A Guide for Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

Adult children of emotionally immature parents often feel frustrated, angry, rejected, and lonely. After all, how can we move past the trauma of our formative years and lead fulfilled lives if we’re still burdened by the issues of our caregivers?

Being raised by emotionally immature parents leaves us at risk of a range of issues, from poor emotional and mental health, to insecure attachment. However, the impact of being raised by emotionally immature parents depends on the specific types and severity of behavior.

The most important thing to flag when discussing emotionally immature parents, is that it is always possible to heal from this form of caregiving–at any stage of life. To help you in this process, this article covers:

• Understanding what emotionally immature parents are
• The effects of emotionally immature parents on their children
• What it’s like growing up with emotionally immature parents
• How to recover from emotionally immature parents
• Strategies for healing from emotionally immature parents

Understanding Emotionally Immature Parents

Emotional immaturity is the refusal or inability to confront and balance emotions in healthy ways–it’s a form of emotion dysregulation.

Emotionally immature parents can take a number of different forms as we discuss in our article “Emotionally Immature Parents: What They Are and Their Impact.” We recommend consulting this article for more information on what emotionally immature parents are, as it can help you understand their actions and how they can come from a transgenerational line of behaviors. Increasing your understanding of emotionally immature parents can help you better deal with your feelings around them, as well as help free you from any emotional cohesion you may still be experiencing with them.

However, for the purposes of this article and learning how to heal from emotionally immature parents, we will cover some of the basics around the phenomenon to help you better understand your caregivers.

Emotionally immature caregivers often find regulating stress, communicating effectively, and empathizing with their children to be challenging. They are generally uncomfortable with emotional intimacy, likely due in part to how their emotions were treated when they were children. This discomfort leads to struggles with creating a deep, emotional bond with their children. Emotionally immature parents may sometimes fleetingly desire connection, so they reach out for closeness. However, when their children respond to these attempts at closeness, the more the emotionally immature parent withdraws.

Emotionally immature caregivers need attention and validation but are wary about vulnerability–creating a push-pull pattern of behaviors with their children. This pattern can lead to emotional loneliness and feelings of rejection in their children. A child wants nothing more than their parents’ love and approval, but the child of an emotionally immature parent is left with a deep emotional hunger.

The Effects of Emotional Immature Parents on Children

The effect of emotionally immature parents on their children depends on the type of emotional immaturity they have. These types include:

• Emotional Parents
• Rejecting Parents
• Passive/Negligent Parents
• Driven Parents.

It’s important to note that the severity of symptoms can change from person to person and that it’s also possible to have more than one type of emotional immaturity. Even though there are four types of emotionally immature parents, there are a couple of common outcomes for their children which we’ll discuss next.

Growing Up With Emotionally Immature Parents

Self-sacrificing needs for the wants of others is a common theme for children of emotionally immature parents. Because such caregivers prioritized their desires over those of their children, they modeled the belief that the child’s beliefs were less important. The child carries this belief with them through life and continues to ignore their own needs, leading to low self-esteem, frustration, and a lack of fulfillment. Adult children of emotionally immature caregivers may even end up with partners who take advantage of their self-sacrificing nature.

Prioritizing the needs of others goes hand in hand with a lack of personal boundaries. Children of emotionally immature parents often grew up feeling parentified and enmeshed with their caregivers’ emotions, so they continue to struggle with enacting and maintaining healthy boundaries as adults. They may also violate the boundaries of others in the hopes of achieving the validation they lacked as children.

Furthermore, children of emotionally immature parents weren’t taught healthy emotion regulation skills. As adults, they may end up repeating the same patterns as their caregivers and struggle to cope with distress in healthy ways, instead allowing their emotions to overwhelm them or completely shut down or deny them. Children of emotionally immature parents may also have difficulties with empathy, making maintaining relationships difficult as adults.

Additionally, children of emotionally immature parents risk developing an insecure attachment style–albeit, a different style depending on the specific type of parent. For example, Driven and Rejecting Parents may be more likely to raise a child with the avoidant style as they demonstrate strict boundaries, value independence, and have low empathy. Alternatively, Emotional and Passive Parents may raise children with the anxious and disorganized styles due to their high levels of self-centredness, lack of consistency, and avoidance of issues that could be harmful to their children.

Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

At one stage, many believed that once people move past the age of childhood, they move past the stage of trauma and leave any associated emotions behind. Of course, research over the past number of years has proven otherwise: Our early years are the foundations for how we perceive the world, ourselves, and others as adults. Therefore, growing up with EIPs can have a long-lasting effect on our psychological functioning.

Being raised by an emotionally immature parent may cause intense feelings of anger, frustration, rejection, and betrayal as an adult. From a young age, you’re used to putting other people first in relationships, so you may self-sacrifice your needs and even end up in relationships that take advantage of your overly-giving nature.

Furthermore, as adults, children of Rejecting Parents hold the belief that they are of low worth, so they give up easily on forging relationships. Because they may feel as if their needs were consistently secondary to their caregivers and potentially adult partners, their sense of agency may suffer and they might feel directionless in life.

Depending on the type, or types, of EIP an adult child of emotionally immature parents can display different symptoms. Let’s break these down into general characteristics.

1. Adult Children of Emotional Parents

Emotional Parents alternate between extremes of behavior due to being driven by their emotions, therefore, they tend to act chaotic and unpredictable. Adult children of Emotional Parents tend to act in similar ways as they weren’t taught healthy ways of regulating their emotions: They may struggle with angry outbursts, anxiety, jealousy, or depression. This inability to regulate their emotions can negatively influence their relationships as they may choose partners that treat them in similar ways as their caregivers did, or else their partners may withdraw from the relationship.

Alternatively, adult children of Emotional Parents may act in opposition to their caregivers and feel disconnected from their emotions.

2. Adult Children of Driven Parents

The adult children of Driven Parents can go one of two ways: They can either be motivationless due to a fear of failure or else become perfectionists like their caregivers with a highly critical self-attitude. To help themselves overcome feelings of low self-worth, these adults may throw themselves into work or substance abuse as a way of numbing their emotions.

In relationships, adult children of Driven Parents may prefer to enact strict boundaries, distract themselves with activities, and avoid or minimize relational conflict. As is apparent, there is a strong parallel between the actions of adult children of Driven Parents and people with the avoidant attachment style.

3. Adult Children of Passive/ Negligent Parents

Adult children of Passive Parents often experience fears about being vulnerable around others, resulting in withdrawal from romantic partners in an attempt to avoid intimacy. Such withdrawal often makes them come across as cold, detached, and aloof to others.

Furthermore, after a childhood in which they experienced avoidance or denial of abuse or neglect, adult children of Passive Parents may struggle with mood disorders such as anxiety and depression. They may also battle with anger towards their caregiver, as well as intense shame and judgment towards themselves.

4. Adult Children of Rejecting Parents

Adults who were raised by Rejecting Parents often end up becoming rejecting of other peoples’ emotions. These individuals may have reduced empathetic capacity for other peoples’ wants and needs, which, from the outside in, may appear selfish or self-centered. Adult children of Rejecting Parents may also alternate between craving emotional closeness and pushing it away–drawing parallels to disorganized attachment. Such difficulties with emotions and empathy can make stable, healthy relationships difficult for adult children of Rejecting Parents.

On the other hand, there can also be a transgenerational effect whereby if adult children of Rejecting Parents become caregivers themselves, they may end up rejecting their childrens’ emotional needs, furthering the cycle.

As is evident, adult children of emotionally immature parents often adopt similar characteristics to their caregivers. Therefore, there is a risk of continuation of behaviors through to their own children, and the transgenerational effect of trauma.

How to Recover from Emotionally Immature Parents

Growing up with emotionally immature parents doesn’t mean that you cannot learn how to be emotionally mature and regulate emotions successfully as an adult.

Your experiences as a child do not represent your worth as an adult, but you may need to learn how to separate your emotions from your thoughts. A therapeutic relationship is an ideal situation in which to increase your self-esteem, learn how to enact healthy boundaries, and identify the emotions and maladaptive thoughts that stem from your childhood. However, therapy is not an option for everyone, so the following tips for healing as an adult child of emotionally immature parents may help.

