4 ways in which childhood influences your personality

Our minds are not rigid as stone, but are defined by constantly evolving. But this process does not simply depend on our age (the fact of accumulating years of life) but on the experiences we go through, what we live in the first person. In psychology, the separation between the person and the environment in which they live, in psychology, is something artificial, a differentiation that exists in theory because it helps to understand things, but in reality it is not there.

This is especially noticeable in the influence that our childhoods have on personality that defines us when we reach adulthood. As much as we tend to believe that what we do we do because "we are like that" and that's it, the truth is that both habits and ways of interpreting the reality we adopted in our childhood will have an important effect on our way of thinking and feeling after the death. adolescence.

• Related article: "Differences between personality, temperament and character"

This is how our childhood influences the development of personality

The personality of a human being is what summarizes his behavior patterns when interpreting reality, analyzing his feelings and making some habits his own and not others. That is, what makes us behave in a certain way, easy to distinguish from others.

But personality does not just emerge from our mind, as if its existence had nothing to do with what surrounds us. On the contrary, the personality of each one of us is a combination of genes and learned experiences (most of them not in a school or university classroom, of course). And childhood is precisely the vital stage in which we learn the most and in which each of these lessons is most important.

Thus, what we experience during the first years leaves a mark on us, a mark that will not necessarily remain. always with the same form, but that will have a decisive importance in the development of our way of being and of relate. How does this happen? Fundamentally, through the processes that you can see below.

1. The importance of attachment

From the first months of life, the way in which we experience or do not experience attachment with a mother or a father it is something that marks us.

In fact, one of the most important discoveries in the area of ​​Evolutionary Psychology is that without cuddling moments, direct physical contact and visual contact, boys and girls grow up with serious cognitive, affective and behavioral We not only need food, security and shelter; we also need love at all costs. And that is why what we could call "toxic families"They are such harmful environments in which to grow.

Of course, the degree to which we do or do not receive attachment-related experiences is a matter of degrees. Between the total absence of physical contact and pampering and the optimal amount of these elements there is a wide scale of gray, which makes the possible psychological problems that may appear milder or more severe, depending on each case.

Thus, the most severe cases can cause serious mental retardation or even death (if sensory and cognitive deprivation occurs). constantly), while milder problems in the relationship with fathers, mothers or caregivers can mean that, in childhood and in later life, adulthood, we become surly, afraid to relate.

• Related article: "The Attachment Theory and the bond between parents and children"

2. Attribution Styles

The way in which others teach us to judge ourselves during childhood also greatly influences the self-esteem and self-concept that we internalize in adulthood. For example, some fathers or mothers with tendency to judge ourselves cruelly They will make us believe that everything good that happens to us is due to luck or the behavior of others, while the bad happens due to our insufficient abilities.

• You may be interested in: "Theories of causal attribution: definition and authors"

3. The just world theory

From childhood we are taught to believe in the idea that good is rewarded and evil is punished. This principle is useful to guide us in our development of morality and teach us some patterns of behavior. basic, but it is dangerous if we come to believe this literally, that is, if we assume that it is a kind of karma real, a logic that governs the cosmos itself regardless of what we believe or what we do.

If we fervently believe in this earthly karma, this can lead us to think that unfortunate people do it. they are because they did something to deserve it, or that the luckiest are also because they have done merits to it. It is a bias that predisposes us towards individualism and lack of solidarity, as well as to deny the collective causes of phenomena such as poverty and to believe in "mentalities that make us rich".

Thus, the just world theory, paradoxical as it may seem, predisposes us towards a personality based on cognitive rigidity, the tendency to reject what goes beyond the norms that must be applied individually.

• Related article: "Just World Theory: do we get what we deserve?"

4. Personal relationships with strangers

In childhood, everything is very delicate: in a second, everything can go wrong, due to our ignorance about the world, and our public image can suffer from all kinds of mistakes. Bearing in mind that in a school class the difference in months of age between the students makes some have much more experience than others, this can create inequalities and asymmetries clear.

As a consequence, if for some reason we become accustomed to fearing interactions with others, our lack of social skills can make us start to fear relationships with strangers, leading us to toward an avoidant-based personality type and the preference for experiences linked to what is already known, which is not new.