Maybe It Wasn’t Attitude My book, What We Didn’t Get, began with a simple question: what happens to us when important emotional, developmental, or psychological needs are missing during childhood?

Maybe It Wasn’t Attitude

My book, What We Didn’t Get, began with a simple question: what happens to us when important emotional, developmental, or psychological needs are missing during childhood?

Most people think of childhood needs in basic terms. Did you have food? Clothes? A place to live? Did someone make sure you went to school? Those things matter, of course, but children need much more than what keeps them physically alive. They need emotional safety, affection, encouragement, protection, patience, healthy boundaries, attention, play, and the freedom to make mistakes without feeling that one mistake defines who they are.

When some of those things are missing, we do not simply leave childhood behind and become adults untouched by it. We carry parts of those experiences with us.

That is one of the ideas I explore in What We Didn’t Get. 

Have you ever looked at someone and wondered why they react the way they do? Why they become defensive so quickly, shut down during conflict, struggle to trust people, need constant reassurance, or seem completely independent until something small suddenly overwhelms them? We are quick to label people. We call them difficult, lazy, dramatic, angry, cold, immature, too sensitive, toxic, or say they simply have an attitude.

But maybe sometimes we are asking the wrong question.

Instead of asking, “What is wrong with you?” maybe we should ask, “What didn’t you get?”

That does not mean every adult problem can be blamed on childhood. It also does not mean our parents were bad people. One of the more difficult truths to accept is that our parents may have loved us deeply and still been unable to give us everything we needed. Both things can be true.

Many parents were raising children while trying to survive their own circumstances. Poverty, racism, violence, addiction, grief, unstable relationships, untreated mental health issues, discrimination, and unresolved childhood experiences can all affect the way someone parents. Some people were expected to raise children when nobody had ever shown them what emotionally healthy parenting looked like. Others believed that providing food, shelter, and discipline was enough because that was all they had ever received themselves.

Then the pattern continues.

A child who was never allowed to cry may grow into an adult who becomes uncomfortable when someone shows emotion. A child who had to grow up too soon may become an adult who cannot rest without feeling guilty. Someone who grew up never knowing when love might disappear may spend adulthood holding people too tightly or refusing to depend on anyone at all. A person who was constantly criticized may hear rejection even when rejection was never intended.

Years later, somebody meets that adult and says, “They are just difficult.”

But what happened before the behavior?

That is the question I keep coming back to.

Understanding where behavior comes from does not mean excusing harmful behavior. Childhood should not become a lifetime permission slip to hurt other people. Accountability still matters. But if we focus only on correcting behavior and never ask what created it, we may spend years treating the surface while never touching what is underneath.

This conversation is especially important when we look at families that have lived through generations of social and economic pressure. What happens to childhood development when survival becomes the priority? What happens when children grow up around racism, financial instability, violence, discrimination, incarceration, housing insecurity, or communities that have been deprived of resources?

Sometimes families teach children what they believe those children will need to survive. Be tough. Don’t cry. Don’t talk back. Don’t let anybody disrespect you. Work twice as hard. Grow up fast.

Those lessons may have protected people.

But protection and development are not always the same thing.

And this is not only a conversation for people looking back on childhood decades later. Younger generations are already talking about boundaries, attachment, emotional regulation, generational trauma, therapy, parenting styles, and breaking cycles. The language may be newer, but the question underneath it is not.

Why am I like this, and where did it begin?

That is why I wrote What We Didn’t Get. I did not write it to blame parents or to convince people that everything wrong in adulthood began in childhood. I wrote it because I believe there is value in looking beneath behavior before we judge it.

Maybe you were not simply “too sensitive.” Maybe nobody taught you what to do with strong emotions. Maybe you were not lazy. Maybe you became exhausted from living in survival mode. Maybe you were not difficult. Maybe you learned very early that if you did not speak up for yourself, nobody else would. Maybe the independence everyone praises you for developed because depending on people never felt safe.

At some point, most of us have to ask two questions: What did I receive that helped me become who I am, and what did I need that I never received?

We cannot go backward and rewrite childhood. But we can understand it differently. We can recognize what was missing, decide what we still need, and become more intentional about what we give the people who come after us.

Maybe healing begins there—not by asking what is wrong with us, but by finally understanding what we didn’t get.

— Linda Kamal
Author, What We Didn’t Get