Nature vs. Nurture

01/15/2004

"True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice." - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

NATURE VS NURTURE

In the January 2, 2004 issue of Who Cares? Recent Developments in Caregiving, the issue of nature versus nurture is revisited:

"A study of identical twins from poor and wealthy families has revealed 40 points lower IQ scores among the poor, and an average 15 point difference between members of individual pairs for the wealthy but a much smaller difference among the poor. The University of Virginia study, released Dec 27 2003, speculates that poverty and environmental factors can actually decrease IQ, accounting for 80% of the decline in scores.

"A second study, by Reynaldo Martorell of Emory University has found that children of Guatemalan women who were given nutritional supplements in their first two years of life scored 33% higher on academic tests than those who had no supplements."

Who Cares? editor Beverly Smith adds this editorial comment:
"It is also useful to consider that IQ tests usually require language fluency and are sometimes culturally and socially biased to, for example, identify certain nursery rhymes or sayings. Given that inherent problem with IQ tests, the idea that the poor are less intelligent may be a bit condescending. Many will use such a finding to promote the idea of giving early childhood education to the poor, but this is not the same as believing the parents are incompetent to provide it and the child should be whisked away to an institutional setting. Many of the very poor for instance have parents working two jobs and never able to spend much time with the child. For them the solution may not be daycare at all, but more time one on one. In the Virginia study one of four mothers had less than a grade 9 education and half the fathers were absent. These kids already are struggling with lack of anchor role model and whisking them away to strangers may not help."

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