Affect Of Childhood On Adult Life
- Who you are today is greatly influenced by your childhood.
- All children are raised differently. Some are raised better than others.
- Study your parents minds, to study your own!
In this series of articles, I am going to be taking a look at how childhood affects our later years of life. Specifically, how we turn out as adults.
I think this is an extremely important topic to cover, because the subconscious mind is greatly influenced by the way your parents treated you as a child. This then directly affected the type of person you became.
Knowledge Is Power
A lot of the characteristics we either like or don’t like about ourselves, were formed during our childhood. These can therefore prove to be extremely difficult to change or reverse, in our teenage and adult years of life.
One of the main reasons these beliefs and behaviors can be so difficult to change, is simply because many people are unaware of them and do them naturally. They become habits, deeply ingrained within the subconscious mind.
However, like anything in life, being aware of something gives you more power to affect a meaningful change. So let’s start by defining what exactly the role of a parent is, and later looking at an exercise you can do to objectively study your mind, by getting outside of it.
What Do Parents Do?                      Â
For any parent who has children, their main role is to care for and prepare their child for independent survival as an adult.
We all begin completely dependant on our parents, and if they raise us successfully, we leave as self respecting and self responsible adults. We are then able to confidently face and cope with the challenges of life.
However as we know, not all adults are the same. We each have different levels of confidence, optimism, self esteem and self worth. Each of these characteristics was greatly influence by how our parents raised us as children.
Good Parent, Bad Parent
There are 2 types of parents. The first are those who treat their children with love and respect. The second are those who treat their children without love or respect.
Generally speaking, the first set of parents are likely to produce a child that is confident and has high levels of self esteem later in life.
However things are not as simple as this, because a parent may treat their child with love and respect, but do it in the wrong way. This may then result in a child who has low levels of confidence and self esteem.
So it is not only the things your parents did to/for you, but how they did them.
Transferring Beliefs
It is also important to recognize that regardless of the way your parents treated you, they most likely did so because they were treated the same way by their parents.
So if you are secretly harboring any resentment towards your parents, then it may be of some comfort to know that how they treated you is often a reflection of their own childhood.
For example, many parents who shout or beat their children, were often shouted at or beaten by their parents. Unfortunately they learnt to accept this behavior as normal, and so did it to their own children.
This transference of beliefs from parent to the susceptible child is a key point to understand, and why children often grow up to be very similar to their parents. Even though they may not like to admit it!
This is why in order to fully understand yourself, you must first understand the people who created your mind. Your parents. As they were the ones who were largely responsible for shaping the beliefs and behaviors you have today.
In the next article, you will learn an exercise that you can do to objectively understand your mind, by getting outside of it.
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