The One Subject You Really Need to Study: Your Own Childhood

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's going to help us to 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's 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, because it is in this period that the dominant share of our adult identity is being 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 18, 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 light-hearted so as to boy up a depressive adult we adored but feared for.

From our experiences, we will then acquire expectations or 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 and fix an adult on whom we depended.

Now we're drawn, but don't realise we're drawn, to rescuing all those that we love.

We admired a parent who didn't much care about 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.