The emotional growth cycle of a person is a very delicate and must be nurtured throughout childhood, puberty and young adulthood. If there're events that disrupt this cycle, it could create behaviors well into their adult life. Anything from trust issues, commitment phobias, drug abuse, hyper-sexuality, etc. etc. can usually be traced back to circumstances and/or occurrences that 'short-circuited' the pattern nature intended. One thing to note is that you can't skip stages of growth, so if your parents divorced when you were 8 years old and you were required to take care of your younger siblings, you've had to become an adult before you're actually prepared to be. The 'fall-out' from this will vary from child-to-child, and some will become uber-successful and some will be crack-addicts, there's no way to predict...but somewhere there's an eight year old that 'lost' his childhood.