Healing From The Impacts of Emotionally Immature Parents
It happens every time. When you try to talk to your parents about something difficult, like your feelings, tough life experiences you’re dealing with, or something that happened in your childhood, you get shut down, shrugged off, or your parent manipulates you into focusing on them and making them feel better.
“That didn’t happen. Stop exaggerating!”
“You’re too sensitive, it’s no big deal.”
“Oh, I see how it is. I’m just the worst mother in the world, aren’t I?”
This kind of invalidating response always hurts. Your parents, of all people, should believe you and be there for you. This pattern is a stark reminder that your parents weren’t the parents you needed when you were young, and they probably aren’t the parents you need now, either. You’re probably wondering why they are like this. Why can’t they care about you like other parents?
You may even be worried you are like this too, or be wondering what impact these parenting patterns have had on you. If this feels relatable, it’s highly likely you have emotionally immature parents.
Emotionally immature parents haven’t grown up yet
Emotionally immature parents are parents whose emotional responses are not properly regulated or proportionate to what they’re experiencing. They lack emotional regulation, and their emotional reactions are closer to what would be appropriate for a child, not an adult.
When you read the hypothetical responses written above, did they sound childish to you? The exaggeration, the inability to empathize, the self-centeredness, and the attempts to rewrite the truth are all behaviors of children. The thing is, children are emotionally immature because they’re supposed to be; they have growing up to do. Adults who are emotionally immature still have growing up to do, but when they have children, their immaturity has impacts beyond just themselves.
Immature parents are often the result of intergenerational trauma
How we are parented sets the tone for how we live our lives as adults. Our parents’ immaturity becomes an intergenerational trauma of sorts. Emotionally immature adults are usually developmentally stunted because of their own childhood experiences and traumas, typically linked to how their parents chose to raise them. Emotional neglect in childhood is a highly effective predictor of emotional dysregulation in adulthood, for example.
Children can’t escape their parents' immaturity. Other adults can walk away from inappropriate emotional responses, but a child has to live with those responses when they have an emotionally immature parent. Your parents, and likely their own, were probably not emotionally nurtured as they should have been by their parents. If they can’t—or won’t—recognize that issue as an adult and work to change it, they remain emotionally immature, and they continue the cycle with their own children..
What are some signs your parents are or were emotionally immature?
Emotionally immature parents often exhibit:
Inability to empathize
Unwillingness to be emotionally vulnerable
Ignoring you when you’re in conflict
Pretending conflicts or problems aren’t happening
Extreme emotional reactions
Boundary problems, including inconsistent ones, porous ones, and overly rigid ones
Neglecting their children's needs
Being overly friendly or acting like a peer to their children
Compulsive or impulsive behaviors
Substance abuse
Hyperindependent
Controlling
Excessive neediness or drawing others into their life "drama"
Using their child as an emotional dumping ground
Manipulative behavior
The four types of emotionally immature parents
Emotionally immature parents often fall into four broad types. While these aren’t absolute classifications, and parents may fluctuate between these styles of emotionally immature parenting, these categories can help us see the extent of your parents’ emotionally immature parenting, and help you see where your own thought and behavior patterns have developed as a response to the inadequate parenting you received.
Driven and controlling
A parent who demands perfection and achievement no matter what, in order to avoid the emotional discomfort of processing normal life experiences like learning, failure, loss, and frustration. When their demands on their children aren't met, punishment, anger, and criticism are the result. Their children are often perfectionist workaholics with poor boundaries and high expectations of others, who are perpetually chasing worthiness or trying to numb feelings of being inadequate.
Emotionally dysregulated
Emotional dysregulation means parents who have inappropriate reactions, from outsized and dramatic to numb and dismissive. This unpredictability can cause children raised by these parents to become anxious, depressed, and also dysregulated. Their relationships mimic their chaotic childhood environment, as that’s what feels like home.
Rejecting
These parents consistently reject their children. They avoid and push away parenting responsibilities, especially emotional ones. Their needs come first, and they don’t participate in their children’s lives. When they're forced to parent, they may be quickly overwhelmed and become angry and abusive. Their children are often disconnected from themselves and others, often lack empathy, push connections away once they're established, and may seem very self-absorbed.
Negligent/passive
These parents often try to treat their child as a peer instead of someone they’re responsible for. They are more focused on what they want to do, what would be fun or enjoyable, rather than what's important. They avoid their child's needs, glossing over them or ignoring them, often overly-involving their child in their own needs and wants. Their children have had their needs neglected so long that they struggle with shame, anxiety, depression, and anger. They often resent their parents and haven't learned how to handle their own or others’ vulnerable emotions.
How did you learn to cope with emotionally immature parents in childhood?
Children are fast learners with a strong sense of self-preservation. To cope with the stressful shortcomings and pressures of emotionally immature parents, children will develop behavior and thought patterns that protect them from the difficult reality that emotionally immature parents aren’t safe parents, and these parents are not capable of fulfilling their children’s needs. These patterns are maladaptive and fall into two main types.
Internalizers
Internalizers take on the feelings and experiences of others as their own responsibility. They spend a lot of time introspecting, attempting to solve their own and others' problems on their own. They are people-pleasers, worried about how they're perceived, and they neglect and turn away from themselves in relationships in an attempt to preserve the connection.
