Katie Kenney

What happens in your childhood sticks with you when you are an adult. Variations of that statement are spread far and wide, so practically everyone understands it. When you grow up believing one thing you tend to keep those beliefs when you are older because it is all you have known or been exposed to. All sorts of things influence kids, whether it be their environment or their openness with their parents. Kids take things in and keep it with them. Now, practically everyone knows that, but not everyone knows the extent of things that make a difference in a child’s life.

In school, it is quite typical to know the questions that come first on your study guide better than the ones at the end. When you have a longer time to study a certain concept than a different concept, you should be able to recall facts about the first topic a little bit easier than the second topic depending on how much you have studied. This is like what happens when you are a child: when you are a child you are given a certain sphere with a specific amount of knowledge within it. Over time, they are given more information, but what they were first given stays with them. The impact the first nugget of knowledge had on them is bigger than the impact from later knowledge added on top of it.

Many things influence a child and that can make the kid grow up to be a great person or an awful person. It is unfortunately common many serial killers had some sort of trauma in childhood, whether it be abuse from an adult, an accident that brought death upon a loved one, or being close to a type of crime, which led to a mental break and brought them to murder. What happened to them when they were kids started the building blocks of a criminal to be stacked on top of one another. The bad stands out more vividly than the good things that happened. This is still the case for most people. It is easier to remember the bad things that happened during the day, is it not? People try to forget the bad things that happen because no one wants to remember sadness or embarrassment, but it sticks out against the good things that happen. It is like seeing one single blue paper laid out amongst a sea of yellow papers: your eyes quickly go to the blue paper that stands out. It is also hard to forget something when you are trying to forget it because you keep thinking about getting it out of your mind, therefore you still have it in your mind.

Your environment is a big part of what happens. It is an important part of the setting in a story. It can help or hinder a person’s journey and it can decide how far they get until they need to stop. Daycares and preschools try to be aware with how clean they are and how they can prevent the spread of germs. At home, however, if a kid isn’t in the richest family on the block then that is not entirely true. If a kid lives in a mobile home where their parents can’t afford all of the cleaning supplies a house should have, then they won’t always be in a clean environment. And when germs are spread around freely, they can get people sick. Children are more susceptible to illness and, depending on where they are, can be sick quite often. People aren’t happy when they’re sick. If you feel nauseous or have just the general cold then you won’t want to get up, go outside, and play with friends; you’ll want to stay inside and sleep off the pain. Kids are known for being rowdy and jumpy, always wanting to play with someone somewhere. A big part of being a kid is having the time and the leisure to play, but when that is taken away what kind of childhood is that? If a child is always sick, then when can they play? They can’t go out and run around when they feel like their stomach is going to implode on itself. They can’t push their friend on the swing when their head hurts so badly that their vision is blurred. How can a child who loves to play, play when they are always in pain? When someone grows up not being able to do the one thing they want to, then when they are all grown up they will most likely have an underlying belief they can’t do what they want to.

Mental illnesses are underdiagnosed in children. It is less common for parents to bring their kid in to a psychologist because they act like two completely different people, than for a teenager to be brought in. Kids emotions are often seen as over-exaggerated and played up. People who are taking care of them use the “I am acting like I believe you, but in reality I think that you are just speaking lies” voice and do not take them seriously. This can seriously hurt a kid when no one listens to them talking about what they feel. No one likes their words to be trampled over by others, but when whatever you try to say is always dismissed, you get used to it. When kids are told they are lying when they are actually telling the truth, it either makes them want to stay silent or makes them not want to tell the truth anymore. If you grow up keeping quiet because you are scared people will ridicule you and say you’re lying, then that mindset will stick with you until you have a reason to change it. Not saying things you want to can keep people from hearing.

Everyone has responsibilities they need to be aware of. New ones can pop up and old ones can no longer be your responsibility. People always need to take care of things. It is harder for some people to see the importance of their responsibilities than others, causing them to just not want to do them. If you grow up with things you have to do or others things won’t work, it allows you to be more prepared for the big responsibilities in adulthood, like bills and taxes. If you grow up without having to do anything for yourself, it will be incredibly hard to know how to do things you need to when you are on your own. The only time you won’t need to know how to do stuff is if you’re rich and have every type of servant there is serve you. Now seeing as that is highly unlikely for most of us, it is beneficial to know how to keep up with all of the responsibilities you have and if you have been taught how to prior to being in the actual situation, you can save yourself quite a bit of stress.

