Alain De Botton

Childhood is a very difficult period.

And I think we all need to understand that children are born into the world utterly dependent on those around them, the few people around them who are randomly chosen and who will be suffering from various distortions of their own minds.

I mean, it's very rare that you are born into a sane family.

Most of us are born into, you know, it's a lopsided sort of proposition.

So we have to understand that this is the way we're born.

How long are we going to let that lopsided entry into the world determine our lives?

Ideally, a minimal amount of time.

What you need to do is to realise the nature of the lopsidedness, accept the lopsidedness and start to correct it as early as possible.

You know, it depends in which area.

Love and work, the two great areas of life.

This is Freud said, you know, happiness means getting love and work right.

And most of us get love and work dramatically wrong with things that are probably related to early childhood.

We pick up – what happens in childhood is that we don't only learn language and social skills.

We learn a whole emotional vocabulary about who we are, how we function, what's expected of us, what it takes to be good, what it means to be a boy, a girl, gender, roles, et cetera.

All of this is encoded in us unconsciously.

And we need to understand the language we've learned in order to become self-aware and question, because bits of it are going to be balmy, really, really strange, really distorted.

There will be an excessive focus on some areas and not on others.

And ultimately, the goal of adulthood is to become your own arbiter of your own value and of your own mission and of your own joys, et cetera.

It used to belong in other people.

A child looks up at its parent and goes, who am I?