Lost Childhood

Charlie Kane spends all his life collecting riches. But the one thing he can never get is love. He views love as conditional and doesn't know how to love. What went wrong? I think we can deduce that he doesn't know how to love because after he left his family, no one ever truly loved him. You can't learn something that's never shown. Kane was taken away from his mother too early to learn how to love. In essense, and absence of a childhood is the cause of this.

It seems that, to some point, Kane realizes the link himself. He mourns his lost childhood. His last word was the name of the sled he had as a boy, and he dropped the snowglobe. I believe he regrets growing up too soon.

http://blogs.princeton.edu/wri152-3/f05/fkherani/a_lost_childhood.html

This article tells of Picasso, a child prodigy. He was in a similar situation as
Kane. Picasso never had a childhood. The rest of his life he tried to live
out the childhood he never had through his drawings. Like Kane, he regreted
the cost of success.