Understanding Emotionally Immature Parenting: A Self-Assessment
In Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, author Lindsey Gibson offers readers valuable insights along with a few simple assessments to help clarify how their parents may have struggled to provide support or healthy modeling during childhood.
Human emotional maturity has been studied for a long time, but recent focus on symptoms and clinical diagnoses within a medical disease model has shifted attention away from a clear understanding of what emotional maturity actually is. This shift has left many adult children unsure how to make sense of the long-term impact of emotionally immature parenting.
The questions below are designed to help you explore this topic with more clarity. Answer them honestly and check any that describe your parents or caregivers.
By recognizing these qualities, we’re not blaming or judging caregivers. We often feel the urge to defend our parents by saying they did the best they could, and that may be true.
But to come to terms with and repair the damage that comes from a childhood where parents couldn’t emotionally show up, we have to honestly assess the behaviors and characteristics that affected us. Only by engaging honestly with those past behaviors — and current ones, if our parents are still alive — can we begin the hard repair work within ourselves.
It’s important to understand the difference between a pattern of emotional immaturity and a temporary emotional regression. We all lose emotional control sometimes.
The patterns reflected in these questions point to someone who consistently operates from emotional immaturity — behaviors that show up again and again.
They become so automatic and unconscious that our caregivers or parents often aren’t even aware they’re doing them. Unfortunately, this also means emotionally immature parents rarely step back to consider how their behavior affects other people, and they very rarely apologize or express regret.
For Further Reading
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents
by Lindsay C. Gibson
In this breakthrough book, clinical psychologist Lindsay Gibson exposes the destructive nature of parents who are emotionally immature or unavailable.
ember integration
I help people prepare for and integrate non-ordinary states of consciousness. My consulting services encompass various topics, including microdosing and cultivation (where permitted by law), preparing for journeys, and integration support for growth and healing.
