically determined.”5 This means that even though twins share the very similar DNA sequence, different traits are acquired as part of their interaction with environment and does not wholly depend on genetics. Another piece of evidence that weighs heavily in favor of nurture and the study of twins is a podcast that was done by a multimedia news organisation called “NPR”. In that podcast, Peter Miller, a senior writer for the National Geographic gives the example of a set of twins with autism. Autism is a genetic trait and is inheritable and that is why both of these twins inherited it but at different degrees. In his talk he questions why does one have a greater degree of autism than the other. This is where he states that he believes that child development has to do more with the theory of nurture rather than nature. He comments that this exception of twins has been playing on the minds of psychologists for years and he believes the answer has something to do with the science of epigenetics where DNA can be changed and some genes can be “turned off” or “turned on” in