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.