Do childhood experiences determine our adult personalities?

Trauma can make people develop certain personality traits

Question: Do childhood experiences determine our adult personalities?
Position1 of 2›: Yes, childhood experiences shape our personalities
Argument‹2 of 2: Trauma can make people develop certain personality traits

Childhood experiences could be emotional, psychological, physical, cultural or even sexual. Childhood experiences play a significant role in shaping our personalities as adults in the way we behave, think, feel, act, associate and many other ways.

The argument

Trauma is a huge factor when shaping one's personality. When it comes to childhood experiences, they can affect a person well into adulthood. For instance, a child who was unable to interact with other kids or locked up during their childhood can portray antisocial behaviors when they are an adult. Children who never experienced love from their parents and other family members can depict irresponsible behaviors in adulthood, as they are unable to express the same feelings. A child who experienced a physically and emotionally understanding relationship with a parent(s) and other siblings can express their feelings in a relaxed and positive way. On the other hand, physically and emotionally abusive and hostile family experiences can elicit personality disorders and psychological trauma that can affect the personality into adulthood.

Premises

[P1]Childhood trauma is a major factor in shaping personality, with effects that persist into adulthood. [P2] Isolation, lack of parental love, or abusive and hostile family environments can produce antisocial, irresponsible, or disordered traits later, while warm, understanding family relationships foster positive emotional expression. [C] Therefore, because trauma and family experience shape adult traits, childhood experiences shape our personalities.

Counter-arguments

The evidence assembled supports influence; the position claims determination, and the gap between them is where the argument fails. Nothing offered here rules out the possibility that childhood experience is one contributor among several to a trait that also has other sources. The findings that bear most directly on this are awkward for the argument. Behaviour-genetic studies consistently estimate substantial heritability for the major personality traits, and — more troublingly still — repeatedly find that the shared family environment accounts for very little of the variance in adult personality once genetic relatedness is controlled. Siblings raised in the same household, by the same parents, in the same emotional climate, do not resemble each other in personality nearly as much as an argument resting on family atmosphere would predict. The longitudinal literature on adversity points the same way. A substantial proportion of children exposed to serious maltreatment do not develop the outcomes described, which is why resilience is a central research topic rather than an anomaly; and personality continues to change measurably across adulthood, which a determination claim cannot easily accommodate. The specific mappings are also stated far more tightly than any evidence supports. No research licenses the inference from an absence of parental affection to 'irresponsible behaviours' in particular. Causation is not one-directional either: a child's temperament shapes the parenting that child receives, so family climate is partly an effect of the traits it is invoked to explain.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Trauma is one contributor among several; behaviour-genetic work finds substantial heritability for personality traits and little variance explained by the shared family environment. [Rejecting P2] The mappings from specific childhood conditions to specific adult traits are far more precise than the evidence supports, many children exposed to adversity do not show these outcomes, and a child's temperament shapes the parenting received rather than only responding to it.