The Importance Of Feral Children

A feral child is a human child who has lived away from human contact from a very young age, and has little or no experience of human care, loving or social behavior, and human language. Feral children are confined by humans, brought up by animals, or live in the wild in isolation. In cases where feral children are found, they are not capable of developing the ability to understand language and speak said language. There have been numerous cases of feral children that were found and attempted to be put back into society.
One of the most notable case of a feral child was a young boy from France named Victor. Victor lived in the woods around Saint-Sernin-sur-Rance in France. He was caught and given to people to be cared for, but escaped back into the forest where he would live a few more years. In 1800 he was found and given to French physician, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard. Itard spent five years caring for Victor and attempted to teach him language and empathy. At first Victor showed significant progress in understanding simple words and language, …show more content…
They never amount to anything due to their handicaps. The ultimate goal in understanding feral children is to eventually make them normal and productive members of society. To understand feral children better there needs to be a way to communicate with them to understand what is going on in their mind. If we can communicate with them and understand their problem we can hopefully normalize them. An important question to take into account to understand feral children is what if they were mentally challenged before they became feral? What if all the feral children discovered suffered from learning impairments before they were lost? Or what if they were autistic? These questions present a problem in understanding feral children because we simply do not know their condition before becoming