Who Did You Learn to Be and Who Might You Have Been Otherwise – Interview with Linda Eskay
Linda Eskay is a writer, speaker, and movement founder whose work explores how childhood experiences shape who we become. What began as a search to better understand why children struggle has grown into a much larger inquiry into human development, belonging, adaptation, and what allows people to truly flourish. Her work challenges some of our most familiar assumptions about behavior, development, and what it means to help a child thrive.
There was a version of life you imagined. Things you wanted. Somewhere along the way, you may have become practical, responsible, successful, agreeable. You took the safe path. But when did you learn to be who you were expected to be?
In this interview, Linda takes that question upstream, exploring what children begin to believe about themselves as they adapt to the world around them, how those adaptations can follow us into adulthood, and what we might discover if we looked beyond the behavior we’re trying to change. Maybe the child isn't the problem. Maybe we're looking in the wrong place.
Linda Eskay, Speaker, Author & Advocate
Your work began with children, but it has grown into a much larger exploration of human development. What question are you ultimately trying to answer?
I've become fascinated by what allows human beings to truly flourish, and what prevents it. I began asking that question through the lens of children. I wanted to understand why children respond so differently to the world around them, and what contributes to struggles with anxiety, behavior, confidence, belonging, or the feeling that something is wrong with them.
At some point I realized I wasn't really studying children anymore. I was studying how human beings become who they become.
Children come into the world so different from one another, and then enter families, schools, and communities with expectations about how they should learn, behave, and develop. They notice what gets praised, what gets corrected, what disappoints people, and what earns approval. They adapt.
That adaptation can look very different from one child to another, and it isn't always obvious when a child is struggling. But sometimes there is a cost.
A child can stop experiencing something as “This is hard for me” and begin experiencing it as “There is something wrong with me.” That's the moment I'm interested in. Struggle is part of being human. But struggle doesn't have to become identity.
When a child is struggling with behavior, what might we miss when our first response is trying to stop or change it?
I think we can miss the child. Children don't wake up in the morning devising ways they can ruin an adult's day. Behavior is what we see, so naturally it gets our attention. A meltdown, anger, withdrawal, defiance. We want it to stop, especially when it's disrupting the family. But I've become much more interested in asking, “What makes this behavior make sense?”
What happened in the moments before? What was the child experiencing? What was being asked of them? How are they interpreting the circumstances? What meaning are they making about themselves?
The same behavior can mean something completely different in two children. One may be overwhelmed. Another may be afraid. Another may be struggling with an expectation they aren't developmentally ready to meet.
I sometimes think of behavior like a smoke alarm. When an alarm goes off, you don't just want the noise to stop. You want to know what set it off.
That doesn't mean we ignore harmful behavior or don't have boundaries. It means stopping a behavior and understanding it are two different things.
Sometimes the behavior we're trying so hard to eliminate is the very thing pointing us toward what the child needs us to understand.
Children have a deep need to belong. How can that need begin to shape who a child learns to be?
Children are incredibly observant, and they absorb energy around them. Long before they can explain what they're noticing, they're picking up information about what makes the people around them happy, worried, disappointed, or proud.
Belonging isn't just something children want. Human beings are wired for connection. Historically, being part of the group was essential to survival, so being accepted runs very deep in us.
Very few parents would ever tell a child, “You need to be someone different for me to love you.” The messages are much more subtle.
A sensitive child notices when their emotions make people uncomfortable. A highly active child hears that they're too much. Another discovers that being easy, helpful, or successful gets a positive response. They learn through feedback loops.
The child isn't consciously deciding to change themselves. Most of the time, they don't even know they're doing it. They're adapting.
We need to belong. But somewhere along the way, many of us learn that belonging means fitting in. That's what I mean by self-silencing. It doesn't always mean becoming quiet. It can mean becoming very good at being who you believe the world expects you to be.
You can fit in, succeed, make people happy, and be rewarded for it. Sometimes that works incredibly well. Until it doesn't.
When a child is struggling, what questions do you wish we were asking more often?
I keep coming back to this image of a room full of babies who are all around the same age. One is crawling, another is pulling themselves up, another is standing, and another has started taking a few steps.
We don't look at the baby who's still crawling and decide something's wrong because another baby is walking. We understand that development happens on individual timelines. We say, “They'll walk when they're ready.”
Then children enter school, and we begin expecting development to follow a standardized timeline. We compare them to what's considered average for their age. When they don't match those expectations, our attention can quickly turn toward what's wrong with the child. But there is no average child.
We accept individual differences everywhere in nature as part of how living things adapt and thrive. Why don't we extend that same understanding to children?
So instead of starting with “What's wrong with this child?” I want us to ask, “What does this child need to thrive?” If the environment isn't working for the child, why is our first instinct so often to change the child?
