How Having An Emotionally Immature Parent Can Affect Your Growth

Continuing The Cycle

This type of behavior is often caused by their own parents also being emotionally immature, raising them to believe that behavior is okay and leaving them without the skills needed to heal themselves. It's passed down from generation to generation, a vicious cycle.

Stopping It Here

Though there may be a cause for these parents behaving the way they do, that doesn't make it right. It's still important to understand just how much an emotionally immature parent affects their child's development and what those lasting scars can look like in adulthood. By being aware of how this upbringing affects you, you prevent it from being passed down to yet another generation, effectively breaking the cycle of bad parenting.

Here are just a few of the types of emotionally immature parents, how they behave, and how that behavior impacts their children.

1. The Controlling Type

You might know this type as "helicopter parents," known for hovering around their children and constantly monitoring them, exercising any amount of control they can get. They put a lot of pressure on their kids, expect them to always be performing, and react to any misgiving with anger or excessive punishment. Even when they're in a good mood, they'll be overly critical and invasive.

Appears Like Perfectionism

This leads to a child that grows up to be an absolute perfectionist, so much so that it becomes a detriment to their mental health. They're workaholics, they have impulsivity issues, and they bottle up negative feelings so as not to appear weakened. They suffer in silence.

2. The Emotional Type

The main trait of emotional type parents is their overreactions to things. This can go in any direction, from rage to sorrow to joy, but it creates a volatile environment where children may be afraid to speak their true thoughts lest their parents lash out. They can either appear needy, overly reliant on their children or be very distant, seeming to refuse any sort of real connection.

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People Pleasing

As children raised under these conditions grow, they often become very anxious and depressed, always afraid of saying the wrong thing and making someone else upset. They yearn for a real connection with others but don't know how to approach it in a healthy way, as they were never taught what that looks like.

3. The Rejecting Type

This type is fairly self-explanatory, they reject their children. They're dismissive of their child's wants and needs, avoiding any sort of heavy or meaningful talk. They always seek to be alone, even appearing selfish in the ways they'll deny their children quality time or any time at all. Any interactions are cold, short, and sometimes very harsh.

Lack Of Empathy

Children raised by these kinds of parents may have stunted empathy. They never learned how to care for others because they were never cared for, and that will extend to the relationships they have in adulthood. They have no way to regulate or manage their emotions, with their only tactic being to dissociate from them entirely.

4. The Negligent Type

Negligent type parents may sound similar in name to rejecting type, but there are a few notable differences. Negligent parents are completely passive. They avoid any and all confrontation, which is often needed to parent a child at all. They pride themselves on being easy to get along with or "chill," but they lack boundaries. The second anything stressful happens, their child tries to talk to them about their feelings, or there's anything serious that requires them to actually be a parent, they shut down.

Feeling Burnt Out

A child raised by this type of parent often deals with shame and feelings of being a burden, both stemming from deeply rooted anxiety. Your parent being your friend is fine in a bubble, but without any sort of structure or guidance in their life, the child basically had to fend for themselves the entire time. This leads to an adult that's tired, lost, and pent up.

A Parent's Scars

No one ever said that parenting was easy, but before having kids, people should examine whether they're truly ready and able to give a child the appropriate level of care, attention, and dedication they need to grow into a healthy adult.

These misgivings are often born of pain, but that pain doesn't have to continue into another generation. Be the change you want to see in your family. If you're the child of an emotionally immature parent, know that you are not at fault for how you were raised. You can seek your own help, you can grow past the marks they left behind, and you can become a better parent to yourself and any children you may have.

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