People Who Felt Loved But Not Prioritized As Kids Usually Have 7 Adult Habits
kryzhov | Shutterstock Kids can feel loved by their parents without feeling like a priority. Everyone wants to be seen, but feeling like they matter is especially important for kids during the most impressionable time of their lives.
When kids feel prioritized and truly important to their parents, they thrive in all sorts of areas, from academic achievement to self-esteem, and even emotional regulation. But people who felt loved but not truly prioritized as kids usually have these adult habits that keep them stuck in unhealthy spirals.
These 7 adult habits actually make sense if you felt loved but not prioritized as a kid:
1. You overthink in your relationships
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Many people who felt less warmth and closeness from their parents tend to feel more insecure in their adult relationships, whether they realize where those feelings come from or not. The dynamic of begging for attention is something they’re subconsciously familiar with and know how to navigate, even when it comes at their own expense.
Even if they were technically loved, to get the kind of emotional support and attention they yearned for, they had to perform for it. Now, they’re prone to reading into things and changing their behavior to comfort another person, even when the conclusions they’re drawing from this “evidence” are really just their anxiety or insecurity talking.
2. You try to please everyone
People-pleasing is a common symptom of feeling unseen and unprioritized early in life, usually because kids had to fight for attention at home with the people who were supposed to be their safe place. Now, they’ve grown up with an underlying but misguided belief that they’re undeserving of someone’s attention unless they curate a specific image and protect everyone’s comfort.
Especially for women who are socialized into agreeableness and these people-pleasing behaviors, it can feel like the only way to get the reassurance and validation they need.
3. You try to hide your problems
With the low self-esteem that tends to come from emotional neglect in childhood, whether it’s incredibly severe or not, adult children may become emotional suppressors later on. Rather than being open about their big emotions and speaking their concerns out loud, they shove them down out of fear that they’ll be perceived as needy or even a burden.
A 2022 study of older adults found that anxiety symptoms were associated with a fear of being a burden. They’re so used to having their needs and desires put on the back burner that they subconsciously do it to themselves in their adult relationships.
4. You isolate yourself when things go wrong
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While children with active, supportive, present parents learned how to ask for help and express their emotions to others when they were struggling, an unprioritized child learned to self-soothe and suffer in silence. Especially when attention from parents felt tied to their own perfection, they had to isolate themselves to hide their mistakes and struggles.
Now, they throw themselves into a very lonely spiral where their relationships are curated with a misguided, unsustainable kind of perfection. Instead of relying on the social support we all need when things go wrong in our lives, they put all that pressure on themselves.
5. You measure your worth by your relationships and achievements
Of course, many of these adult children have formed anxious attachments, where their relationships define their self-worth in some way. However, they may also tie their well-being and security to other external factors, like money, success, or a professional career.
It’s not just a way to keep themselves busy, but also to promote the narrative that they’re worthy of the attention they sorely missed growing up. Even if it’s entirely subconscious, they keep themselves stuck in a cycle of burnout and disappointment, trying to feel more secure by relying on things outside of themselves.
6. You change your opinions to fit in
Depending on who’s around and what they have to gain from being liked by a group, adult children who’ve never felt truly prioritized may change themselves to fit in. Whether it’s their personality around new friends or their beliefs around strongly opinionated peers at work, they’d prefer to protect the peace than stray from the norm.
While anyone can intentionally shift and change their personalities to some extent, when someone’s trying to do it for the validation or attention of another, they’ll never be truly satisfied.
7. You fish for compliments
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Many people with childhood trauma, specifically emotional neglect, end up searching for attention and validation in others later in life. They’re used to feeling insecure and uncomfortable, performing for attention by changing themselves, and it takes on a different form in adulthood.
Whether it’s fishing for compliments in conversations or painting their personality in a misguided way to seem cool to a new group of people, they often find themselves curating a misleading narrative to be liked by others.
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.
