Infants....

[intothevoidx]

I was wondering if a baby were to be fed, and kept healthy, but did not receive interaction from the parents, how would this affect the baby? Someone once told me that the baby can become depressed and actually die......I find it hard to believe, but is there any credibility?

[insane_alien]

i don't know about it dying but it would certainly have a lot of psychological problems. i mean lack of interaction will cause even grownups to go insane.

[aj47]

Actually there was a program on this on channel four recently called 'feral children' which showed the physical/psycological effects of children raised by animals or without any human contact. There were some pretty horrible cases i.e in 1970's when a father caged his 2 year old daughter in a dark room and kept her there with out human contact untill she was found at 13, or a few cases where children had been abandoned and raised by animals.

 

Anyway with the majority of cases, after being found the child would have severe problems with launguage and social interaction. The majority also had severely underdeveloped brains and smaller cortexes with areas such as wernicke's and broccas being affected. There would be physical problems i.e 'psychogenic dwarfism' where the child would not grow properly due to the extreme emotional deprevation preventing growth hormones from being relased or in a lot of cases excessive growth of body hair.

 

So yea there are many psycological and physical problems caused by lack of human interaction, however I don't think these children would die as a direct result of them.

[intothevoidx]

Hmm I was searching on google, and I found an article claiming that infantile depression is linked to SIDS. So perhaps it can lead to death?

[CanadaAotS]

The question is how they linked it to SIDS...

 

I saw that Feral Children program as well... the children (depending on the age they were rescued) had permanent problems. The "wolf girl" managed to learn language and interact socially, but would sometimes revert back and start barking like a dog, panting, walking on all fours, etc.

 

Same thing with the little boy left in an abandoned apartment building that had wild dogs living in it.

 

I think the "cut-off age" for it was around 13... any later and the children (or teenagers I guess at that point) would probably never fully learn language or social skills.

[wiggy]

I surpose in ways it might lead to SIDS, but I cant quite see how though!!! The programme on channel 4 open my eyes to how much we do need each other to be sociable enough to communicate etc. Its not something we will ever find out though