- In your opinion, do you think NATURE or NURTURE is the most significant?
- It is my belief that the power of nurture is immensely more influential in shaping a person than nature. Because nature could only provide a formula for a person’s appearance or other physical characteristics. While nurture will contribute to a person’s personality, likes and dislikes, the good and the evil, and ultimately, their moral values. For example, if a child grew up in an abusive family by constantly witnessing domestic violence when he/she grew up, they are likely to become a person of violence themselves or to become an advocate to stop domestic violence. All of these shifts are solely based on their childhood memories. Even though the scenario that they might become a person of violence themselves is more likely to happen, does that mean they are a violent person by nature? I don’t believe so. In a similar analogy, if a person starts to smoke at an early age, you can bet that there is a smoking environment that influences their perception that smoking is of no harm to them. Now, let’s use Canadian swimmer Maggie MacNeil as a positive example. She was an abandoned orphan in a Southern Chinese province of Jiangxi. She was eventually adopted by a white Canadian family. If she was raised in China, I could almost guarantee you that she would not have been a professional swimmer, let alone an Olympics medalist. However, because her foster parents noticed her talents in swimming and her family was fairly financially capable of supporting her. She eventually won a gold medal for the Canadian Olympics swimming team. If that does not speak to the power of nurture, I don’t know what does quite frankly. It is genuinely impressive, don’t you think?
- What were THREE (3) topics discussed in the Genie Wiley clip that you found to be important or interesting?
- The Genie Wiley clip mentions that the parents specifically chose to isolate their daughter from the rest of the world, or community, per se. This, quite frankly, perfectly corroborates and supports my previous statement that the nurturing factor of parenting plays the ultimate critical role in shaping what a kid grows up to become. In this case, although the daughter was able to recover and integrate herself into the rest of the world, her lost childhood, and the fact that her parents are locked up, leaving her without a family or a torn apart family, is also a huge tragedy that she is going to spend the rest of her life trying to comprehend and to heal. Also, what I find interesting is that the brain requires regular stimuli in order to develop properly throughout the phases of growth. Whichever parts of the brain that we do not use will be lost in the developmental stage. This kind of reminds me of the concept of “use it or lose it” in osteology. This also speaks to the idea we, the parents, should simply just “let kids be kids.” Instead of trying to force our kids into thinking and behaving in a certain way that we deem proper and just. And, of course, we should still enshrine our kids with proper moral values and the right and wrongs, dos and not-to-dos in society. However, values aside, we should let kids do what they do best, and that is to play so that way they are able to discover their interests. In the previous example of Maggie McNeil, the Canadian Olympic gold medalist, if it weren’t for the foster parents discovering her swimming talents, she would have never become a professional swimmer, let alone to being a medalist. Again, if she grew up in Asia and were raised by her biological parents, for me, knowing how a typical Chinese parent would raise their kids and how they would indoctrinate them with their own beliefs, wills, and expectations, she would not even have a chance to discover her own swimming potential.
- In the clip about the identical triplets, what was the significance of their Socioeconomic level or where they grew up?
- Again, in the identical triplet clip, it was identified that although the identical brothers carried on with their separate lives, the power of nature brings their physical characteristics to an identical match. They can hug, smile, and behave similarly, but when it comes to their career options, that is where the power of nurture by the parents comes into play. Because of their own separate life experiences and their respective adoptive parents’ moral values, their ways of thinking and how they interact with society will be fundamentally different from each other.
- Please choose ONE (1) Theoretical perspective: Conflict, Structural Functionalist, or Symbolic Interactionist, to apply to EITHER clip shared above. Either the story of the 3 Identical strangers OR the Genie Wiley story.
- The story of these three identical triplets is a good example of symbolic Interactionism because they were forcefully separated at birth, not knowing each other’s existence. It was only after that they had grown up and developed their own perspectives of the world that they finally came to meet with each other. Although their physical gestures are mostly identical, their individual constructs, that is, personality, likes and dislikes, moral values, and all of the things and factors that play a critical role in societal stability, differ completely, and that, quite frankly, was shaped through the power of nurture through their adoptive parents’ use of language, gestures, discipline, and interactions.
- Background Story:
- In most Asian countries, there is a widespread consensus that male offsprings are vastly more preferred than females. This view has only been exacerbated in China because, in ancient China, societal stability surrounded the idea that males were an additional source of income and additional laborers for the family farms. Therefore, these twisted and foolish ideologies were passed on from generation to generation and eventually to modern-day China. So with that said, to answer this original question. All I could say is that if I had been born in China as a female during the 1990s, I probably would not have survived up till now. I would likely have been aborted as a second child since it was at the height of the one-child policy.
- Agent of socialization: One-Child Policy / My Parents
- How did this dynamic make you feel?
- Well, I survived to see the light of day so I should be glad, but it was completely at the mercy of my gender advantage during those turbulent and troubling times.
- Is gender socialization a topic you have thought about before or is this somewhat new for you?
- This is not anything new, particularly and simply because of the harsh reality and the consequences of the infamous one-child policy. In recent years though, China has been suffering from a population crisis which means, that, due to the low birth rate, there are a lot more seniors than working young people. This would lead to a decrease in tax revenue for the Chinese government and a sharp decline in labor for their manufacturing sector jobs. And this, quite frankly, is not even accounting for the extremely disproportional male and female ratios in China.
- If we use this short movie clip from The Mask You Live In (2015) and your personal experiences as a reference, what is the significance or impact of gender socialization?
- All I could really say is that parents, especially Asian parents, need to grow out of that male dominance or preferences state of mind and embrace the fact that both genders could carry out similar tasks. I am not trying to say that females have to be equal to males or vice versa, but at the very least, they should be exposed to equal opportunities and, as a matter of fact, choices. And after being exposed to those opportunities, the decision of where our kids want to pursue their life is up in their hands, and parents should not have an ultimatum on their kids to be in a certain way, provided that the correct moral values are properly enshrined at an early age. At the end of the day, if your female offspring chooses to pursue a completely feminine and traditional way of life, they should be able to choose that life, that is, after they know about the other alternatives, and at that point, the choice is hers.
- How might your words or actions as AGENTS of socialization impact others?
- Well, governmental policies affect not just how we raise our kids but also could result in a life and death sentence at conception. All I can say is that policymakers need to make policies that affect social structures more slowly and cautiously. A good example of that is immigration policies here in the U.S. We, here, in the U.S., also have a relatively low fertility rate for developed nations. However, the influx of immigrants to our country, especially skilled immigrants, fills up that labor market so that we can sustain that low birth rate. A bad example of this is Japan. Japan also has a population replacement crisis, similar to China, where the working population is shrinking as senior’s life expectancies are drastically longer. But because they are not very tolerant of immigrants and their immigration policies are harsh enough to disincentivize people from moving to Japan, their labor force will continue to plummet, and that, my friends, is an ultimate ticking time bomb.
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Clover's Tree Hollow 