In Sociology there are many interesting topics, people and facts that are discussed. I personally find this class to be very interesting with the new material that’s taught to me. In my breakout session I attended Friday, I learned about socialization and at the end I was assigned an assignment. My assignment was to find a section in chapter 3 that was interesting to me and express my opinions on it. The most interesting section to me was, Isolated Children. The first thing that pops into my head when I think of isolated children is being away from society. As well as being closed off from people, the community, sports and many other very important things a child needs while growing up. Isolated means separated, or being apart from others. If children don’t have the opportunity to be around other people when they grow up, they will never know how to do many different things. This is why this section interested me so much. I think one of the most important things kids need to learn is how to communicate with others (in other words their language). It stated in the book that language is key to human development.
Without language, there can be no culture or shared way of life- and culture is key to what people become. In this section, there was a story on a young girl named Isabelle who was mentally damaged. She was unable to speak due to being isolated her whole life. She wasn’t allowed the proper development a normal child is provided when growing up. Isabelle was able to get help and eventually started working with other people to get her back on track to where she needed to be. She took an intelligence test and scored a zero on it. After a year of working on her vocabulary skills she started improving. Isabelle finally reached the intellectual level that was normal for her age. She went on to school and was involved in activities like the rest of the kids in her class. Isabelle is now a healthy, bright, cheerful young lady. It frustrates me that parents do this to their own kids. I find it very striking that they think it’s normal to let them grow up this way. Every child should be provided a healthy lifestyle. I do agree and believe that language is key to culture and communicating with others and without that, life would be very difficult.
I don’t think enough people pay attention to children who are isolated. Maybe its because people don’t realize how serious the long term effects are on children, or maybe its because people think kids can recover from it easily. Well that’s not the case. It’s a very serious situation and I think it’s important everyone stays alert so we can try to decrease the amount of children who are faced with this.
