Nature v Nurture

I was listening to Radio 4 this morning & people were talking about their childhood & how it formed them. As I move into older age I do, very occasionally, think about what has made me the person I am. I feel oddly disconnected from it because it was so long ago & because my memories of it are very poor, but I know enough about psychology to know that our formative years are just that. The first 5 years lay down patterns of behaviour, habits & attitudes which are very hard to break as adults.

My home & my life was very ordinary in many ways. My father was a manual worker, who worked nights throughout my early years, so I rarely saw him. My mother had occasional, unskilled, part time jobs to suppliment his wage. They had both left school in very early adolescence. My father could read, but at the level of Tit Bits, the News of the World & Daily Mirror, which I later learned had a reading age of around 9. My mother was probably the cleverest one, but neither of them had had the opportunities I have had.

My mother valued education, but my father didn't really think it was important for girls. My mother won. I am eternally grateful.

I now realise how impoverished life was in the community of Higgins Lane. There were very few books in the house. I cannot remember ever having stories told or read to me. There was no music other than the "light" music of the radio in those post war years. There was no TV, so BBC radio provided all our entertainment.  http://www.turnipnet.com/whirligig/radio/  Looking back it was all very unsophisticated - Educating Archie, Journey into Space, the Billy Cotton Bandshow....


Later on I remember going to Saturday morning cinema for children.  http://www.1900s.org.uk/1940s50s-sat-m-pics.htm  An auditorium full of excited children watching cartoons & black & white childrens films. I don't remember ever going to the cinema with my parents, but did bunk off Grammar school to go to the pictures in Birmingham town centre when I was older.

I really don't remember much in the way of toys - balls, a skipping rope, marbles. I had a teddy & a doll, which for some unfathomable reason I remember as being black. I think I had the un PC "gollywog" too. There was a compendium of games like Snakes & Ladders too, but no one to play with.

There really wasn't much in the way of stimulation. Children amused themselves & adults didn't play with their children in the way that they do now. There was school & learning, (by rote mainly), and there was home, where you did as you were told & respected your elders regardless of whether they deserved that respect.

Yet my generation blossomed. We grew into adults who contributed to society in many different ways. We were not impoverished by poverty & lack of stimulus.

The world has turned. The opposite is now true here. Children have opportunities we would have wondered at in disbelief. I wonder what difference that will make.