Nature or Nurture?

There was an interesting article a few weeks ago in the WSJ that described how nature and nurture might interleave to produce a child with certain characteristics.

There has long been a debate regarding the importance of genetics on how a child turns out. Another group argued that equally important, if not more so, was the importance of the environment the child grew up in. This was actually the them of "Trading Places".

It turns out the two are inter-related in a way that had not occurred to me.

When a child is born, he/she might be predisposed to behave a certain way. Of particular importance, it turns out, is how often he/she smiles. Parents like smiling kids, and will interact more with them if they are smiling. So, if genetics make a child more likely to smile, you get more interaction, positive reinforcement and all kinds of good things.

What happens if a child does not smile as an infant, or frowns a lot, or cries a lot. Parents get "testy", and the child does not receive the postive feedback and attention. Indeed, short tempered parents may start yelling at the child, and doing a variety of things that stunt the childs emotional and intellectual growth.

The key is that the nurturing environment does not exist in a vaccuum, but rather, is dependent to an extent on what nature provided the child.