Self-Care Tips for Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

As children, people who grew up with emotionally immature parents didn’t get their needs met in the way they required. For this reason, as adults, to recover from emotionally immature parents we need to enact self-care. The following tips can help you do so. Bear in mind that the specific steps you need to take to recover may differ depending on the type(s) of emotionally immature parents you have.

1. Set Healthy Boundaries

Boundaries are important in any relationship. However, as an adult, you may need to be mindful of how your relationship with your caregivers still impacts your life. Do you feel as if the parenting role is reversed and you’re still taking care of your parent’s needs over your own? Do conversations with them feel as though you’re walking on eggshells? When they become upset with you for not putting their needs first or don’t communicate their issues with you openly and instead react overly emotionally, does this influence your mood in drastic ways? These are all reasons why boundaries with emotionally immature parents are highly important.Remember, setting boundaries with this type of caregiver can be tricky; they likely won’t understand or respect your wishes. Therefore it may be wise to create space without drastic movements. For example, if you have to attend a family gathering, make an excuse to leave after a set amount of time. Or, reduce the amount of enmeshment in the relationship by finding hobbies or activities that you can do by yourself and not involve your caregiver in the decision.

2. Prioritize Your Needs

Being the child of emotionally immature caregivers means that you’re likely not used to having your needs met. Think about what you need in areas such as safety, emotions, career, stimulation, and love. Write a sentence about each. For example, “To feel safe, I need to be able to talk about my feelings without feeling judged.” Or, “To feel loved, I need to be able to make choices for my own life and be supported in these decisions.”Think about your sentences around your needs and the steps you can take to meet these needs. You don’t need to justify these steps to anyone and remember your boundaries in the process.

3. Observe Instead of Engage

Throughout your life, you may have been primed to be hypersensitive to your parent’s needs and emotions, making you highly reactive to their emotional states. If this is the case for you, you may need to detach from your need for their approval.Observing your caregiver’s actions, self-preoccupation, and manipulative strategies without reacting to them will allow you to recognize their behavior for what it is, reducing your caregiver’s control over your emotions.

4. Manage Your Expectations

Emotionally immature parents may never be able to give you what you require from the relationship. So, managing your expectations around what you want from them may help reduce your disappointment and feelings of rejection.Think about your goals for the relationship, and be realistic about them. For example, rather than pushing for emotional intimacy from them, you may instead shift the goalpost and aim for respect instead. You can’t change your caregivers, but you can change how you react to them.

5. Set Targets for Interactions

Emotionally immature parents tend to consistently make themselves the topic of focus. For this reason, conversations with them can be draining, frustrating, and unfulfilling. If you know that you’re going to be seeing them ahead of time, make clear, explicit goals for the interaction.For example, you could decide that you need to discuss a work issue with them. In such a situation, if they hijack the conversation, you can keep redirecting them back to the topic. You can do so by saying something like, “OK, but if we can return to what I was saying for a moment we can get back to what you’re talking about later.”

6. Build Your Self-Worth

Consistently not having your needs met as a child can leave you feeling like you’re not worth having your needs met. We want you to remember something: You are of incomprehensible worth. It doesn’t matter how you were treated, what you’ve achieved, or the steps you’ve taken in life.To build your self-worth, it’s important to discover what your values are as these are an important indicator of who you are as a person. Also, bear in mind that you are in control of how you respond to circumstances and situations, so choose ways of responding that are in line with your values.

Final Words on Healing From Emotionally Immature Parents

Adult relationships with emotionally immature parents can be incredibly draining if we keep mistaking their physical age for emotional maturity. If you’re wondering how to deal with emotionally immature parents, it’s important to start by acknowledging that you likely eclipsed them developmentally many years ago. Their disregard for your needs is likely not intentional, but instead due to a preoccupation with their own. Once you recognize this fact, you can emotionally disengage from situations that currently exhaust you.

Remember, our brains are wired for connection. However, growing up with emotionally immature parents causes our brains to wire for protection. You are safe now; you no longer need to react to situations in ways that protect you. Instead, release yourself from needing approval from people who can’t give it and focus on building strong connections with those who will return the effort.