Jason never lets anybody get close. He learned before he was ever Robin that the people you love are only a liability. The streets, the people of Gotham don't care how close you are to anybody. They rip you away from them more violently than you can hold on to them, and you wind up alone again, and all you have to show for loving someone is empty arms and memories of happier times to compare your current situation to. Jason knows from personal experience that that makes things worse, not better, so he keeps a barrier of attitude and anger between himself and anybody who tries to get closer. And that works on the streets, where nobody wants to get close to a ratty street punk anyway, and accepts his attitude without comment.
But then he's off the street, and thrust into a new world where jeans without holes in the knees aren't his best pair of pants, they're his worst, and he's not only going to school, he's going to some fancy school where he sticks out like a sore thumb even though they all wear uniforms, and Alfred washes his mouth out with soap if he curses. And he's also Robin, which is unlike being on the streets even though he's on them some of the time, and unlike the rich world he's been thrust into, because he's allowed to get in fights but not to have an attitude (he doesn't even want to think about what Batman would do to him if he cursed). And without his attitude he doesn't know how to push people away so he finds himself with a family of sorts, a family that is closer than anything he's ever heard of and yet more distant at the same time, and he can't keep himself from caring about them.
People die, that's the way of the world. And when they die, they leave behind an empty place in his heart. And the only thing time does to that empty place in his heart is make it larger.
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