It is so crucial to learn how your childhood affects the way you live your life today, because what you learnt from your parents and family in your childhood determines how you approach issues. These learnt attitudes and habits determine how well you develop and maintain your relationships with other people, as well as how you see yourself.

The main benefit in critically looking into your childhood is that you are responsible for everything you do as an adult; your parents cannot be blamed anymore for what you do. Immediately you begin to determine the relation between your childhood experiences and your adult behaviors and attitudes, you are enabled to make the changes you need to live a more fulfilling life.

You always put others before yourself.

You might have learnt that when you saw the sacrifices your parents and other people made for you as a child. You saw how your mother will make sure you have eaten to the fullest before she eats, or your father buys you that now toy when he could have bought a new cell phone for himself. The lesson you might have learnt is that is how to care for people.

You are fiercely independent.

As a child, you might have been in a family where self-sufficiency is highly valued. You lived with parents who never asked anyone for help or for anything, even when they needed it. The result is that, you always want to be yourself, do everything by yourself, even when you needed the help or someone offered to help.

You have impossibly high expectations for yourself and others.

If you lived in a family that values the ideal and the perfect, there is a greater chance that you and your activities are looked down upon. Maybe your family valued perfection and disapproved of shortcomings. How do your perfectionist tendencies sit with others? How do these expectations affect your own stress and anxiety levels? If you're able to see how you learned to be this way, you can understand how you may come across to others and why you feel the way you do.

You have low self esteem

If you see yourself as worthless and have low self esteem, it may be that you suffered abuse as a child. Children who were constantly abused during childhood see anybody that comes into their lives as coming to abuse and take advantage of them. They tend to have poor relationships with others.

You are secretive.

Children who were abuse victims grow into people who keep everything secret. The learnt to keep secretes when they learnt to keep the abuse secret due to fear of the abuser or lack of trust for other people. Also most of the abusers are people the victim trusts, they therefore loose trust for everyone. They tend to be reserved when with others and retract from society.

Learning how your childhood affects the way you live your life is important as it helps you improve your interpersonal and communication skills. It will alert you on your weaknesses and improve on areas that need improvement.

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