Nature/Nurture: Moma's Boys -made or born that way?
 

A very annoying person at pottery class was whining about how hard her life is because all three of her kids are Momma's Boys.

1) Methinks she doth protest too much
2) Do you really get 3/3 Momma's boys by chance?

But she railed at someone's (thinly veiled) suggestion that she made them into momma's boys (after talking about how she got no sleep and couldn't leave the house for three days because the toddler had a fever and wanted to nurse all the time) but I think the nail might have been hit on the head.

Did she make her bed and now needs to lie in it, or get seriously unlucky and needs sympathy? Or is it just wishful thinking and it's her way of defending her smothering of them?

And is being a Momma's boy really so bad?

How else will she fulfill her need to be completely needed and depended upon...for way longer than is normal? Invent some other supposed malady?

But needing your mom is a good thing, as long as the kid still gets to grow and learn independence.

Fine line I guess. What do I know? :)

Made by momma and born that way are sort of the same thing if you squint your eyes a little.

Then there's that great 2 part graffiti:
My mother made me a homosexual.
If I buy her the yarn will she make me one, too?

Nature through nurture. Kids have tendencies but it takes a true psycho parent to go 3 for 3 with Nancy boys.

I see a lot of traits in my big boys that their father has, particularly Aden and they have had no influence from him at all since they were about 11 or 12, and even then it was pretty spasmodic.

I think there's a bigger argument for nature than I previously thought, but I think nurture is equally to be held responsible for kids outcomes.

Parents generally do the best they can, but are their parenting actions the product of nature or nurture? And then what impact do those actions have on the kid? How much of who they are is nature versus nurture?

I need to chart this shit out. So let's say 50% of a kid's behavior is due to nature, and 50% is nurture, but of that 50% nurture, the parents who are responsible for the nurturing owe 50% of their behavior to nature and 50% to nurture. So really, of the kid's 50% nurture, half of that is really from the parent's nature. So the kid is 75% nature after all. And then what do you do to account for the grandparents? and their grandparent? You have to start getting in to mathematical limits and shit like that, and it's been too many years since I took that stuff. Seems to me it works out to being all nature in the end.

Or it could be that our entire concept of intelligence is wrong, because the very simple models we are given for of how it operates do not explain so much.

Like, in this 50%/50% model, how many of the children decided to use language to communicate, and how many communicated in dance?

This is a leading question and I am trying to not do that any more. The number is 0. I guess because language is a cultural layer on top of intelligence that is deeply rooted enough for us not to detect how significant it is. It is passed along to 100% - and yet feral children do not communicate this way*.


*No, from my Wikipedia gatherings on feral children, there aren't enough true and well-documented cases to draw any broad conclusions on how truly feral children think or operate.

I am hereby requesting Griff's opinion on the Critical Period hypothesis

There are a lot of twin studies that support the argument for nature.

On a gut level it makes sense. Neural pruning takes place at different stages of development which could eliminate capacity in unused regions of the brain. However the brain is turning out to be more plastic than was taught in the dark ages when we were in school. With the right intervention I bet language could still be acquired although it'd be a much more difficult task requiring a lot more repetition... That's my wild-ass guess.

So is the 'black box' theory about language acquisition in children still relevant or is there a new theory?

If they haven't yet, I would assume that neural scientists are probably working out exactly what brain structures constitute the black box. It is an exciting time in that field. The brain can wire around damaged tissues and re-purpose areas so explaining my wild-assed guess further it can probably wire around self inflicted (neural pruning) damage. But damnit Jim, I'm a behavioral therapist not a neural linguist (if that's a thing)! My kid is interested in studying that brain stuff though. Classicman would have some insight...

They've done fMRI scans on autistic patients who didn't learn to speak until a later age, and for many of them their "native language" paths are laid out where the "foreign language" paths would be in a person who grew up normally then took a second language in school. Basically they have no native language, and what they do know came from rote learning instead of instinct. It doesn't shed any particular light on why they missed out on the instinctive language window in the first place, but one side effect is that for those who do force through and learn to speak as a "second language," they get that same benefit native speakers have in that learning a "third language" is relatively easy after the structures have already been developed for a "second."

Case in point, my daughter still speaks English a bit like an immigrant--reverses word order, conjugates verbs incorrectly especially in future and past tense, can't come up with common words but can talk around the deficit ("the pink rectangle" if the word "book" escapes her, for example,) but she is miles ahead of the other kids in Spanish class.

How cool is that!?

Don't they have Jesuits in Australia?

"Give me a boy for his first seven years and I'll give you the man."

By the time they're 11 or 12 it's all over but the shouting.

Yeah, maybe. I just don't know. The waters are so muddy. I think both of my husband's have left a bit to be desired in the way of modelling what it means to be a man -from my perspective. They both seemed to like sitting on the couch all the time. Not a great thing for young boys to watch all the time. To Daryls credit he was working a lot of that time, but still, I don't think it's a great example for kids to think it's ok to just sit on the couch all the time.

That's why I occasionally lie flat on the couch. To mix it up a bit. ;)

So.... these ones are definitely made/wishful thinking. Today a normally quiet and always pleasant classmate said -after Momma left- words to the effect of "could she shut the fuck up?"

She went on for three entire hours about her boys. She did not stop talking the entire class. Although for twenty minutes it was a loud cellphone conversation rather than directed at the rest of us. Still about her three boys. Who are all mama's boys and can't manage without her (except, apparently, when she has pottery class)