>replace every occurrence of AI in your statement with child and maybe you will begin to see/understand

I could also replace every occurrence of AI in my statement with "banana" or "hot sauce" or "sandstone". You can't just replace nouns with other nouns and expect the sentence they're in to still work.

AI is not a child. Children are not AI. They are two different things and operate according to different rules.

>this is a nature/nurture conversation, and we are as much machines/programs ourselves

Compared to AIs, humans are mostly hard-coded. A child will learn the language of the household he's raised in, but you can't get a child to imprint on the noises a vacuum cleaner makes as his language, for example.

"Raise a child with love and care and he will become a good person" works because human children are wired to learn the rules of the tribe and operate accordingly. If an AI does not have that same wiring, how you treat it makes no difference to its behavior.