Nurture’s edge over nature

By Chanah Park

Cypress High School

The question of whether nature or nurture predominantly affects a person’s development has troubled psychologists for ages. Those for nature argue that one is born the way they are, physically and psychologically, and inherit traits from one’s parents.

Prospero, a protagonist from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, embodies this viewpoint when he states: “A devil, a born devil on whose nature Nurture can never stick, on whom my pains, Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost. And as with age his body uglier grows, So his mind cankers. I will plague them all, Even to roaring.” Essentially, Prospero is asserting that nature comes before nurture and the way one is born ultimately decides who one becomes.

Lianne Cha, a junior from Oxford Academy, agrees that nature plays a larger role in determining who someone becomes using the example of how a dog can be trained to do one thing and then trained to do the complete opposite, showing that nurture is not as permanent as nature.

On the other hand, those for nurture, such as Eunice Kim, a junior from Cypress High School, claim that environmental factors and the manner in which one is raised is the main factor in human development.

Up until a few decades ago, most scientific studies on Sir Francis Galton’s “Nature vs. Nurture theory” have all generally pointed to the same thing - it is not nature or nurture that ultimately shapes a person, but it is in fact the collaboration of the two. However, I disagree. If I had to choose point-blank whether or not it was nature or nurture that played the most defining role in shaping who a person becomes, I would say nurture.

Advocates for the nature argument frequently use the intelligence argument. They state that if one’s parents/guardians, for example, have graduated from a top university with excellent grades that their children must be smart as well. Of course this statement is not without basis as many studies show that high-achieving parents have high-achieving children, but I believe that the “causation” part of this argument is flawed. High-achieving parents do not simply birth high-achieving children as there is no such thing as a “Smart-Gene” or a “Genius Trait” that parents may pass on to their offspring; intelligence is not innate but rather acquired. I believe that this correlation exists because high-achieving parents create an environment in their homes that encourages academic excellence and underscores being goal-oriented. In a home where the traits of high-achievers are valued, the children of the home will learn to value them as well as that is the environment they are raised in.

Therefore, it may be more accurate to state that high-achieving parents raise high-achieving children and not that they simply have them.