Blaming your childhood experiences for the behavior and mistakes you make as an adult is just a scapegoat for not taking responsibility for yourself.
Plenty of people that have negative childhood experiences grow into perfectly stable and high-functioning adults. Blaming poor decisions on childhood is just a way to avoid taking responsibility for yourself and your actions.
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The Argument
Adult humans make decisions every day of their lives. 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. 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. 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.[1] It is easy to say that you have, for example, commitment issues if you had perhaps an absent parent. Even if that’s true, there’s nothing stopping you from taking control of that situation and seeking help, therapy, or otherwise, in order to overcome that obstacle.[2]
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.[3]