There is perhaps no greater priority in childhood than to acquire an education: it’s in the
early years that we have to push ourselves with special vigour to learn the lessons,
and acquire the experience, that will help us successfully manoeuvre around the pitfalls
of adult life. By studying hard and intelligently, we’ll have the best chance of avoiding a
middle-age of confusion and resignation, regret and sorrow. The clue to a successful adult
life – we’re repeatedly told – lies in childhood education.
It’s for this reason that we send weary children out into the world on dark winter
mornings with full rucksacks in order to spend the day studying coordinate geometry and indefinite
articles, the social impact of religious and economic changes under Edward VI and the place
of Aristotle’s philosophy in Dante’s Inferno. But there is one very striking detail to note
in our approach. The one subject that almost certainly has the most to teach us in terms
of its capacity to help us skirt adult dangers and guide us to fulfilment, the subject that
far more than any other has the decisive power to liberate us, this subject is not taught
in any school or college anywhere on the planet. A further irony is that this unstudied subject
is one that we nevertheless live through every day of our early years, it is part of our
palpable experience, unfolding all around us, as invisible as air and as hard to touch
as time. The missing subject is, of course, our childhood itself.
We can sum up its importance like this: our chances of leading a fulfilled adult life
depend overwhelmingly on our knowledge of, and engagement with, the nature of our own
childhoods, for it is in this period that the dominant share of our adult identity is
moulded and our characteristic expectations and responses set. We will spend some 25,000
hours in the company of our parents by the age of eighteen, a span which ends up determining
how we think of relationships and of sex, how we approach work, ambition and success,
what we think of ourselves (especially whether we can like or must abhor who we are), what
we should assume of strangers and friends and how much happiness we believe we deserve
and could plausibly attain. More tragically, and without anyone necessarily
having meant ill, our childhoods will have been, to put it nicely, complicated. The expectations
that will have formed in those years about who we are, what relationships can be like
and what the world might want to give us will have been marked by a range of what could
be termed ‘distortions’ – departures from reality and an ideal of mental health
and maturity. Something or indeed many things will have gone slightly wrong or developed
in questionable directions – leaving us in areas less than we might have been and
more scared and cowed than is practical. We may, for example, have picked up a sense that
being sexual was incompatible with being a good person; or that we had to lie about our
interests in order to be loved. We could have acquired an impression that succeeding would
incite the rivalry of a parent. Or that we would need always to be funny and lighthearted
so as to buoy up a depressive adult we adored but feared for.
From our experiences, we will then acquire expectations, internal ‘scripts’ and patterns
of behaviour that we play out unknowingly across adulthood. Certain key people didn’t
take us seriously back then: now we tend to believe (but don’t notice ourselves believing)
that no one can. We needed to try to fix an adult on whom we depended: now we are drawn
(but don’t realise we are drawn) to rescuing all those we love. We admired a parent who
didn’t care much for us: now we repeatedly (but unconsciously) throw ourselves at distant
and indifferent candidates.
One of the problems of our childhoods is that they are usually surrounded by a misleading
implication that they might have been sane. What goes on in the kitchen and in the car,
on holidays and in the bedroom can seem beyond remark or reflection. For a long time, we
have nothing to compare our life against. It’s just reality in our eyes, rather than
a very peculiar desperately harmful version of it filled with unique slants and outright
dangers. For many years, it can seem almost normal that dad lies slumped in his chair
in quiet despair, that mum is often crying or that we’ve been labelled the unworthy
one. It can seem normal that every challenge is a catastrophe or that every hope is destroyed
by cynicism. There’s nothing to alert us to the oddity of a seven year old having to
cheer up a parent because of the difficulties of her relationship with the other parent.
Unfortunately, the last thing that the oddest parents will ever tell you is that they are
odd; the most bizzare adults are most heavily invested in thinking of themselves, and being
known to others as normal. It’s in the nature of madness to strive very hard not to be thought
about. This drift towards unthinking normalisation
is compounded by children’s natural urge to think well of their parents, even at the
cost of looking after their own interests. It is always – strangely – preferable
for a child to think of themselves as unworthy and deficient than to acknowledge their parent
as unstable and unfair. The legacy of a difficult childhood – by
which one really means a typical childhood – spreads into every corner of adult life.
For decades, it can seem as though unhappiness and grief are the norm. It may take until
a person is deep into adulthood, and might have messed up their career substantially
or gone through a string of frustrating relationships, that they may become able to think about the
connection between what happened to them in the past and how they are living as grown
ups. Slowly, they may see the debt that their habit of trying fix their adult lovers owes
to a dynamic with an alcoholic mother. Over many hours of discussion, they may realise
that there need be no conflict between being successful and being a good person – contrary
to what a disappointed father had once imputed.
The system tells us that we will finally and optimally have succeeded
when we grasp the laws of the universe and the history of humanity. But in order properly
to thrive, we will also need to know something far closer to home. Without a proper understanding
of childhood, it won’t matter how many fortunes we have made, how stellar our reputation or
outwardly cheerful our families, we will be doomed to founder on the rocks of our own
psychological complexities; we will probably be sunk by anxiety, lack of trust, dread,
paranoia, rage and self-loathing, those widespread legacies of distorted and misunderstood pasts.
Well meaning people sometimes wonder, with considerable hope, if Freud has not after
all by now been proved ‘wrong’. The tricky and humiliating answer is that he never will
be, in the substance of his insight. His eternal contribution has been to alert us to the many
ways in which adult emotional lives sit on top of childhood experiences – and how we
are made sick by not knowing our own histories. In a saner world, we would be left in no doubt
– and even partially alerted while we were living through them – that our childhoods
held the secrets to our identities. We would know that the one subject we need to excel
at above all is one not yet flagged up by the school system called ‘My Childhood’,
and the sign that we have graduated in the topic with honours is when at last we can
know and think non-defensively about how we are (in small ways and large) a little mad,
and what exactly in the distant past might have made us so.