Growing Up With Emotionally Immature Parents

Your Score: 34 (Out of 40)

A score between 20 and 40 suggests that you have likely experienced parental emotional immaturity.

Did You Grow Up with Emotionally Immature Parents?

When caregivers are selfish, distant, and dismissive, their children carry anxiety and low self-worth into adulthood. Begin your healing journey here.

Growing up, did you feel that your parents’ needs came before your own, or that you could never please them? Were they dismissive of your ADHD-related struggles because it was easier to believe your symptoms weren’t real than it was to seek help? Did your parents try to control you, discourage your independence, or make you feel that you had to care for them?

Emotionally immature parents exert a toxic force that can leave lingering scars. Their children often carry anxiety and low self-esteem into adulthood, leading to unhealthy relationships and destructive behavioral patterns. Not surprisingly, emotional immaturity is a leading cause of parent-adult child estrangement, according to a Cornell University survey.

Were My Parents Self-Absorbed?

Traits commonly exhibited by emotionally immature caregivers:

• Egocentricity: Self-absorption and lacking self-awareness; a child’s emotional needs are sidelined, even if material needs are met,
• Mental rigidity: Little respect for differences and defensiveness when challenged.
• Low stress tolerance: Difficulty coping when things don’t go their way.
• Inconsistency and unpredictability: Shifting rules and expectations; affection feels conditional.
• Intense but shallow emotions: Quick mood changes, rarely with nuance.

Tactics of Emotionally Immature Parents

• Parentification: Expecting children to take on unreasonable, inappropriate adult responsibilities, like mediating parents’ arguments or acting as their therapist.
• Gaslighting: Questioning a child’s memory, judgment, or sense of reality.
• Moving the goal posts: Shifting and changing expectations without rewarding progress.
• Guilt-tripping: Making a child feel bad for their choices, becoming resentful or playing the victim if confronted.
• Rug-sweeping: Ending arguments without resolution or acknowledgement of the issue.
• Favoritism: Treating one sibling as the “golden child,” while making the others feel invisible.
• Intrusiveness: Lacking boundaries and feeling entitled to a child’s personal life.
• Straw man arguments: Misrepresenting or distorting a child’s views, often putting them on the defensive.
• Blame game: Rarely accepting accountability.
• Strings attached: Giving gifts only with conditions that are later held against the child.
• Questioning worth: Making a child feel they must constantly prove their worth.

You can read the full article on ADDitude.