The Childhood Roots of Adult Confidence

Have you ever wondered why some people grow up feeling like they can handle whatever life throws at them, while others feel powerless? That feeling—the belief that you can influence your life and get the outcomes you want—is called "mastery." Researchers wanted to know: what happens in childhood that might lead to higher or lower mastery in adulthood?

Our belief that we can handle life’s challenges is not innate; it is nurtured or harmed by the environment we grow up in.

They looked at data from over 200,000 adults across 22 countries, asking about 11 different childhood experiences. These included things like health growing up, relationships with parents, family finances, abuse, feeling like an outsider, and whether they attended religious services. What they found is both simple and humbling. No single childhood factor stood out as the big one.

Instead, many small factors added up. People who had excellent health as kids, good relationships with their mothers and fathers, families that met their financial needs comfortably, and who regularly attended religious services tended to report higher mastery as adults. On the flip side, people who experienced abuse, felt like outsiders in their own families, had poor health, or faced serious financial hardship growing up tended to report lower mastery. Interestingly, whether parents were married or whether a child was an immigrant showed little connection to adult mastery. The researchers also found that these patterns varied a lot from country to country.

What helps build mastery in one culture might look different in another. The effects were modest—often just a few percentage points—but they were consistent enough to suggest that childhood experiences matter for how capable we feel decades later.