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How Nature and Nurture Affect Human Development

This document discusses the roles of nature and nurture in human development. It defines nature as inherent traits from birth and nurture as environmental influences. While parents aim to shape their children, research suggests nature plays a larger role than nurture. Examples are given of individuals like George Washington Carver who succeeded despite difficult environments, indicating strengths from innate nature. If excellent parents can have poor children and vice versa, normal parenting differences have limited effect on character compared to genetics from nature. Overall, both nature and nurture impact development, but nature plays a greater role in shaping individuals.

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Elias Kalumbilo
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528 views2 pages

How Nature and Nurture Affect Human Development

This document discusses the roles of nature and nurture in human development. It defines nature as inherent traits from birth and nurture as environmental influences. While parents aim to shape their children, research suggests nature plays a larger role than nurture. Examples are given of individuals like George Washington Carver who succeeded despite difficult environments, indicating strengths from innate nature. If excellent parents can have poor children and vice versa, normal parenting differences have limited effect on character compared to genetics from nature. Overall, both nature and nurture impact development, but nature plays a greater role in shaping individuals.

Uploaded by

Elias Kalumbilo
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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HOW NATURE AND NURTURE AFFECT HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

Nurture is the sum of environmental factors influencing the behavior and traits expressed by any organism. While, Nature is the inherent character or basic formation of a person or thing. (Merriam Webster Dictionary). For centuries people have wondered what role does nature or in other words, one's inherent traits from birth, and nurture or the role of one's environment play in the development of ones social and psychological identity. Parents attempt to raise the perfect child, the one that reflect their values and goals. But many times they are troubled to discover a stranger in their child; when the child they raised is nowhere close to what they want him/her to be. Recently, researches try to conclude that nature plays a major role in the shaping of an individual rather than nurture. Below has discussed and given example how nurture has only a limited effect on early phases of human development as compared to nature. How an individual turns out to be a good person in spite of tremendous environmental conditions is not the case for parents and other environmental factors influence on a child's growth. The biography of the famous American scientist George Washington Carver would be a very good example. He emerged from slavery to become one of the worlds most respected and honored men (Bellis, M. 2008). Here one asks the question of where all the courage and strength came from to deal with such hard and discouraging conditions, when there were no obvious supportive environmental influences. The very believable answer to this question would be that these individuals were born with it; it was in their genes (nature). If excellent individuals can raise poor offspring and poor parents can produce excellent offspring, differences in parenting (nurture) within the normal range are unlikely to have a major effect on a child's character and personality.

Conclusively, I think that nature and nurture, both of them are the bases of the personality and development; we can not neglect each of them. However, nature plays a major role in the shaping of an individual rather than nurture.

References
Bellis, M. (2008). George Washington Carver, retrieved on 7th Nov 2011 from http://inventors.about.com/od/cstartinventors/a/GWC.htm http://www.merrium-webster.com/dictionary Joseph, J. (2006).Nature vs nurture. New York: Algora.

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