YOUR CHILDHOOD AFFECT YOUR ADULTHOOD

From the biological side of things to how we're nurtured, a lot of what goes on in childhood influences how we turn out as adults.

And while there isn't a set recipe for ensuring achievement and happiness in adulthood, psychology research has pointed to a handful of factors from childhood that can predict success.

We are, all of us, beautifully crazy or, to put it in gentler terms, fascinatingly unbalanced. Our childhoods, even the apparently benign ones, leave us no option but to be anything else.
As a result of these childhoods, we tend, over most issues, We are too timid, or too assertive; too rigid or too accommodating; too focused on material success or excessively lackadaisical. We are obsessively eager around sex or painfully wary and nervous in the face of our own erotic impulses. We are dreamily naive or sourly down to earth; we recoil from risk or embrace it recklessly; we have emerged into adult life determined never to rely on anyone or as desperate for another to complete us; we are overly intellectual or unduly resistant to ideas. The encyclopedia of emotional imbalances is a volume without end. What is certain is that these imbalances come at a huge cost, rendering us less able to exploit our talents and opportunities, less able to lead satisfying lives and a great deal less fun to be around.
Yet, because we are reluctant historians of our emotional pasts, we easily assume that these imbalances aren’t things we could ever change; they are fundamentally innate. It’s just how we were made. We simply are, in and of ourselves, people who micromanage or can’t get much pleasure out of sex, scream a lot when someone contradicts us or run away from lovers who are too kind to us. It may not be easy, but nor is it alterable or up for enquiry.
The truth is likely to be more hopeful – though, in the short term, more challenging. Our imbalances are invariably responses to something that happened in the past. We are a certain way because we were knocked off a more fulfilling trajectory years ago by a primal wound. In the face of a viciously competitive parent, we took refuge in underachievement. Having lived around a parent disgusted by the body, sex became frightening. Surrounded by material unreliability, we had to overachieve around money and social prestige. Hurt by a dismissive parent, we fell into patterns of emotional avoidance. A volatile parent pushed us towards our present meekness and inability to make a fuss. Early over protectiveness inspired timidity and, around any complex situation, panic attacks. A continually busy, inattentive parent was the catalyst for a personality marked by exhausting attention-seeking behaviour.
There is always logic and there is always a history.
We can tell that our imbalances date from the past because they reflect the way of thinking and instincts of the children we once were. Without anything pejorative being meant by this, our way of being unbalanced tends towards a fundamental immaturity, bearing the marks of what was once a young person’s attempt to grapple with something utterly beyond their capacities.
For example, when they suffer at the hands of an adult, children almost invariably take what happens to them as a reflection of something that must be very wrong with them. If someone humiliates, ignores or hurts them, it must – so it seems – be because they are, in and of themselves, imbecilic, repugnant and worth neglecting. It can take many years, and a lot of patient inner exploration, to reach an initially less plausible conclusion: that the hurt was essentially undeserved and that there were inevitably a lot of other things going on, off-stage, in the raging adult’s interior life for which the child was entirely blameless.
Similarly, because children cannot easily leave an offending situation, they are prey to powerful, limitless longings to fix, the broken person they so completely depend on. It becomes, in the infantile imagination, the child’s responsibility to mend all the anger, addiction or sadness of the grown-up they adore. It may be the work of decades to develop an adult power to feel sad about, rather than eternally responsible for, those we cannot change.
Communication patterns are beset by comparable childhood legacies. When something is very wrong, children have no innate capacity to explain their cause. They lack the confidence, poise and verbal dexterity to get their points across with the calm and authority required. They tend to dramatic overreactions instead, insisting, nagging, exploding, screaming. Or else excessive under-reactions: sulking, sullen silence, and avoidance. We may be well into middle-age before we can shed our first impulses to explode at or flee from those who misunderstand our needs and more carefully and serenely try to explain them instead.
It’s another feature of the emotional wounds of childhood that they tend to provoke what are in effect large-scale generalisations. Our wounds may have occurred in highly individual contexts: with one particular adult who hit their particular partner late at night in one particular terraced house in one town in the north. Or the wound may have been caused by one specific parent who responded with intense contempt after a specific job loss from one specific factory. But these events give rise to expectations of other people and life more broadly. We grow to expect that everyone will turn violent, that every partner may turn on us and every money problem will unleash disaster. The character traits and mentalities that were formed in response to one or two central actors of childhood become our habitual templates for interpreting pretty much anyone. For example, the always jokey and slightly manic way of being that we evolved so as to keep a depressed, listless mother engaged becomes our second nature. Even when she is long gone, we remain people who need to shine at every meeting, who require a partner to be continually focused on us and who cannot listen to negative or dispiriting information of any kind.
Similarly, a childhood craving to pacify and never bother two squabbling unhappy parents can far outlast our actual presence in their company. We may decades later still harbour a powerful desire to evade all confrontation, even though the original source of our hesitancy has long disappeared and such avoidance bears a heavy price.
We are living the wide-open present through the narrow drama of the past. We suffer because we are, at huge cost, too loyal to the early difficult years. We should, where we can, dare to leave home. Let’s consider the following childhood experiences that’s still affecting some till date

CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES THAT CONTINUES TO AFFECT YOU EVEN IN ADULTHOOD

What early childhood experiences shape the way we behave as adults? Positive or not, they decide how well-adjusted we are.

1. Spanking

First of all is spanking or flogging in Nigerian term. Most of us would have gotten spanked or flogged at one time or another. We wouldn’t have enjoyed the experience. The good news is that experts stand by children’s side regarding spanking. Researchers found that physical discipline had harmful effects on a child’s development. The researchers concluded that it impacted children the most.

2. Whether Parents Are Supportive

Everyone, especially children, thrives in caring, supportive environments. Experts, too, conclude that children who received support from their parents have a better academic performance later in life. Research unveils that children brought up in loving environments, had better academic results.

3. Doing everything for a child

You might know of relatives or friends who do everything for their children. It’s tempting to micromanage a child’s activities for fear that he or she will make the wrong decisions. Unfortunately, micromanaging a kid can cause them to become over-reliant on others when he or she is an adult. One study shows that micromanagement has links with college-age depression and other psychological issues.

4. Attachment

Another factor that governs whether children become well-adjusted adults is how attached they were to their parents. Children with secure attachments develop academically, socially, and mentally. Research proves that children with healthy attachment patterns are less likely to use drugs than their peers. Experts like suggest that practicing attachment habits like co-sleeping and consistent care help a child’s personal and social growth.

5. Quality of experiences

Furthermore, the quality of our childhood experiences is a deciding factor for future decades. It affects our self-esteem and health. Controlling parents use destructive criticism and corporal punishment, e.g., pinching to discourage bad behavior. Such negative feedback creates self-doubt and fear. It also triggers adult diseases. Science points out that girls will become prone to emotional disorders while boys develop aggression-related problems..

6. Socializing

Early childhood experiences decide if we have good-quality relationships because they impact our social skills. Research shows that consistent care enables children to develop social skills.

Attachment theorists suggest that the earliest bonds we form with our parents and caregivers are the most impactful. They decide the way we approach adult relationships.

7. Family Stability

Many studies illustrate that divorce affects children the most, especially if it happens during the early childhood. One study shows that it becomes part of a child’s world view.

These children demand a high degree of morality, fidelity, and compassion in their adult relationships. While it’s necessary to have high standards, they can trigger paranoia, which takes a toll on relationships.

8. Role Models

Finally, the role models children associate with affect the way they behave as adults. Children take examples from adults and mimic them. Understandably, negative examples would cause them to act negatively.