Sadie Jackson

Evans

Child 300

10 July 2017

Children will inherit many traits from their biological parents such as allergies, health

problems, and other behavioral attributes. The environment the child grows up in plays a huge

role as well with their adoptive parents lifestyle impacting the child’s own opinions and way of

thinking. The adoptive parent’s status, and levels of education can also affect how the child

grows up. Although, we also need to take into account the prenatal environment as well. What

the infant experienced while in utero. The birth mom’s nutrition, stress levels, and overall health

while she was pregnant. All of these factors influence the baby before they are even born. Both

nature and nurture play a large role in the child’s development, they work together to shape the

child into the person they grow up to be. Although, prenatal experiences and inherited genes play

a bigger role in a child’s development rather than environmental factors growing up.

What is the nature vs nurture debate? Jordan outlines the specifics of each side in his

research. Nature being what children inherit from their parents biologically and nurture being

what children learn for themselves from the varied environmental factors of how and where they

are raised (Jordan, 2003). While, Pléh explains the history of each side and the roles that they

played since the 1960’s. She believes that both nature and nurture work together and you can not

have one without the other (Pléh, 2012). Both biological and environmental factors do play a role

in the child’s development but in the long run nature has more of an effect.

There have been a number of case studies that have been performed among adopted

children to look at how nature and nurture really affects human development. Adopted children
are the perfect sample to look at as they have different biological genes as their adopted parents

but have environmental factors of their adopted parents raising them differently. Grotevant

discusses the issues and effects that occur with adopted children, “Adopted children are at higher

risk than the general population for problems with adaptation, especially externalizing,

internalizing, and attention problems” (Grotevant, 2014). Burt agrees with Grotevant as these

studies are vital to the study of nature vs. nurture (Burt, 2012).

How a child is raised also affects their cognitive development in later stages in their life.

Plomin did a research study on adopted kids and how they developed later on in life. He

discovered that biological factors play a much larger role in the development on humans as

children became more like their birth parents rather than the environment they grew up in

(Plomin 1997). Plomin also discusses how as children develop and grow up they become more

like their biological parents in the ways they think, and form attachments (Plomin, 2014).

We can also get different parent’s perspectives on how they view the nature vs. nurture

debate. Harold did a study on children with ADHD, “Utilizing the attributes of two genetically

sensitive research designs, the present study examined associations between biologically related

and non-biologically related maternal ADHD symptoms, parenting practices, child

impulsivity/activation, and child ADHD symptoms” (Harold, 2013). We can also see biological

differences in siblings even though they have the same genetics and grow up in the same

environment (Kamran, 2016). Overall, we can see how much more impactful nature, or the

biological influences have on human development.

Bibliography:
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