Kids Raised By Parents With Very Little Compassion Usually Carry 6 Habits Into Adulthood
Alones | Shutterstock To feel safe and loved and learn empathy, kids need their parents to offer and model compassion. If they don't get enough of that kindness and understanding, they'll develop bad habits to cope with the loss, and those habits won't just disappear once they turn 18.
Kids with little to no compassion from their parents never truly feel secure in their love. It can mess with their sense of self and how they view the rest of the world. Even worse, however, is that when empathy isn't modeled at home, kids never learn how to properly regulate their own emotions. Having feelings becomes a problem, and that can impact every adult relationship they ever have.
Habits kids raised with very little compassion will develop and carry into adulthood:
1. They overstep in group conversations
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The kinds of people who interrupt often and overshare, likely lacking social competence, grew up with parents who struggled to show them empathy and basic kindness.
As a study published in the Pediatric Investigation journal found, children of parents with low empathy are more likely to struggle with emotional and behavioral problems and lower social competence. They’ve been raised by parents who don’t consider other perspectives or anyone at all, leading to a unique social struggle that affects their adult relationships.
That means relating to others and reading the room are skills they just never learned. As adults, they'll struggle to understand how conversations flow and how to listen and relate to what the people around them are saying.
2. They avoid or struggle to cope with their own feelings
Kids who learned empathy from their parents understand their own emotions and have a good relationship with themselves, giving them an advantage in understanding and connecting with other people.
However, for kids who never felt compassion from their parents, understanding their own emotions is like a foreign language. In social settings, it’s obvious they’re uncomfortable with vulnerability, but internally they’re probably also struggling to express, process, and manage their own emotions.
3. They suppress their emotions
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On top of not being taught basic fundamentals of emotional intelligence by watching their parents, kids of parents with little compassion and warmth often grow into adults who struggle with coping and general well-being.
Whether their parents were generally cold or overlooked opportunities to make their kids feel understood, these kids learned to suppress and hide their feelings instead of expressing them openly. For adults, this creates greater emotional dysregulation and overall stress.
4. They get easily defensive
We usually think of empathy as the driving force behind helping people, but it also plays a role in resolving conflict and dealing with hard conversations.
Kids who grew up without a strong example of compassion and empathy probably witnessed a lot of conflict without much resolution. They learned to fear conflict and to get defensive, because their parents never truly modeled what healthy communication looked like.
Now, their relationships are at stake, and their well-being is too, because conflict feels like the end of the world instead of a stepping stone to growth.
5. They avoid alone time and reflection
When we grow up with compassionate parents, they create safe spaces for us to practice regulating and processing our emotions without fear of being judged. These kids grow into adults who prioritize their alone time because it gives them a chance to sit with their thoughts and feelings.
However, when kids grow up without that basic kindness, they often learn to demonize their own emotions. That means they are usually uncomfortable without distractions. They never had a chance to practice sitting with their feelings, so they never learned to be self-aware or to reflect thoughtfully on how they felt without suppressing.
6. They try to be perfect
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When kids aren't shown patience and understanding as they learn and grow, they begin to dread making mistakes. That's when perfectionist traits start to show up.
They feel like they have to be perfect at everything they do, because they grew up with parents who had little compassion or consideration for mistakes. They had to learn how to behave to receive affection, and that can lead to neuroticism in adulthood.
Zayda Slabbekoorn is a senior editorial strategist with a bachelor’s degree in social relations & policy and gender studies who focuses on psychology, relationships, self-help, and human interest stories.
