This video about the wild child genie this video talk Genie's parents lived in Arcadia, California. Genie's mother was partially blind due to cataracts and a detached retina, and her father (who was 20 years his wife's senior) was mentally unbalanced, a condition that worsened after his mother's death in a hit-and-run accident.[citation needed] Genie was the fourth (and second surviving) child, and had an elder brother who also lived in the home.
When Genie was between 14 and 20 months of age and was just beginning to learn speech, a doctor told her family that she seemed to be developmentally delayed and possibly mildly retarded. Her father took the opinion more seriously than it was expressed by the doctor, apparently deciding that she was profoundly retarded, and subjected her to severe confinement and ritual ill-treatment in an attempt to "protect" her.
Genie spent the next 12 years of her life locked in her bedroom. During the day, she was tied to a child's potty chair in diapers; at night, she was bound in a sleeping bag and placed in an enclosed crib with a cover made of metal screening. Indications are that Genie's father beat her if she vocalized, and he barked and growled at her like a dog in order to keep her quiet. He also rarely allowed his wife and son to leave the house or even to speak, and he expressly forbade them to speak to Genie. By the age of 13, Genie was almost entirely mute, commanding a vocabulary of about 20 words and a few short phrases (nearly all negative), such as "stop it" and "no more".