The Long Shadow of Childhood: Impacts of Your Upbringing Last into Adulthood

I was accidentally referred a 13-year-old girl for psychiatric assessment.
When she arrived, I would not have known she was 13 until I looked in her chart. She looked much older. A little flustered, I told the mother that I was not a child psychiatrist. She was aware but agreed to the assessment because I was the only psychiatrist available.

Seeing this child turned out to be a very valuable experience. It is much more vivid hearing about a childhood that is being lived in real time, rather than from memory decades later as it is in adult patients. What stood out behind her very mature appearance and language, was a child who was very much a sponge of her environment and the people in it. Every answer she gave and her interactions with her mother in the appointment itself, revealed the dynamics of the home and by extension, her inner world. There is a transparency in children not yet muddied by time and the psychological defenses we develop with age.

It should come as no surprise that many adults who seek my help come from troubled homes, where they could not trust their parents to protect them. Speaking to this child about the events in her life that lead to her distress and school avoidance really highlighted the kinds of parental interactions, even with the best of intentions, that carry harm in childhood and beyond.

Here are the three most common parenting “communication styles”
I see that have later contributed to mental health challenges in adulthood. Keep in mind that communication encompasses all forms: verbal, nonverbal, direct and indirect.

1) Parents who communicate they are helpless, not in control and things are not ok.

2) Parents who are unpredictable such that the connection between a cause and the emotional or physical consequences to the child makes no sense.

3) Parents who are contradictory in what they say and how they act.

All of these parenting “styles” disrupt a child’s sense of safety. Without safety, the nervous system is overactive and much of the child’s resources are then spent on being hypervigilant, trying to manage both the external and internal world, to reduce the threat. This leaves little if any resources to developing a healthy sense of self. Children do best in experiences that enable creativity, play, risk-taking, and exploration, particularly with peers.
In the above communication “styles”, the child learns that their parents are not in control and cannot protect them. They will have a difficult time trusting any good or safe feelings because of what inevitably happens next: an outburst, a catastrophe, instability. The result is that these children will focus on looking after the parent, so hardwired is the understanding that to survive, their adults must survive too. In homes where a parent is unpredictable, with anger and violence being most common, children learn to walk on eggshells, hide or be perfect in futile attempts to anticipate or avoid the next blow-up. Children cannot understand the many possible reasons for why their parents act as they do, so will conclude it must be the child’s fault. In the eyes of a child, to feel some semblance of control is better than none, and so if they tell themselves they are responsible, they at least tell themselves they can do something about it. How a child interprets and internalizes the complex and unfair world is by how it manifests in the parents.

Another outcome is that the child will learn to deny their own feelings and interpretation of reality, particularly when there are conflicting or contradictory messages from the parents. An example of this is for a parent to say they love their child more than anything, only to be physically or emotionally abusive. The child has no choice but to make sense of this somehow, and the only way is to dissociate from their otherwise healthy instincts, and to believe what is being said to them. So you can imagine how the body and mind begin to detach from one another. These children will learn to be agreeable because to appease the parent is to also keep the demon at bay.

My work with adults is in making sense of how childhood experiences have affected them. This has served two purposes: First, patients who understand themselves better avoid over-medication and faulty diagnoses. And second, patients stop blaming themselves. They begin to grieve their childhood and appreciate their mental health symptoms as remnants of their much younger selves trying their best, against the odds to survive in impossibly difficult situations. Because only then can they take the next step: celebrate, because they did just that. They survived.