How Emotionally Immature Parents Impact Their Children Into Adulthood
Updated: 18 hours ago
Most people have complicated relationships with their parents, shaped over a lifetime of closeness and distance, of times they felt understood and times they didn’t.
Disagreement, misunderstanding and disappointment are part of every family, and a parent who sometimes gets things wrong isn’t necessarily a problem in itself.
What tends to bring people to this subject is something more persistent: a sense that, as a child, there was very little room for what you felt, and that you learned to manage the adults around you rather than being looked after by them.
For many people, these experiences continue to shape adult life in ways that are difficult to trace, influencing how they deal with conflict, how much they expect from others, how freely they express what they want, and how tiring relationships can feel.
Seeing your parents clearly
It can be difficult to look at your own parents objectively, and many people struggle to make sense of these relationships.
Sometimes this comes from loyalty or protectiveness, or from a feeling that naming a problem is somehow a betrayal. It can also be difficult because, if you grew up around emotional immaturity, it probably felt normal at the time.
It may take years to recognise that the way relationships worked in your family was not inevitable, but a particular way of relating that you came to accept as ordinary.
What’s the point of looking at this?
The aim of taking a more balanced look at your parents is not to turn them into villains or stir up resentment.
When parents behave in hurtful or neglectful ways, they may have little awareness of the impact on their children. Their behaviour can reflect what they themselves experienced growing up, although family histories and circumstances vary considerably.
Understanding what happened, and what may have been going on for your parents, can give you a clearer picture of your childhood and make more room for compassion towards yourself and, sometimes, towards them.
Understanding something, however, is not the same as excusing it, and it does not commit you to any particular decision about the relationship. You can recognise the difficulties your parents faced while still acknowledging what you needed and did not receive.
What is emotional immaturity?
Emotional immaturity is not a diagnosis, nor is it a fixed category that a person either belongs to or does not.
It is a way of describing patterns of relating in which someone struggles to manage their emotions, may be rigid in their thinking, becomes absorbed in their own needs, reacts strongly to disagreement, or finds it difficult to take in another person’s emotional experience.
It has little to do with intelligence or education, and it does not necessarily mean a parent does not love their children.
Many emotionally immature parents care deeply about their families and try hard to do the right thing, but struggle with the emotional demands of parenting, which often require a person to remain steady and attentive while a child is upset, angry or frightened.
Most parents show some of these qualities at times. The difficulty arises when they become a persistent feature of family life, leaving a child with little room to develop a sense of their own feelings, needs and identity.
The traits of emotionally immature parents
In Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, Lindsay Gibson describes a number of characteristics that can help people make sense of their family experiences. These are best understood as descriptions of recurring patterns rather than a checklist for judging an individual parent.
One characteristic is a strong focus on the parent's own feelings and wishes, which can leave little room for the child's inner life. A child in this position may grow up feeling unimportant or unseen, particularly if the parent regularly takes over conversations or dismisses what the child says matters to them.
Another is emotional reactivity. Outbursts of anger, sudden fear or withdrawal can make the family atmosphere unpredictable, leaving a child unsure of what to expect and with little opportunity to feel emotionally secure.
Difficulties with boundaries can take different forms, too. Some parents treat their children as extensions of themselves, controlling their choices or expecting them to meet the parent's emotional needs. Others are so detached that their children receive very little guidance, interest or support.
A strong need for control may also be present, sometimes connected to a fear of unpredictability. It can show up as persistent criticism, micromanaging or rigid expectations, leaving a child feeling that they must fit in rather than develop their own identity.
Blame and defensiveness are related difficulties. A parent who struggles to acknowledge having done something wrong may describe a child as “too sensitive”, “difficult” or “ungrateful”, leaving the child feeling responsible for the parent's distress.
Finally, relationships with emotionally immature parents can remain on the surface, organised around behaviour, appearances and achievements rather than the child's actual emotional experience.
A family may appear close from the outside, while the child experiences a deep sense of loneliness because there is little opportunity to be known or understood.
The impact on children, and on adult life
There is no single outcome for children who grow up in these circumstances.
Temperament, the presence of other supportive adults, and the wider family environment all make a difference.
People who experience very similar upbringings can develop quite different ways of coping. Nevertheless, there are patterns that many adults recognise when they begin to look back at their childhoods.
