If society is ever to advance, people must be nurtured properly, taught correctly, and then stand on their own two feet to take responsibility for their own actions. What can be done to grow such people?
 
Let's start at the beginning. At age seven months in the womb, humans begin language coordination in response to what they hear through the mother's belly wall. Some 52 muscles learn to respond to the various phonemes (a phoneme is a basic language sound like 'b' in boy and 'm' in man) of the language surrounding the mother. The emotional state of the parent imprints itself on the baby growing in the womb, as do things like music and other environmental conditions. Poor nutrition, drugs, and even topical lotions and pollution spill right through directly to the fetus via the placenta. Parenting and nurturing better people obviously begins way before the bassinet.
 
At eighteen months the child has a brain one-third the size of an adult but with the same number of synapses (neural connections). Neurons have fingerlike tendrils that relay information—outgoing from the nerve cell through axons, ingoing by way of dendrites. It is the number of synapses that appears to determine intelligence, not the number of neurons.
 
Astonishingly, a six year old has about five times more synapses than adults. These trillions upon trillions of connections in youngsters are waiting to be imprinted by the environment, parents, and society. This is probably the reason that beginning in the first millennium the Roman Catholic Church initiated children into the sacraments at age six or seven. (It is remarkable how so many 'new' scientific discoveries were anticipated by the intuitive traditions of the past.)1

⌕ Click to enlarge

​Beginning at about age twelve, the fatty myelin sheath covering the unused neural tendrils are literally dissolved, absorbed into the cerebrospinal fluid rendering the neurons functionless. Some 80% of the functional neural brain mass present at age 6 is gone by age 14 as a result of disuse. To make matters even worse, consider the fact that of the remaining 20% of the brain, we only use 5%. That means we are running on only about 1% of the full potential we began with.
 
This retrogression (devolution) of the brain applies only to the neocortex, that big part of the brain with all the folds and grooves that humans are so proud of. The more 'primitive' parts of the brain, the 'reptilian' brainstem and limbic system responsible for stimulus-response and emotion-cognition, remain intact and do not experience this loss. In other words, our ability for fight-flight (running from predators), self-awareness (look at me), sex (fun stuff and children-hatching), eating (wouldn't want to miss that), and road rage (essential in modern living) are never at risk. Our ability to be intelligent about all that base reptilian stuff, however, is in decline throughout our adult lives.2
 
Is it not clear which parts of the human brain are in full function today? Just watch a little television, listen to 'with it' music, go to movies, and pick up some of the tabloids at the grocery counter and you'll see that the primitive human brain stem has suffered no melt-down. But that three-pound blob on top of it, the so-called seat of intelligence, is evidently just filling up space.
 
The ability to make and hold neural connections in the smart part of the brain is not due to what can be beaten into our kids with rules, instructions, and performance pressures. Those connections grow from what they experience around them without even realizing it. Neither the child nor the parents are aware of at least 95% of the imprinting a child receives. Who we are as parents emotionally, ethically, and intellectually in our day-to-day routines—not what we pretend or preach—is picked up by our children as their most important lessons and is then neurally connected. So telling a child to be something we are not doesn't do. If we want better children we must be better people.3
 
This idea also speaks to the importance of a loving and nurturing family nest. We learn love, in large part, by experiencing it. The erosion of the family in our libertine society thrusts the child into a peer group for imprinting. This surrogate family begins with technological births in hospital wards, and then continues with isolating infants in their own bedrooms, pseudofood in bottles with plastic nipples, television, day-care, broken homes, and on to public school. The raising of children by society rather than families results in a premature unfolding of development accelerated through exposure to adult themes pressing in from everywhere. Menstruation is beginning in eight-year-old girls (partly the result of hormone-type pollutants in food), there is an outbreak of pregnancies in nine-year olds, and violent sex crimes among children under the age of 10 are becoming too common.
 
Children are being thrust into full operational adult thinking way before they are capable of handling it properly. That is, in large part, why some 70% of teenagers are functionally illiterate: They may be able to learn, but cannot interpret meaning. They have not been properly imprinted (and have also experienced the diminution in neural connections mentioned above) and they don't have sufficient life experience or proper social context for intelligent decision-making.
 
So yes, home, family, and parents contribute to the development of children. On the other hand, nature plays a big part, too. Any parent raising a child into adulthood will see that the personality of a person at 40 is pretty much identical to their earliest infancy. So parents should not be too quick to take the blame for a child gone bad. Grown ups should also not spend a fortune in therapy whining about how their parents didn't love them enough. We may lose important neural connections in childhood, but once we realize who we are—very early in childhood—the ball is in our court.
 
There are people with essentially no brain in their skull (compressed to a thin membrane from hydrocephalus) who excel intellectually and ethically. So, as an adult, buck up, take responsibility for yourself, and make good use of the neural connections remaining. We are not victims. Even though we are left with only 1% of our mental potential we can make a lot of good use of that. It means reaching inside for the goodness that is there and extending that to our fellow humans. It means not following the conscience of others but learning what is already within and being true to that.
 
Our children don't need money, videos, signature shoes, and pressure for grades and sports performance. The inner needs of children are met if they are raised in a pigpen, as long as there is love. If that critical emotional relationship is not there, children will seek it in peers, including some of the perverted media models. Then we have the ethically blind (other children, idols, and profiteering media) leading our blind children. This is not the proper incubator for the adults of the future, it is the formula for the collapse of society.
 
What, then, is the best stimulant for growing good people, particularly with the popular indoctrination they get elsewhere that everyone is a victim, and any failure in life is the fault of somebody else? It is that greatest of all intelligences, love. That is not a platitude. Love requires an expansive and wise mind. Even with the puny 1% of our brain that we use, the capacity for love is infinite. Love means growing to be the best we can be, extending ourselves to others selflessly, and taking responsibility for ourselves. When that is done, the perfect model is created to grow good children as well.