Brought up or dragged up?

Are children born bad, or do we make them that way?
 
Yes, it’s the old Nature versus Nurture debate.
 
Recent study suggests that as a race we are remarkably pliable as infants. Our brains are born semi made and open to molding.
 
This is how we easily become human and learn all of the things that we take for granted in later life. Walking, talking and all of the other stuff.
 
English is reckoned to be one of the most difficult languages to learn and yet by an early age most of us have learned the basics.
 
Whilst we have genetic dispositions towards certain things, gifts or curses from our parents or grandparents, we also have the ability to become our own person dependent on the circumstances of our upbringing.
 
So basically, parents get two attempts to screw up your life. They can give you a poor genetic makeup and they can give you a bad upbringing.
 
As a society, we can’t yet do much about genetic makeup, and I fear the day when we can. But we can do something about the way in which our children are brought up.
 
Most parents do a reasonable job, even without a manual, but hardly anyone gets everything right. Even after the early stages are passed, there are still many trials to face and life can throw some tough breaks at even the best family.
 
So we end up with some broken individuals. Am I worrying about an insignificant minority?
 
Read our newspaper and you might suggest that it is not such an insignificant minority who are getting into trouble.
 
Somewhere, we as an Island society are going wrong and it isn’t getting any better.
 
We now have the spiral of despair.
 
Parents who don’t know how to parent, because of their own upbringing, and children of those parents now having kids of their own.
 
The trouble is that, as a kid, you take what life throws at you as normal until you see differently. Half of the stuff we take for granted is a foreign country to some. Why read to your child if nobody ever read to you? Why not let them play violent computer games; you did.
 
It’s not trying to impose nice middle class standards into the estates. It’s trying to find ways of improving the childhood experience to minimise the problems we are later seeing with some of our youngsters.
 
We can’t change nature but we can do something about the quality of nurture that we as a society give to our young.
 
What this means in practical terms, I don’t know. Perhaps you can add to the debate?