We tend to notice the child who is visibly struggling. What might we miss in the child who seems to be doing just fine?
Not every struggling child looks like they're struggling. Some children make it clear when something isn't working. They melt down, refuse to comply, argue, withdraw, or become anxious. Their struggle gets our attention because we can see it. But other children adapt in ways adults tend to reward.
They become easy, helpful, independent, or high-achieving. They learn to read the room and avoid disappointing people. They may become perfectionists or take responsibility for keeping everyone else happy.
We call them mature, responsible, and a pleasure to have in class. The problem is that we can mistake a child's ability to function well within an environment for evidence that the environment is working well for the child.
A child can become incredibly good at meeting everyone else's expectations without ever asking for what they want or need, or trusting that their feelings are okay.
Doing well isn't always the same thing as being well. I want to know whether they feel like they can be themselves without worrying about disappointing the people around them. The child may look fine precisely because they've become very good at not disappointing anyone.
What happens when some of the ways we learned to adapt as children follow us into adulthood?
Childhood adaptations don't simply disappear when we turn 18. The child who learns that keeping everyone happy makes life easier can become the adult who struggles to say no. The child who gets approval through achievement may become the adult who never feels like they've done enough. The child who learns not to need much from anyone may struggle to ask for help.
These patterns can work incredibly well for a long time. We may even be praised for them. Until one day they stop working.
As adults, how often do we say, “I don't even know what I want.” Or, “I've done everything I was supposed to do. Why am I not happy?”
I know that experience personally. I built a life that looked successful from the outside, but my anxiety was telling me something wasn't working.
What if we knew that some of the things we're trying so hard to change about ourselves as adults began to take root in childhood? That's a question worth asking.
A child can look very different at home, at school, and in a professional's office. What could change if the adults in that child's life began seeing those pieces as part of one whole child?
This is one of the biggest gaps I see in how we support children. The child who struggles at 9:00 a.m. in math class is the same child who sits in the pediatrician's office, melts down at home, talks to the school counselor, goes to soccer practice, and lies awake thinking about what all of those experiences mean for them.
Every adult is seeing a piece. The child is living the whole. The child doesn't experience their life in silos. We do.
When those pieces remain separate, I think we miss some of the most useful information we have. Why does the child struggle in one environment and thrive in another? Why do they appear to hold it together all day at school and fall apart when they get home? What's different about the places where they feel capable, comfortable, and understood?
Those differences aren't problems to explain away. They're clues to understanding the child. Imagine what could change if the adults surrounding a child began seeing that whole child together. Instead of sending children from one adult to another to find what's wrong, we could build something much more powerful around them: shared understanding.
You've talked about wanting to move further “upstream.” What could prevention look like much earlier in a child's life?
We spend enormous amounts of time and money helping adults change the beliefs and patterns that keep them stuck, questioning themselves, or living lives that don't quite feel like their own. That's downstream.
We've become accustomed to intervening after the struggle has already taken root. I'm interested in what was happening when those beliefs and patterns were being formed. That's what I mean by moving upstream.
A child struggles to read and begins believing they're stupid. Maybe they need more time and decide they're slow. Or they're deeply sensitive, keep hearing that they're overreacting, and eventually stop trusting their feelings. What matters to me is what the child is beginning to believe about themselves because of what's happening.
Think about what we do when we're trying to help a plant thrive. We pay attention to the conditions. The light. The water. The soil. We don't expect every plant to thrive in the same conditions. Why would we expect that of children?
We're not going to prevent children from failing or going through hard things. But imagine going through those things with a strong sense of who you are and trust in yourself. A failure can be something that happened, not proof that you're a failure. To me, that's resilience, and that's why I want to get there earlier.
What do you hope will be different for the next generation of children and for the adults they eventually become?
I want us to question some of what we've come to accept as normal. We take children who are wildly different from one another and put them on the same timelines, compare them to averages, reward some ways of being, and question or challenge others. Then, years later, we find ourselves helping adults change patterns and beliefs that no longer serve them.
I don't think those two things are unrelated. I want children to grow up knowing they can trust themselves. That struggling doesn't mean there's something wrong with them. That being different doesn't make them deficient, and that they don't have to become who everyone else needs them to be in order to belong.
I'm not talking about creating perfect childhoods. I'm talking about changing what children come to believe about themselves while they're living them.
Imagine what changes in a home when a child no longer feels like they're the problem, and a parent no longer feels like their job is to fix them. Because those children become adults.
Perhaps the next great shift in human development will not come from discovering one more way to change children. Perhaps it will come from changing the way we see them. Together, and that's really the possibility behind everything I'm doing:
"What would it take to create a world where people don't have to spend their adult lives recovering from their childhood?"
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