Our minds are not rigid like stone, but are defined by being constantly evolving. But this process does not depend simply on our age (the fact of accumulating years of life) but on the experiences we go through, what we live in 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 the personality that defines us when we reach adulthood. As much as we tend to believe that what we do is because “we are like that” and that is it, the truth is that both the habits and the ways of interpreting reality that we adopt in our childhood will have a major effect on the way we think and feel once we are past adolescence.

This is how our childhood influences the development of our personality

The personality of a human being is that which summarizes his behavior patterns when it comes to 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 has nothing to do with our surroundings. On the contrary, the personality of each 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 one of these learnings is most important.

So, what we experience during the first years leaves an imprint on us, an imprint that will not necessarily always remain the same, but that will have a determining importance in the development of our way of being and relating. 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 we experience or don’t experience attachment to a mother or father is something that marks us.

In fact, one of the most important discoveries in the area of Evolutionary Psychology is that without moments of caress, direct physical contact and eye contact, children grow up with serious cognitive, affective and behavioral problems. We not only need food, safety and shelter; we also need love at all costs. And that is why what we might call “toxic families” are such harmful environments in which to grow up.

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

Thus, the most serious cases can generate serious mental retardation or even death (if there is constant sensory and cognitive deprivation), while milder problems in the relationship with parents or caregivers can cause us, in childhood and adulthood, to become surly, with fear of relating .

2. Attribution styles

The way in which others teach us to judge ourselves during childhood also has a great influence on the self-esteem and self-concept that we internalize in adulthood. For example, some parents with a tendency to judge us in a cruel way will make us believe that everything good that happens to us is caused by the luck or the behaviour of others, while the bad happens because of our insufficient abilities.

3. The Theory of the Just World

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 to teach us some basic patterns of behavior, but it is dangerous if we come to believe literally in this, that is, if we assume that it is a kind of real karma, a logic that governs the cosmos itself regardless of what we create or what we do.

If we believe fervently in this earthly karma, this may lead us to think that unhappy people are unhappy because they did something to deserve it, or that the luckiest ones are unhappy because they have done something to deserve it. This 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 theory of the just world, as paradoxical as it may seem, predisposes us towards a personality based on cognitive rigidity , the tendency to reject what goes beyond the norms that should be applied individually.

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. Considering that in a school class the difference in months of age between students makes some have much more experience than others, this can create clear inequalities and asymmetries.

As a consequence, if for some reason we get used to fearing interactions with others, our lack of social skills may cause us to start being afraid of relationships with strangers, leading us towards a personality type based on avoidance and a preference for experiences linked to what is already known, which is not new.