People who grew up with very few words of encouragement usually develop these 9 traits later in life (without realizing it)

My grandmother raised four kids on a teacher's salary. She worked hard. She provided. She kept everyone fed and clothed and safe.

But she didn't do encouragement. That wasn't her language. You did well on a test, she'd nod. You won something, she'd say "that's nice" and move on. Positive reinforcement wasn't part of her toolkit, probably because it wasn't part of hers growing up either.

My parents inherited some of that. Not all of it, but enough that I grew up understanding that love looked like practical support, not verbal affirmation. Which is fine. Plenty of people grow up that way and turn out okay.

But it leaves marks. Subtle ones. The kind you don't notice until you're an adult wondering why you can't take a compliment or why you drive yourself into the ground trying to prove something to nobody in particular.

Psychology has identified patterns in people who grew up without much encouragement. Not defects. Not damage. Just traits that develop when certain emotional nutrients are missing during childhood.

1) They struggle to accept compliments

Someone tells you you did great work. Your immediate response is to deflect, minimize, or explain why it wasn't actually that good.

This isn't modesty. It's discomfort.

When you grow up without positive reinforcement, compliments feel foreign. They don't match your internal narrative about yourself. So your brain treats them like errors that need correcting.

I still do this. Someone compliments my writing and I immediately list everything wrong with it. My partner finally called me out: "Why can't you just say thank you?"

Because accepting a compliment means believing it. And if you weren't trained to believe good things about yourself as a kid, that skill doesn't magically appear in adulthood.

Learning to simply say "thank you" without the follow-up explanation is harder than it sounds. But it's necessary.

2) They become perfectionists

Here's the twisted logic that develops: if you couldn't get encouragement for being good, maybe you can earn it by being perfect.

Perfectionism isn't about high standards. It's about trying to become worthy.

As psychologist Michelle P. Maidenberg explains, the childhood thinking goes: "If only I were good enough, smart enough, likable enough, loveable enough, then my parents would love and accept me." In adulthood, that becomes an exhausting cycle of trying to finally "make the cut."

I see this pattern everywhere. People who work themselves into burnout trying to achieve some undefined level of "enough." They hit their goals and immediately move the goalposts. The finish line keeps receding because the real goal isn't achievement. It's validation that never came.

The problem with perfectionism is it's never satisfied. There's always something that could be better. Always a way you fall short. It's an impossible standard that guarantees perpetual disappointment.

3) They seek validation constantly

If you couldn't get emotional needs met in childhood, you spend adulthood trying to fill that void.

This manifests as seeking approval from everyone. Checking if your work is okay. Asking if people are mad at you. Needing reassurance that you're doing well, that people like you, that you're acceptable.

It's exhausting for everyone involved. For you, because the need is bottomless. For others, because constant reassurance gets draining.

The cruel irony is that external validation never actually fills the gap. You get the compliment, the approval, the praise, and it feels good for about five minutes. Then you need it again. It's trying to fill a childhood-sized hole with adult-sized Band-Aids.

Real security comes from internal validation. But that's a skill that should be taught in childhood. Learning it as an adult is possible but difficult.

4) They have low self-esteem

Self-esteem develops as we grow. It's built through experiences with people and situations, starting in childhood.

As Sarah-Len Mutiwasekwa from the Global Institute of Emotional Health and Wellness explains, the people around us contribute to our basic self-esteem. When positive reinforcement is missing, that foundation never gets properly built.

Low self-esteem in adulthood looks like constant self-doubt. Feeling inadequate. Believing you're not interesting, likable, or good enough. Comparing yourself to others and always coming up short.

I struggled with this for years. I could objectively see my accomplishments, but subjectively I felt like I was faking my way through life. Impostor syndrome on steroids.

The weird part about low self-esteem is it becomes self-fulfilling. You believe you're not good enough, so you don't try things, so you don't succeed, which confirms your belief that you're not good enough. The cycle reinforces itself.

5) They fear failure intensely

Encouragement in childhood is what gives kids permission to try new things. It's the safety net that says "it's okay if you fail, I believe in you anyway."

Without that safety net, failure becomes terrifying.

People who lacked encouragement often develop a paralyzing fear of failure. They avoid risks. They don't try new things. They stay in their comfort zone because stepping out means potentially failing, and failure confirms their deepest fear: that they're not good enough.

As psychologist Andrew Elliot points out, this creates overachievers who are driven not by genuine desire to achieve, but by an underlying fear of failure. They're running from something rather than toward something.

