When I was six, I ate spaghetti with my hands.
My mother had invited one of her boyfriends over for dinner. After my father left, there had been a parade of unfamiliar men coming in and out of our home, and my brother and I hated it. But we were children, and nobody asked what we wanted. That night, she wanted us to perform: sit at the table, smile, be polite, and pretend everything was fine.
So when the spaghetti was served, I shoved it into my mouth with my hands and talked with my mouth wide open. I was defiant, disgusting, and deliberately awful.
At the time, I thought I was just behaving badly. A troublesome child. A problem.
Looking back now, with decades of education and clinical experience, I understand: I was protecting myself. My “bad behavior” was a survival response to abandonment, chaos, and having no control over my life. I didn’t have the words, so I acted it out instead.
The first bags children carry
Children don’t come into the world with baggage. They arrive open, vulnerable, and trusting. But when the adults around them fail them, through neglect, abuse, abandonment, chaos, or their own unprocessed trauma, children start packing bags. Not consciously. Not deliberately. But inevitably.
The first bags are small but heavy:
The belief that they caused the problem. Children are egocentric by nature, so they think, “I must have done something wrong.”
The responsibility to fix things. They become caretakers, peacekeepers, and perfect little performers.
The need to survive at any cost. Hypervigilance, people-pleasing, or acting out become the strategies that keep them safe.
Behavior is communication
Here’s what I wish I had known then, and what I want you to know now: children don’t misbehave. They communicate through behavior because they don’t yet have the neurological development or the emotional vocabulary to do it any other way. The part of the brain responsible for impulse control and rational thinking isn’t fully developed until around age 25.
That meltdown, that shutdown, that “attitude” is often a child’s desperate, inarticulate attempt to say, “Something is very wrong, and I don’t know how to handle it.”
What changes when we see it
When we start asking “What is this child trying to tell me?” instead of “Why are they acting like this?”, everything shifts, for the children in our lives and for the child we once were.
Children’s baggage isn’t their fault. It’s what happens when developing brains try to make sense of environments that make little sense.
This post comes from Chapter 7, “Children’s Baggage,” in Not My Baggage. If this stirred something up for you, the companion journal is a gentle place to start unpacking it.
Travel light.