It is well-known military families tend to move a lot. They are stationed different places in the United States or in different countries across the world. Some people who don’t have anyone in the military move around just as much as those who are a part of the military community. When you move, you have to leave friends behind along with everything familiar to you. You lose many connections you had with people, and the ones you do keep are hard to keep strong because of the distance. Many military kids, who have lived in multiple places, stop making connections other kids their age make because they know it is just a matter of time before they move again. This causes them to never have a true feeling of trust. This doesn’t just pertain to military families, it could be people who have some other job responsibility or just like to move around often. Trust is hard to build and takes time, but when you are unable to obtain the time to work on trust, you never build trust. When kids grow up lacking the ability to trust others, they are found to be disconnected and isolated. They might think they don’t need trust, that trust isn’t worth the time, or they will never be able to trust others. They block people off and disable deep connections that could be formed in fear of those bonds being broken later on, because it is what they have known for the longest time.

It is a regular occurrence in many homes for parents to ask their kid(s) how school went today and how they’re feeling. I know a lot of kids lie and say school was good that day and they’re tired because of this and that, when they actually had a bad day because they failed this and was called that. They don’t tell their parents everything that happened because they feel like they would overreact and say something that wouldn’t help their case, not understand in the slightest, or ignore what they say they are feeling and call it “just a phase” or “teenager problems.” Now, I’m not saying everyone does this, I actually have a friend who tells her mom practically everything, but it is a common thing that takes place. Saying someone is lying about their struggles doesn’t make you want to speak about them; it makes you want to stay quiet and act like nothing happened. It isn’t beneficial to keep all of your emotions inside, but when someone misinterprets what you are saying or dismisses it, you might think it is better to hold everything. This kind of mentality is hard to break. Once someone starts to think like that, it is hard to switch that viewpoint.

It is common for babies and toddlers to have separation anxiety. They don’t like it when their parent leaves them and so they end up crying and throwing a tantrum type of thing. Children just don’t like being away from the people who are most familiar to them: their parents. Most of the time, parents just walk away and don’t look back when a crying session occurs, which is beneficial to whomever is watching the child because the baby no longer sees the parent and eventually “forgets” about them. However, there is always that one parent that won’t leave or they will look through a window. This doesn’t help the baby because they can still see their parent and they don’t understand why they can’t just go to them and definitely doesn’t help the person who is watching the child because the baby continues to freak out. Over time, the parents learn to just walk away and out of sight. There are some parents that don’t stop looking through the window, though, and it causes the anxiety to continue on as they grow up.

Everyone gets mad at or at least annoyed with someone at some point in their life. There is always going to be that one person who just gets on your nerves. Now, to be completely honest, kids can be annoying, from toddlers to teenagers and those kids who are about ten. They just seem to get on everyone’s nerves. Some kids can make you mad, whether because they disobeyed you and did something stupid or they made a bad decision. It’s okay to be mad at kids, but while you’re mad you still need to show them love. It is almost universal for kids to think if someone is angry with them then they aren’t loved by that person anymore. Kids need to be shown unconditional love through the mistakes they make. You can’t let them get away with making bad decisions over and over again, but you need to love them through their problems and help them not make the same mistake twice. Kids aren’t the only people in the world who need unconditional love; adults do as well. To have a good family structure, you need to be able to love each other through the problems another person may make. If a kids grows up thinking they will stop being loved when they make a mistake, it is likely for them to have the underlying thought that when they mess up people will leave them because they made a mistake, whether it be simple or catastrophic.

Children’s opinions can be seen as meaningless to those who are older than them. People say kids don’t understand what is coming out of their mouths and dismiss what they have to say. Therefore, to fill up the empty space, they talk about their opinions and what they think is right. Some adults can be quite forceful and get mad if the child doesn’t agree with what they are saying. They just want the kids to believe what they have to say is the only option, when in reality, there are so many different thoughts and expressions they could have that are completely unique compared to other ways of thinking. Having your own opinion can give you confidence in yourself and your abilities. It can make you more passionate about the things you love and more willing to share your point of view with others. But if you are never given the opportunity to form your own special views, then it will be incredibly hard for you to think for yourself. Taking someone else’s opinions and using them as your own never allows you to express what you think and what you want. You can’t express the changes you want to make or the passion you have. And if you grow up being an impassionate slate who takes everything in but doesn’t give anything out, you won’t really want to share what you think when you’re older. You won’t necessarily know how to, seeing as you were used to adults always giving you way to think. That would make it hard to create things that are special to you. You won’t be able to have your own thoughts, and that is not a good way to go through life.

It is common knowledge children collect all sorts of information and keep it with them as they grow up; however, I don’t think people understand how much of it they actually keep. I mean children, as a whole, are curious and want to know all sorts of things about every object, topic, or even person they can get their hands, or mind, on. It has been said children are like sponges: they soak up an abundance of knowledge as a sponge collects a large amount of some type of liquid. Children take in the things they see, hear, and experience then bring them with them as they grow out of childhood. We need to be gentle and loving to kids, because they matter. Just because they aren’t adults doesn’t mean what they say is invalid. They have importance and value in God’s eyes, so they should have importance and value in ours. We should do everything in our power to help them get through the struggles imminent to them.