Does childhood determine our future?

Dewey

Minimalistic
As a side note to this, i will use Malcolm and his siblings as a prominent example; and maybe use my research to try and determine where the boys will be in 5, 10, 20 and 30 years from now. Do you have any thoughts on this too?

I'm also looking for people who would be willing to talk about their childhoods in relation to where they are in adult life. The age group I'm looking to research would ideally be aged between 18 and 40 years and be familar with MITM. If you are a visitor of this forum, fit into that age range; and would also be available to comment and complete surveys etc, then please let me know.

I realise that I may be asking a lot, so I understand if you cannot comment for whatever reason.
 

yardgames

Retired Administrator
Trust our philosophical member to come up with something like this. Like it or not, childhood stays with you for the rest of your life. As far as evidence in MITM, I'd like to point to Dirty Magazine. Malcolm says that the censors are a bunch of arbitrary people wtih arbitrary ideas of censorship; he's not fighting for the story, necessarily, as much as he's fighting for the principles of censorship surrounding the story. It's these principles he learned from Lois, and he's not going to forget those, trash his value system, and completely rewrite his DNA from the ground up when he turns 18. It's not physically possible.

Reese tried in Lois vs. Jamie, to do one lasat childhood act, before he would convert himselft to adulthood. He hasn't really changed since that ep, he had changed more prior to it than after it.

Good luck with your surveys.
 

allison

New member
To answer your question "Does our experience of childhood shape who we become in the future?" Yes, I defintely think so. As yardgames said childhood stays with you for the rest of your life. Of course you don´t wake up the morning of your 18. birthday and be a totally different person.

Of course it also depends on the people in which way their lives are shaped by the experience of their childhood. But some things, like the way you were brought up will impact your whole life. In our biology lesson (the first time I found something interesting:D ) we talked about how experiences you had in your youngest childhood can impact your development. If babies don´t get enough attention they often become social rejects and have great problems to integrate into society.
It would actually be quite illogical if your childhood didn´t affect the rest of your life at all. The day you turn 18 and officially become an adult the only experiences you ever had you had in your childhood. All your memories are from your childhood. So how could you entirely forget about all these things? I think people mature when they grow older, but childhood is a very important (if not the most important) part of your life. It´s the time when you learn so many things and hit puberty and have to deal with lots of changes.
When you reach adulthood your development may stop in a way, but you can´t let go of all your past experiences. And for those people who want to (because they had a bad childhood or something) it´s pretty difficult to do so.
Your past is in general very important because we learn from and by experience.

You asked where we think the boys will be in a couple of years from now. I have no idea what Malcolm is going to do in his future, but in my opinion he´ll probably never become a really happy person. He´ll probably still overthink everything (as he did in his childhood) and complain about his life.
I´m not sure about Reese. maybe he´ll surprise people and achieve success (you never know, we tend to underestimate people like Reese):D
It´s hard to say how Dewey could turn out. He´ll maybe become a musician or something like that.
All of them surely had a crazy childhood which certainly will impact their adulthood.
Take Francis for example. Though he already has his own life and lives away from his family he still can´t stop complaining about the things his mother did to him. Plus it appears that he married a woman who´s pretty similiar to his mother. I don´t know if this is true, but some people say that children who don´t get along with their parents very fine subconsciously look for a partner who are similiar to their mother/father.
And I´m sure that Malcolm won´t forget about all the times when his mother embarassed him.
They probably all won´t forget Lois´"reign of terror" (to quote Francis:D ) and in one way or another it will certainly impact their adult life.

 

MITM-Fan

New member
That's a very interesting topic. Well..I totally agree with all the above mentioned opinions. And yes, your childhood experiences are influential to your future adulthood but that's not all. There are many other factors that play a significant role in the contribution how you turn out to be in the future, like:
- education (from school, as well as from your parents)
- standard of living
- the environment where you grew up
- the people you meet during your life (just one person could be able to change your whole attitude by a fingersnap)
- your privat interests (what you are doing in your spare time, what you are watching on TV, what music you are listening to)
- your closer family
etc...
These are all factors which are highly influential to your upcoming adulthood and then you have the experiences related to these factors and not everyone has exactly the same experiences or the same given basic factors which I mentioned. It's very complicated but, all in all...yeah, I believe that childhood experiences can affect your future life. :D BUT your attitude can change within a second.

:cool:
 

Wemboy

New member
I'd be willing to fill in a survey or do an interview for you appanah. I'm only twenty so i'm at the bottom end of the age group, but let me know if i can help you out.

In response to your initial question, i definitely think childhood shapes who we become in later lives. "The Child is father of the Man" as William Wordsworth said (ooh, get me with me fancy quotes!). Anyway, we learn from our experiences, especially during adolescence in my opinion. I think that the people you socialise with in school, and even more importantly your parents, can have a profound impact on your personality and general outlook in later life. Its all part of the socialisation process, which is an ongoing process but tends to have more of an impact when you're younger, and it affects every part of your life.

One thing my brother said the other day springs to mind, he's 28, and he was commenting on how he had lately found himself "unlearning" things he'd been told in school that were actually wrong. The example he used was "Columbus doscovered America." He didn't doiscover america, there had been people living there for thousands of years, and he wasn't even the first European to go there, as the vikings had left settlements on the continent in their era. This just seems to show how even stuff that you know is wrong can somehow stick with you, just because you were told it when you were a child.
 

Jimmy Junior

New member
I think that what people do in life can have more to do with chance than what they really want to do - I had a similar upbringing and similar opportunities (if anything, fewer) than my brother, but I feel I've done so much more than he has; although he's older than me he still lives with my mum, never goes out and worked in a pizza shop until he was about 25; I paid for my driving lessons by DJing in a wine bar, worked in Portugal for 4 months, got kicked out of home when I was 20 and lived above the bar which I managed, and now I live about 200 miles away from where I grew up.
I would say that nearly all of those events led on from showing an active interest in stage lighting when I was at school - it's all about networking.

I think people can change a great deal as they grow up; I think I'm more outgoing and more popular than I was when I was younger because I somehow ended up working in sales (maybe like Dewey), but in the same way people can become more sedate - there was a guy I went to school with who was always causing trouble and taking the pee out of people, but now he's settled down and works in an insurance office (a bit like Francis).

At the same time I think people can stay pretty much exactly the same - at Christmas I go to the pub in my home town and I see people I went to school with who still live there (many people move away), still hang out with the same people and still have the same hobbies (I can see Malcolm falling into this category).
 
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