Kids Raised By Mentally & Emotionally Unsupportive Parents Usually Carry 6 Habits Into Adulthood
Quí Trần | Pexels When parents offer mental and emotional support to their kids, they're creating a healthy, stable environment.
And once these kids grow up, they're more in touch with their own feelings. Unfortunately, for children who grew up with unsupportive parents, their emotions were never validated. As a result, they take some pretty unhealthy habits into adulthood.
When kids are raised by unsupportive parents, they carry these habits into adulthood
1. They're quiet
Mikhail Nilov | Pexels
Unsupportive parents often use negativity against their children. They're harsh parents, and over time, they rob their kids of the chance to regulate their emotions.
They may have ridiculed their kids for no reason or punished them just because they wanted to. Children internalize all this negativity, and as adults become unable to speak up about what they want.
They learned as a child that keeping your mouth shut was the best bet to appease their parents.
2. They're self-critical
Imagine growing up in a home where your parents never offered you a compliment or praise. A supportive parent will approve of a child who wants to join afterschool clubs, but a toxic one shoots down that idea immediately.
According to a 2022 study, "Poor parenting techniques cause depression, trauma, behavior issues... Parents must express their love and support for their children to avoid [this]." When there exists a lack of love and support, these kids grow into adults who are never happy with themselves.
This isn't to say that happiness is impossible, but it can be very difficult to obtain. Every happy thing they earn, they quickly shut it down and feel guilty for feeling joy.
3. They struggle with low self-worth
When parents are emotionally unavailable and don't support anything their child needs, as adults they may withdraw into themselves. They don't have a positive sense of self because they never received validation they needed
They blame themselves for their parents' struggles and that follows them into adulthood. "In order for a child to develop a healthy and accurate self-esteem, they need mirroring, attunement, and validation... If the child doesn't get enough of it, their ability to self-assess is stunted or even damaged," mental health coach Darius Cikanavicius explained.
4. They attract unstable relationships
When someone is raised by unsupportive parents, it sets the bar for the relationships they seek in life. For example, if they're stressed about school and their parents make no effort to reassure them, they may seek out adult relationships where they're invalidated.
According to attorney and therapist Marianna S. Klebanov, "The relationship between a child and his or her parents serves as the foundation for all of that child's future relationships. Infants and small children need to experience love and positive attachment behaviors from their primary caregivers in order to conduct relationships optimally throughout life."
When these things aren't present, Klebanov continued, "children may grow up to be too needy or attached, too critical, withdrawn, unreliable, inconsiderate, and more as they recreate the earliest relationship they experienced."
5. They're drained by social interactions
Onur Bahadır | Pexels
By not being supportive, parents are causing their children to become anxious. As adults, they never learned how to properly engage with others. So, when they interact with others, they put on a front just to get through it.
They're not only afraid to speak their truth, but find socializing tiring. When they were kids, they felt drained when they would talk to their parents, and now, they're repeating that same pattern with others.
6. They don't offer people the same support they craved as kids
Children can pick up on habits they learned from their parents, so there's a chance that kids raised by unsupportive parents may become mentally and emotionally unsupportive themselves. They experienced neglect and harsh parenting, and everything they learned is what they carried into adulthood.
They aren't trying to actively hurt anyone, it's just what they're used to. They're emotionally exhausted and absent, and find it difficult to connect on an empathetic level. They don't do well with others' emotions because of their lack of control over their own.
Allison Peterson is a writer with a degree in English from the University of Nevada, Reno. She writes on relationships, lifestyle, and mental health topics.