Externalizers
Impulsive and action-oriented, externalizers focus on outward influences to regulate their emotions and soothe their feelings. They feel the external world and the people in it are responsible for how they feel and how they behave, and will go to great lengths to maintain access to external resources they think they deserve.
The effects of emotionally immature parents extend into adulthood
All of this inadequate parenting can impact your mental health, your physical wellbeing, your perception of yourself, your independence, how you behave in relationships, how you parent, how motivated you are in life, and overall makes it hard to function in a fulfilling and healthy way as an adult.
Insecure attachment from poor parenting informs how you relate to others
When your parents are too immature emotionally to properly parent you, the relationship you develop with them becomes your model for all other relationships in the future. This can be deeply disruptive and difficult, though thankfully, attachment styles aren’t permanent, and you can learn to create secure, healthy relationships even if you had emotionally immature parents.
Anxious attachment
Anxious attachment pushes you to try to get closer to others, no matter how they treat you. You may have weak boundaries and intense emotional reactions to perceived abandonment. If your parent was inconsistent, unpredictable, or withholding, you may have anxious attachment.
Avoidant attachment
If your emotionally immature parents neglected you and your emotional needs, especially if they also parentified you, you may feel unsafe in any close relationship and avoid intimacy and vulnerability.
Disorganized attachment
If your parents are particularly inconsistent and unpredictable, your attachment style may be disorganized. You may respond anxiously in one instance and avoidantly in another, creating confusion for yourself and others that makes emotional closeness difficult.
Parentification reverses the roles of parent and child, with negative consequences
Emotionally immature parents don’t recognize their role in the family as one of caregivers, and often fail to provide the emotional and physical support children need to grow into well-adjusted, functional adults. Children of emotionally immature parents are often parentified early in life. Instead of getting to play, learn, be silly, make mistakes, and explore their personality, a parentified child is expected to fulfill adult responsibilities far too early, leading to anxiety, poor boundaries, perfectionism, missed milestones, a tendency toward enmeshment and codependency, and more.
Healing as a child of emotionally immature parents
As you’ve read this, you may find yourself experiencing intense emotions. Your parents did not do enough to raise you to live an emotionally healthy life, and that hurts. You may also feel uncomfortable reading about how your own behaviors aren’t serving you, especially if you aren’t sure what to do about them. So now what? Are you stuck this way?
Thankfully, no, you are not stuck this way. There are many ways to heal from emotionally immature parents, and your willingness to develop awareness and learn about the patterns of emotional neglect and abuse you experienced is a great starting point.
Next, you have an opportunity to invest in yourself. You are a capable adult, and you deserve time and attention, even if you don’t always feel that way (especially if you don’t yet feel that way!). You can learn life skills and emotional regulation behaviors that can set you on a new trajectory in life. You can take a long, hard look at the relationships in your life, and figure out where you’d like to change how you show up, even in your relationship with your parents. You can start to develop acceptance and attunement to the things in life that are, and are not, your responsibility.
How to handle emotionally immature parents as an adult
Changing your relationship with your emotionally immature parents can be incredibly healing. You may find you don’t want to interact with them anymore, and can finally give yourself permission to make that change. Or you may still want, or need, to interact with your parents, but you may want to change your approach so it’s less stressful. Here are a few ways to break old patterns and create some peace for yourself.
Distance and detachment
If you can create mental and emotional distance from your parents’ emotional chaos, you can start observing their behaviors in a more detached way. You can focus on your own inner feelings, managing them in ways that benefit you, without diving into your parents’ chaos. You will be the one to create calm for yourself, with firm internal boundaries that respect your own feelings.
This approach can be found in grounding exercises, mindful observation of situations, staying attuned to your own emotions and needs, and often a grieving process as you start to see clearly how difficult your parents’ emotional immaturity has made your life.
Awareness and acceptance (not approval)
When you take a “maturity awareness approach”, you’ll take a hard look at what your parents are capable of, and that perspective on your parents’ immaturity can help you choose responses instead of launching into the reactions that were ingrained in you in childhood.
If you keep your interactions with your parents focused on basic, concrete goals, like expressing your thoughts (even if they don’t validate them), or keeping a conversation on topic (even if they try to change the subject repeatedly), you recognize what you have control over and you achieve what you set out to do, no matter what their response is.
Therapy in Coral Springs can give you clarity on your parents’ emotional immaturity
As a therapist who serves both families and individuals, I’ve seen how emotionally immature parenting impacts my clients. Sometimes, there’s room for growth in family therapy for both parents and their adult children, and I can provide a safe, fair, and supportive therapy space where we can develop communication and listening skills that let you speak your piece and be heard.
Sometimes, however, emotionally immature parents aren’t ready to take accountability by attending family therapy, so I also provide therapy in Coral Springs for individuals who want to work through their feelings and experiences, and start to make changes in their own lives to undo the damage of emotionally immature parenting. When you’re ready to connect, I’m here for you, ready to help you process your feelings, find acceptance, develop emotional regulation on your terms, and start to shift your life in a positive, fulfilling direction.
