Blaming your childhood experiences for the behavior and mistakes you make as an adult is just a scapegoat for not taking responsibility for yourself.

The argument

Adult humans make decisions every day of their lives, and the argument's starting point is that this capacity is what adulthood consists of. Learning from experience is part of it. As a child, if you had touched an open flame, you would feel pain, so you would then avoid open flames. You learn from your mistakes — and the lesson the child takes from the flame is a useful one, formed by an event and carried forward. The move the argument makes is to distinguish that ordinary process from a claim of determination. If that same adult develops a phobia of fire 20 or 30 years later and says it is because of this one incident as a child, it is still that adult’s responsibility to employ self-awareness and seek help and aid to remedy that phobia. The childhood event may explain where a difficulty came from, but it does not settle what happens next, because the adult retains the capacity to act on it — and that capacity, rather than the origin of the difficulty, is what the question of responsibility turns on. From that distinction the argument draws its charge. People who use incidents as a child as justification for their inability to take responsibility for themselves as an adult are just avoiding growing up and showing ownership of themselves and their own minds. The explanation is being used to close the matter rather than to open it. An everyday case makes the point concrete. It is easy to say that you have, for example, commitment issues if you had perhaps an absent parent. Even if that’s true — and the argument does not deny that it may be — there’s nothing stopping you from taking control of that situation and seeking help, therapy, or otherwise, in order to overcome that obstacle. Where a remedy is available and unused, the outcome is chosen rather than inherited.

Premises

Counter-arguments

It is widely understood in the scientific community that childhood experiences comprise the fundamental formation of our brains. While humans do continue to learn and grow through the course of their lives as their brains develop into adulthood, these adult experiences do not always overwrite those early ones, and those early influences can continue to hold sway well into adulthood.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Responsibility for seeking help is compatible with childhood experience shaping behaviour; the premise argues for the former and treats it as establishing the latter. That an adult can work on a phobia says nothing about where the phobia came from. [Rejecting P2] The argument is about blame, and the position it is filed under makes a causal claim. At its strongest it would show only that early experience does not excuse adult conduct — not that it does not influence it, which is what the position needs. The counter's point that childhood experience shapes the formation of the brain, and that later learning does not always overwrite it, is left untouched.