I see this in how I approach new projects. I need everything mapped out before I start. I need to know I can succeed before I try. Taking a genuine risk, where failure is a real possibility, makes my stomach turn.

6) They struggle with emotional expression

When feelings were dismissed or ignored in childhood, you learn to bottle them up.

That habit doesn't disappear in adulthood. It gets stronger.

Adults who grew up without encouragement often have difficulty identifying and expressing emotions. They keep feelings to themselves. They avoid emotional topics. They're not sure how to articulate what they're feeling or if it's even okay to feel it.

This creates problems in relationships. Your partner can't read your mind. Your friends don't know you're struggling unless you tell them. But telling them requires emotional expression skills you never developed.

Research shows this difficulty communicating emotions stems from a lack of early emotional nurturing. You can't express what you were never taught to recognize or validate.

7) They become hyper-independent

Here's the thing about not getting encouragement: you learn to rely on yourself because nobody else is coming to help.

This creates fierce independence. Self-reliance. The ability to handle things alone.

Which sounds positive, and in some ways it is. But taken too far, it becomes isolation.

Hyper-independent people struggle to ask for help. They don't know how to be vulnerable. They handle everything themselves even when they shouldn't have to. They build walls that keep people out, not to be unfriendly, but because asking for support never occurred to them as an option.

I recognize this in myself. My grandmother drilled self-sufficiency into my parents, who passed it to me. Asking for help feels like admitting weakness. Even when I'm drowning, my instinct is to handle it alone.

But humans aren't meant to be completely self-sufficient. Connection requires vulnerability. Relationships require reciprocity, which means sometimes letting others help you.

8) They have difficulty trusting others

When the people who were supposed to encourage you didn't, it creates a blueprint for relationships: people let you down.

This manifests as difficulty trusting in adulthood. Fear of intimacy. Assuming people will disappoint you. Keeping relationships at arm's length to avoid potential hurt.

A lack of childhood encouragement often leads to what psychologists call anxious or avoidant attachment styles. You want connection but don't fully trust it. You get close to people but always keep an exit strategy ready.

This creates relationship problems. Partners feel like you're emotionally unavailable. Friends feel like you don't fully let them in. And they're right, because you don't. Trust was never established as a foundation in childhood, so it's shaky in adulthood.

Building trust as an adult requires conscious effort and often therapy. You have to rewire patterns that were set decades ago.

9) They're incredibly resilient

Here's the trait that doesn't get talked about enough: people who grew up without encouragement often develop extraordinary resilience.

When you have to be your own cheerleader, when you learn to motivate yourself, when you figure out how to keep going without external validation, you build strength that people who had more support never needed to develop.

This resilience is a superpower. It means you can handle setbacks. You can persist through difficulty. You can get back up after failure because you've been doing it your whole life without anyone telling you you could.

The research on this is clear: adversity can create remarkable strength of character. It's not that the adversity was good, but humans are adaptable. We find ways to cope, and sometimes those coping mechanisms become genuine assets.

I've used this resilience my entire career. The ability to keep going when things get hard, to figure things out independently, to not need constant reassurance to continue, these are valuable traits in any field.

The key is recognizing when resilience tips into unhealthy isolation or when independence becomes an inability to connect with others.

The bottom line

Growing up without encouragement shapes you. That's not a judgment, just a fact.

Some of the traits it creates are challenging. Low self-esteem, fear of failure, difficulty with emotions, these make life harder than it needs to be.

But some of the traits are genuine strengths. Resilience, independence, the ability to self-motivate, these serve you well.

The work isn't about erasing these traits. It's about understanding where they came from and deciding which ones serve you and which ones hold you back.

Therapy helps. I've spent years unpacking this stuff with professionals who helped me see patterns I couldn't see myself. Understanding why I deflect compliments doesn't magically make me stop, but it helps me catch myself and choose a different response.

Self-compassion helps too. Recognizing that these traits developed as adaptations, not defects, makes them easier to work with.

And time helps. The longer you practice new patterns, the more natural they become. Accepting compliments gets easier. Taking risks becomes less terrifying. Trusting people becomes more possible.

If you recognize yourself in this list, you're not broken. You're someone who adapted to circumstances that weren't ideal. Those adaptations made sense at the time. Some of them still serve you. Others need updating.

That's the work of adulthood. Taking the raw materials we were given in childhood and consciously shaping them into something that works for the life we want to live now.

It's never too late to start.