One is difficulty knowing what you feel. If a child's emotions were routinely dismissed or ignored, they may learn to push those feelings aside or stop expressing them altogether.
In adulthood, they may struggle to identify their own needs, find it difficult to explain how they feel, or expect that other people will dismiss their experiences in the same way. This can sit alongside a persistent sense of not counting for very much.
Another pattern is constant watchfulness. A child who grows up around moods that change without warning may become highly skilled at reading the adults around them, learning to anticipate what might trigger anger, withdrawal or rejection. This attentiveness can become an automatic way of relating to other people.
In adult life, it may show up as anxiety, worry about what others think, or a sense of waiting for something to go wrong. Whether someone's particular difficulties with anxiety are connected to their childhood is something that needs to be explored in the context of their own experience.
Some children become the family's emotional caretakers, managing a parent's moods or trying to keep the household steady. This places a considerable responsibility on a young person who should be able to rely on the adults around them.
Later in life, they may find themselves putting other people's needs first, feeling compelled to fix problems, or experiencing guilt when they say no or ask for something for themselves.
Boundaries can be confusing for similar reasons. If a child was not shown that their feelings, preferences and limits mattered, it can be difficult to know how to express them as an adult.
Some people become accommodating, finding it hard to disagree or risk disappointing others. Others keep people at a distance, having learned that closeness can bring disappointment, intrusion or pain.
These different responses can emerge from a similar difficulty: finding a way to feel secure in relationships while remaining connected to one's own needs.
These experiences can also carry into romantic and other close relationships. Some people find themselves wanting closeness while simultaneously fearing it, or become particularly sensitive to the possibility of abandonment. Others notice that they repeatedly become involved with emotionally unavailable partners, perhaps because a familiar pattern of relating feels strangely recognisable, even when it is painful. Some look to their relationships for the attention, reassurance or validation they struggled to receive as children.
None of these patterns is inevitable, but they can be difficult to recognise while they are being lived out.
Gibson also describes what she calls a “false self”: a version of oneself that is compliant, guarded and organised around pleasing other people, developed because expressing one's real feelings and needs did not feel safe.
In the family environment where it developed, this way of being may have been a sensible adaptation.
Years later, however, it can leave a person feeling as though they are performing a role rather than being themselves, struggling to let others know them, or repeatedly finding that their own needs have little place in their relationships.
Why understanding it matters
For many people, recognising emotional immaturity in a parent brings both relief and pain.
It can help explain why childhood felt emotionally thin, why certain needs went unmet, or why familiar difficulties keep appearing in adult relationships. At the same time, this understanding may bring sadness, anger or grief for what was missing.
One of the most important realisations can be that a parent's difficulty in responding to a child's emotional needs does not determine the child's worth or lovability.
A child may nevertheless have spent years drawing conclusions about themselves from the way they were treated, and those conclusions can persist long after the original circumstances have changed.
Understanding this intellectually and coming to feel it more deeply are different things, and the latter often takes time.
It is also worth remembering that recognising a pattern does not mean that every difficulty in adult life can be traced back to one's parents.
Our experiences are shaped by many influences, and the purpose of looking at childhood is not to find a single explanation for everything, but to understand more clearly how we came to relate to ourselves and other people in the ways we do.
Working through it in therapy
If you recognise some of these experiences, it may be useful to explore them with someone, particularly if you notice their effects in your current relationships.
Therapy can offer an opportunity to put words to experiences that were rarely discussed in the family, to make sense of the ways you learned to cope, and to notice how those adaptations continue to influence you.
You might begin to recognise, for example, how quickly you appease someone who is displeased with you, how difficult it feels to express a need, or how easily you assume responsibility for another person's feelings.
These responses often developed for understandable reasons. The aim is not simply to get rid of them, but to understand what they have done for you, where they may no longer serve you, and how you might gradually develop other ways of responding.
This is part of my work in psychotherapy: exploring the recurring patterns in how we think, feel and relate to others, including how those patterns may have developed and how they can begin to change.
The process is different for everyone, but understanding the relationship between earlier experiences and present difficulties can create more room for choice, rather than leaving us feeling bound to repeat familiar ways of relating.
Considering therapy?
If this article resonates with you or if you're experiencing anxiety, overthinking, intrusive thoughts or recurring difficulties in your relationships, psychotherapy can offer a space to understand what you're going through and explore how things might begin to change.
You don't need to have everything worked out before we speak.
