I found the discussion of the relative importance of nature and nurture in shaping us into the people we eventually become especially interesting from my own personal perspective as an adoptee.
I was born in Romania to illiterate, uneducated Roma parents who had no resources to take care of me and bring me up, so they turned me over to the state right after I was born. I spent the first eight months of my life in a Romanian orphanage where the orphanage workers, the first agents of my socialization, were poorly trained, poorly paid, and far too busy taking care of hundreds of abandoned babies. I have since learned that conditions in that place were pretty bleak. Food was in short supply, medical supplies were scarce and primitive, and toys were nonexistent. I spent almost all of my time there confined to an iron crib with peeling white paint, in room with about a dozen other babies. When I was eight months old, the agents of my socialization changed dramatically. I was adopted by my adoptive parents and brought home to Minnesota.
My genetic inheritance is obviously from the biological parents I have never met. I have a picture of them, and of my maternal grandmother, that my adoptive parents took when they adopted me. I can see some family resemblances in that picture, but I really have little or no idea what kind of non-physical traits I may have inherited from them. For me, the contributions of nature on my identity remain mostly a mystery.
In contrast, I know a lot about the agents of my socialization since my adoption. My adoptive parents were able to provide me with a very comfortable middle class life in Minnesota, in stark contrast to bleak environment I had in the orphanage. All of a sudden, I had food, clean clothes, all necessary medical care, toys, and, most importantly, parents to socialize me. My new parents were determined to provide me what the orphanage workers could not: physical security, cognitive stimulation, and love. When I was adopted, I got a new culture, a new social class, a new language, and a new name. In a sense, it was a new identity.
Last summer, my parents and I traveled to Romania to see where it all began for me. We went to the village where my biological parents lived and learned that both my mother and grandmother have died. My biological father was not in the village, so I could not meet him either. But with the help of Romanian social services personnel, I was able to meet one of my brothers and one of my sisters. Both are younger than I and both were raised as wards of the state. I saw physical resemblances between myself and my brother, especially, and I can see that we seem to have similar smiles and demeanors. (Crooked teeth seem to run in our family, although mine have been fixed with braces. My siblings are not so lucky.) My brother’s education opportunities have been limited, however, and my sister’s have too. I am certain that I am the only person in my biological family that has had the opportunity to get a college education.
Although meeting two of my siblings provided me with a few clues about nature’s contribution to who I am today, it also demonstrated how important environmental factors really are in a person’s upbringing. I got a brief glimpse of what my life might have been like had I not left that orphanage at eight months old.
It is a lot to think about.
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