Reflection On The Wild Child Documentary Film

Summary

Wild Child was a documentary focused on a girl that went by the name of Genie who was isolated by her parents. Her father assumed she had a mental disability and thought it would be best to keep her socially isolated from the world. For a little over 10 years she was locked in her room with no attention and was usually strapped to a child’s toilet. In the video, people used her as an opportunity to learn about the brain and how lack of language knowledge affected the learning process in a person’s later life. The people worked with Genie to try to get her to learn how to talk and live and teach her everything that she should already know by this point in her life. Through the months that they worked with her, taught her and studied her, she was able to get some words down, understand them, and be able to put them together. They may have made sense in her head, but she was unable to speak the words and put them into a coherent sentence that was grammatically correct. So it became very difficult for people to understand her, and it looked as though it was something she would never be able to get over. This marked her as disabled for the rest of her life.

Class Connection

Genie experienced social isolation from the world, although not as bad as a couple of other stories mentioned in the textbook, she had the worst outcome of them and received permanent damaged and suffered disabilities for the remainder of her life (which she is still alive and living in a home for disabled adults). Genie struggled greatly with language and even through learning she wasn’t where she was supposed to be. At age 13 (when she was found), if we’re looking at Jean Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development, she should be in the “Formal Operational Stage” which means that she should be able to think abstractly, but her mental development was around that of a one year old so she was in the “Sensorimotor Stage” (which was the first of four stages) and couldn’t use language or symbols, only her five senses (Macionis 116-117). I believe that that would be scary, but from Genie’s perspective she had no idea what was going on. Everything in her life was what she knew, and she probably couldn’t put it together that what she was going through wasn’t normal. She didn’t know that by 13 she should be able to talk and read, make connections between things, and think abstractly. Genie didn’t have any agents of socialization to help her life a normal life.

The most important agent is the family. The family gives the nurture in the young life of a child and teaches them initially about race and social class and culture. Family is supposed to teach about race and how what you are can affect your life, but with Genie being a white female she wouldn’t have had as many problems in society as if she was black. Same with her social class, high class has fewer problems than those in low social class. Another agent is the school which Genie was withheld from since her father believed her to be intellectually disabled. In school, once you’ve learned the basis of talking from your family and where your place is in the world, you learn the importance of your place and how you fit in with other genders and students on top of the formal lessons in the classrooms. Genie didn’t get to experience any of that which is why her mental development didn’t develop. She didn’t have any of the interactions that would help develop her mind and personality. Without these interactions she didn’t find a peer group that had similar interests as her (she didn’t have any interests due to the isolation), and she never really experienced the difference between the “good friends” and the “bad friends” that most people get influenced by throughout their lives. “Every social experience we have affects us in at least a small way” (Macionis 120). With no social experiences, Genie had nothing to affect her in any way, and therefore she lacked the one thing that makes every human, human: social interaction. In class it was brought up that she had a brother who experienced abuse as well but not to the same extent as Genie did, he was able to develop mostly normally and experienced a lot of the agents of socialization since he attended school and had the social interactions that Genie didn’t have.

Personal Reaction

I think what happened to Genie was absolutely terrible. I disagree with how much the tested her and mentally strained her to learn how she learned. I disagree with what her father did to her and her brother in terms of the abuse and isolation. Although, I sympathize with abuse and isolation, of course I’m not in the same mental state of Genie because my abuse started in my teen years compared to her and hers starting at infant ages. I know what abuse is though and my reaction was to hide in my room and not face people. I feel like hiding away from the world disconnected me from a lot of things that I needed in life when it came to social interactions. I didn’t have a lot of friends in school, and if I wasn’t in school, I was at home hiding in my room. I portrayed this for all years of high school and the first year-ish of college. It took me a while before I started to interact more with people as I gave people more of a chance and tried to trust them more. That allowed me to join some more clubs and get involved in college and start making new friends and get that agent of socialization with the peer group that I never really got in high school.