I heard this assertion again tonight. It’s by no means the first time and probably won’t be the last. It goes like this…
Children who are adequately cared for in every other manner will die if they are denied human contact. How does the death process go, you ask? Well, first they stop eating. Then they go crazy. Then they die. Or something like that. Oh, and the same thing also happens with primates.
I haven’t been able to find anything on the source of this. Clearly, no tests have been conducted in a laboratory to see if babies die if you don’t hug 'em. But these kinds of stories tend to start somewhere. Any idea the source from which this notion was derived?
Actually, there was once such an experiment. IIRC, this took place in the 15th century; Europe somewhere, I believe. Several children were raised by monks (?) from infancy. They were fed, watered and clothed and provided other basic needs, but were never talked to, hugged or touched in any way, nor given any human contact beyond what was needed to keep them alive. They all died by age 5 or 6, if memory serves. I’m trying to find a cite online - this was something I read many years ago, and I don’t even recall the source, now.
I seem to remember this was done by one of the French kings who was curious to see how it would turn out—a particularly inhuman scheme. As for hugging, I need to be hugged even yet, possibly because my parents weren’t at all affectionate. I made sure to hug my son as often as possible.
The origin of the children-raised-by-monks story seems to be attributed to Frederick II Stupormundi, the Holy Roman Emperor. He was a Renaissance man several hundred years before the Renaissance, with a keen scientific mind. There is a legend that he had several children raised by monks who never spoke to them, to discover if the children would spontaneously begin speaking Hebrew (the ‘original language’ of mankind). Instead they died.
The story is probably bunk. Check out Robert Payne’s “The Dream and the Tomb” for the real (fascinating) story of Frederick Stupormundi.
Ahh, good ole King Fred. That would have been just his style. I like the guy, so allow me to nitpick: it is Stupor Mundi, with the space in it. It means “Wonder of the World”, and it refers mostly to his cultural openness, up to having Greek, Muslim and Jewish personnel, which was quite a lot, tolerance-wise, in those times.
One of my favourite books on Frederick II Hohenstaufen (his real surname; Stupor Mondi was just a description, not a nickname like “the Bold” for other rulers) is Frederick II, a Medieval Emperor by David Abulafia. Very good book!
I dont think they’'ll “die”, but based on tests with primates, and in reviewing the effects of some particularily horrendous institutional caretaking of orphans, they would likely be very screwed up mentally.
There have been some famous cases of childeren being raised with minimal human contact. I don’t know if this quite qualifies as what you are asking but Genie is one of the best known and certainly reliably documented.
Genie (not her real name) was raised in almost complete isolation, I don’t know enough about the case to say if she recived no human contact at all, but it was certaintly minimal. Her parents raised her alone in a locked room tied for most of the time to a potty chair, sadly perhaps as close you’ll ever come to a human ‘Skinner Box’ in modern times.
When she was discovered by the authorites in 1970, she was physicaly okay, but not surprisingly had severe mental problems.
There is much info about her case on the 'net along with a number of other less well documented cases of childeren with simiar backgrounds. this seems to be a good place to start.