Our childhoods are exceptionally important in shaping who we become as adults. Loving parents and largely positive experiences make us feel secure, while a challenging upbringing can leave lasting scars. Here are 18 traits that often develop in response to what society would consider a ‘bad childhood’ and the emotional damage it can wreak.
Unhealthy Attachment Styles
HelpGuide.org states that attachment issues develop when “The emotional relationship that develops between an infant and their primary caretaker is disrupted or not developed.” Children need to feel secure, loved, and bonded to their parents, and adults with a history of neglect, abuse, or frequent familial changes often lack trust and fear intimacy or are excessively clingy.
Low Self-Esteem
If a child feels constantly unloved, unwanted, or incapable, this can severely impact their self-esteem as adults. They may be easily exploited, have difficulty setting boundaries, be negative about themselves, or constantly require approval or validation. This can impact things like forming relationships and personal growth, making it difficult for them to achieve their goals.
Anxiety
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) such as abuse, neglect, or dysfunctional households are strongly linked to anxiety in adulthood. Research has found that such negative experiences disrupt brain development and increase a person’s vulnerability to stress, making individuals less resilient to life’s challenges and less able to cope with daily stressors.
Self-Destructive Behaviors
People who experience a terrible childhood are more likely to be self-destructive and engage in activities like substance abuse, self-harm, reckless promiscuity, or neglecting their health. A study found that adults who were abused or neglected as children were 1.5 times more likely to become drug addicts compared to those from loving, stable homes.
Fear of Abandonment
Children who experience abandonment or neglect in early life never develop the trust that happy children have in their loved ones and often have a deep-seated fear of rejection or being left alone. This can manifest as difficulty trusting others or a tendency to be excessively clingy, insecure, or possessive in their relationships.
Suspiciousness
Trust is essential for a healthy social outlook. Children who experience betrayal, abuse, or neglect struggle to trust others in adulthood and are prone to distrusting and suspicious behavior, seeing danger and ulterior motives in every interaction. This mistrust often impacts future relationships, particularly long-term romances and marriages.
Depression
As with anxiety, an unhappy childhood full of negative experiences and painful memories is associated with adult depression. A secure, loving family fosters mental resilience in children and produces adults who are confident that they’ll get support if they need it, even after they leave home. People with rough childhoods often lack this strength of mind and become depressed more easily.
Poor Emotional Regulation
Children learn to regulate their emotions by watching their caregivers, so those with volatile parents or older siblings are prone to negative behavior when they’re angry or upset. Adults with such childhoods may struggle to identify, understand, and express their feelings in a healthy way, which can lead to emotional outbursts and overreactions.
Cynicism
Understandably, a childhood filled with broken promises, manipulation, betrayal, and consistently negative outcomes makes for a distrustful and cynical outlook on life. Adults with such a history tend to expect the worst from others, are excessively suspicious, or assume ulterior motives. This can make it difficult for them to form genuine connections.
Difficulties with Intimacy
Being physically and emotionally intimate with someone requires some degree of trust and commitment and can be difficult for grown children of abusive or neglectful homes. They learned that being vulnerable and trusting was always met with hurt and disappointment, so they now tend to find intimacy frightening or uncomfortable and may have fleeting, shallow relationships.
People-Pleasing
Children who grow up in unpredictable or chaotic environments may develop people-pleasing tendencies as a survival mechanism to avoid unwanted conflict or abuse. This habit can continue into adulthood and impact how they interact with others, from romantic partners and friends to colleagues and strangers. This can make them easily mistreated and damage their self-esteem.
Hypervigilance
Feeling safe means trusting that those around us aren’t harmful or malicious, which can be problematic for adults treated poorly as children. Unsafe or unpredictable living conditions keep children in a state of heightened alertness to potential threats. Once grown, this manifests as an inability to relax, being easily startled, and a tendency to constantly scan their surroundings for threats.
Aggression
While not always the case, it is common for adults with difficult upbringings to be prone to aggression, especially if exposed to anger and violence at home. Children raised by caregivers who cannot control their own tempers often have anger management issues themselves. They can struggle to express their emotions in a healthy way and may even be violent in their relationships.
Impulsiveness
The ability to control your impulses develops throughout childhood. This means that young children from healthy environments learn to resist their urges with non-violent, consistent discipline and delayed reward. On the other hand, those who experience neglect or trauma sometimes lack the ability to resist temptation and may choose short-term gratification (despite adverse consequences.)
No Self-Care
Low self-esteem and an inability to relax can make adults with challenging histories poor at prioritizing their own needs and engaging in activities that promote their physical and mental well-being. This can be because they were never encouraged to identify their own needs as children or weren’t permitted to indulge in activities that made them happy.
Perfectionism
Childhood trauma can result in an adult who has feelings of inadequacy or a need for control over their environment, and this can lead to perfectionism. Constantly trying to achieve perfection is tiring and stressful and can result in anxiety, strained relationships, an inability to cope with mistakes, and unrealistic standards for themselves and others.
Difficulty with Boundaries
Developing and maintaining healthy boundaries in any relationship. They are necessary to protect everyone’s well-being and prevent unnecessary discomfort, disrespect, or unhappiness. Children who grow up with caregivers who do not respect their boundaries are naturally poor at setting them in adulthood and may also fail to recognize those of others.
Codependency
Codependency occurs when individuals rely on others for their sense of worth and identity and lack self-reliance. Children who experience neglect or emotional abuse are more susceptible to this as adults, and it often comes hand in hand with clinginess or a fear of abandonment. They usually attach themselves to others for support because they have low self-esteem.
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