The ol' nature vs nurture scuffle

Got an email telling me how my cousin's adopted son has been having violent episodes and they are becoming frustrated. Okay, so I can understand that. Parenting is hard. Parenting someone else's kids is even harder (I've seen both sides of that one). Parenting someone else's kids who no longer wants them and you've adopted/fostered must be even harder.

But what got me was the part of the email where she describes the "issues" that might account for why her foster son has violent episodes: "abandonment, illegitimate birth, birth parents are both of a violent nature/violent lifestyle"

???

Okay, so I can see abandonment and witnessing a violent home life ("lifestyle") as reasons why a child might be acting violent. But how does the absence of a piece of paper conferring certain rights and responsibilities upon his parents, a piece of paper that is simply a social convention, account for a violent child? Does the child know this? Is his violence a rebellion against his parents's disregard for this cultural norm? Did he as a fetus recognize that he was in the womb of a woman who did not possess such a paper? What was it?

I'd like to be generous and explain that perhaps she meant something else and it was just a case of bad wording... but having grown up in the kind of environment that she lives in, I doubt it was meant as anything than what it sounds like: a moral judgment of someone else's choices in life, a blaming of the 'sins of the father' on the child. An essentialist notion that does nothing to address the issues her adopted son is facing right now.

Reminds me of the comments made a couple of weeks ago by Harvard University president Summers who seemed to imply in his address at an economics conference that women aren't genetically capable of filling his shoes. Nice refutations: Pharyngula and Michael Berube.

All I can say? Wow. I thought this was the twenty-first century.