“People can often be heard to mention that the developmental necessities of early childhood are crucial to the formation of our bodies, minds and relational character. This is reasonable and true: children are living in a mode of time that is really different from the modes of teens, young adults, and so on. They are developing crucial assets whose presence or absence as development continues can form pivotal foundations from which skills and potential developments arise. Without these assets, various kinds of developmental crises ensue.

Yet what we are concerned about with these ideas is true of everyone, at every age. In part, because we are ‘still all of our ages’, and, in such a perspective, our first ages are the oldest and most developed. My first year is twice as old as my second year (once both have taken place). in thinking about this, I realized that the idiom: ‘the formative years’ is never not true; while the years of early childhood are truly formative, there are no years that are not formative(?), for everyone, and the idea that there are is both confused and confusing. Once we start to think this way it is too easy to believe, and thus live out, a fiction: that some years are formative and others are just years.”

— an anonymous informant