Effects of living in the Woods on Older Kids

[countryhorror]

Hello little details,
Two of the characters in the story I'm drafting get abandoned in the woods by their parents. They're about 10 years old when that happens and at the start of the actual story they're 13/14, with ideally only a couple of months passing after leaving the woods. I have not worked out the exact details, though since I'm working in a fantasy setting I have considered having fairies kidnap one or both of them to explain the timeframe.
So far my research has only yielded cases where the isolation started way too young for my time frame, or the child in question was gone for only a few days.
I assume social skills *will* be negatively affected by isolation, but to what extent? Are there any other major psychological effects I should keep in mind? Any behaviors you'd expect to form after the period?
Thank you all in advance !

Comments

[kitarella_imagines]

I don't know much about this subject but I think the key thing would be: who/ what is managing the children? Are they alone or are there creatures/ people keeping them captive/ looking after them?

I am always fascinated by human children who are raised by animals. I've noticed that when rescued, children raised by wolves never become human, but children raised by apes usually do. Just my opinion.

Not sure if I've helped but maybe?

[mific]

They'd have normal speech by age 10 and would talk with each other so wouldn't lose that. Social skills would depend on the setting and whether they had any caregivers there, and what the culture of those carers was. I imaging they'd become pretty dependant on each other, and would mistrust caregivers, having been abandoned. Depends if they have healing experiences in the forest.
It also depemds what their upbringing was like before they were abandoned. That doesn't sound like loving parents! So they might already have been at least emotionally abused, or neglected, and that would play a major part.

[lilacsigil]

The age of criminal responsibility is a big issue in Australia at the moment, especially in Queensland, with kids as young as 10 being locked up for long periods of time, often in isolation. It's not exactly the same, but it's your exact age group and it has been researched.

https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2019/06/locking-kids-damages-their-mental-health-and-leads-more-disadvantage

This article has a lot of links to that kind of study.

[voidampersand]

Why would they be isolated? There are always people hunting and gathering and timbering in the woods, and there will be other people living in the woods. Word would get around that there are some kids by themselves. People would look in on them. There's a good chance that someone will take them in.

[winterbird]

The OP explains that it's a fantasy series with the potential for fairies kidnapping them to explain the timeframe (potentially without human intervention) so I think we can assume isolation is the idea!

[voidampersand]

Yeah, I know.

Even the boy who survived the Holocaust by living in the woods was not completely isolated. He was helped by others. He helped others himself. There was a dispersed, very marginal, very precarious community of Jews in the woods. But it was a community, and it had some contact and support from people outside.

[lilacsigil]

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/may/28/how-we-survive-maxwell-smart-boy-in-the-woods

And here's a story about a boy who survived the Holocaust by living alone in the woods for years. All the content warnings you would expect for that including child death.

[winterbird]

There's some good links here, I would say psychosocially, the two children would likely develop very unique ways of communicating with each other similar to twins, in terms of uniquely understood phrases, turns of phrase, experiences, sounds, indications of threat and harm, etc. So there would be linguistic shifts, not where they'd necessarily forget language at all, but where...they might develop unique names for animals and plants they haven't seen before, etc.

While I don't have links things you'd need to address on a mundane level are:

- Hygiene (how are they toileting, how are they going to get clean if say, they both get diarrhea in the winter in the snow? It's so easy to die from infection in the woods. Like, SO easy).
- Relating to hygiene, further mundane stuff around toothaches, menstruation (depending on if either has a uterus, they're likely to have started menarche by 13/14, as well as developing breasts etc.).
- Food + fresh water (presumably if they're possibly kidnapped by fairies, this stuff could be provided, but it's still something that needs to be resolved).

They'd be missing a fairly significant period of social development - you might want to research individuation, and what happens when individuation is hampered re: attachment bonding etc. You might also find that they try to individuate against *each other* and therefore develop a very toxic bond in the end where they're trying to rebel against each other as they might their parents, while also needing each other. Teenagers learn how to say no and define themselves against their parent's wishes as a literal psychological *need* in development, and going from 10-13/14 without parents to do this against, they will likely do it against themselves or against each other, or against any authority figures in the story in this time.

I would also suggest possibly watching Room (with Brie Larson) that shows a teenager who essentially gets isolated in a room, raped, and forced to have a child from her rapist. The movie is brutal, but it's a good look at how difficult it is to assimilate/integrate back into society after being isolated from everything you've known. While the trauma is different, it's still trauma, and there will be parallels, from the betrayal of abandonment, to missing so many social markers absent from community. The movie was extremely well-researched and based off a mosaic of sadly real events, and it's interesting in kind of demonstrating the disconnect where everyone expects you to be "fine" when you return to normalcy, but instead it's you and this other person (in this case, her child) against the rest of a strange world.

She still remembers the world, she remembers being a child and having a different life, she still has language. But she develops a new mythology and mythos to explain what's happened to her, and it's obvious she and her son have a kind of unique language and way of relating that no one else can understand.

Fictional narratives like this may give you some anchoring into the emotionality of it all!

[mecurtin]

In addition to points others have made, what kind of woods (tropical? temperate?), and how much about survival in that woods do they know before they get left there? Which ties into: how close do they come to starving to death? Surviving in most woods is HARD if you haven't been trained to it for years. 10-14 y.o.s who aren't from a foraging aka hunter-gatherer culture would probably starve unless they can get food from non-woods sources, by stealing or whatever.

[countryhorror]

Hello I have returned, taking notes on what people have said + providing a bit more context on the character's situation since I posted this in the middle of the night ><"
The woods/forest would lean more temperate but be closer to taiga in precipitation, their mother did teach them some short-term survival skills but definitely not something that would last that long. The two of them already had issues with their parents and one of them does have a habit of thievery which could both play into the issues of food, hygiene(maybe? thinking in regards to the menstruation point), and other people.
Speaking of other people, there is a bit during the time frame where a third party interferes in the siblings situation, which is where the idea of fairies kidnapping them comes up. My outline/notes currently has this part written down as "While lost, a strange magic woman locks the two in her 'abode'". I'm not sure if she counts as an authority or parental figure, especially since I currently have it so she's been dead a good couple of years at the start of the story.
A lot of this stuff is rather early stage so I do apologize for lack of details that come up, but it is very fun to hear other peoples suggestions and all of the new reading material I have. ^v^

[melannen]

Like people above said, it's going to depend on a lot of things (also, taking care of basic survival on your own while also hiding from other humans will not be easy, even in woods they know and have been trained to survive in. If they haven't been it will be a lot of living day to day just trying to eat enough to look for more food. Hunter/gatherer can be a great lifestyle where there's plenty to eat and do - if you're part of an established community that can support and train each other.)

But I just want to toss in - depending on the needs of your story and why you have them hiding in the woods, traditionally people kidnapped by fairies have time dilation issues. So if you wanted to skip all of this you could totally have the fairies take them Year One and then they show up again Year Three thinking only a few weeks have passed. (Whether they physically aged during that time would be up to you - or if you want some real fun you could have all of the missed physical development catch up with them suddenly right after they return, which happens sometimes in the stories too.)

[satsuma]

Getting kidnapped on its own is likely a case for cptsd even before you add in the trauma from living in the woods for a couple years, so I would consider looking up some more general resources on how it manifests in children/young teens to fill in the gaps around more specific research on isolation/wilderness survival.