Effects of Early Stimulation or Deprivation - Essay Example

Feral Children In the book, Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children, there are many examples of cases that were documented about “wild children”. This topic is extremely important in the context of Human Growth and Development when seeing how impacting the raising and the environmental setting of the child will either inhibit certain trait development and influence the development of others. The impact of “feral children” often becomes applicable to scenarios such as children who develop without or with minimal care giving by parents.

This could be applicable in the field of criminal psychology where we look at the deprivation of care giving and the effect on the child psychologically and physiologically. The case in particular was about a child named Ivan Mishukov who lived in Russia. When he was 4 years old, due to an unsatisfactory living environment, ran away and decided to take a life to the streets. It was not uncommon for this to happen. He specifically started relating to random dogs that were wondering on the streets.

He became psychologically and physiologically associated with dogs. The movement and behavior of the child began to resemble that of the dogs. This consisted of locomotion on all fours as well as sitting like dogs with their specific hip girdle placement. He also began begging similar to the dogs including whining and sitting attentively for food. This is where the psychological aspect came in. He shared his bounty often with neighboring dogs and in their sociological construct became the pack leader.

The interesting aspect of the case was that he knew and understood human language having lived the first few years of his life with other humans. They put him in rehabilitation which started out hard. This was due to the fact that his defense mechanisms had become to resemble that which dogs use such as snarling, barking, and biting. After spending a few months in rehabilitation, the damage has almost been reduced, except for the fact that he “still dreamed of dogs” (Newton, 2004). References Newton, M. (2004). Savage girls and wild boys: a history of feral children.

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