How to Deal With an Emotionally Immature Parent
It’s hard for old parents. Whether it’s incessant requests for IT support, aggressive questions about your personal life, or unsolicited speculation about your health, the relationship between an adult child and its parent can be fraught. This is especially true if you have an inverse relationship where the parents act more like children than adults.
“Emotionally immature people, like two-year-olds, can be selfish, impulsive, they can be turned off, but they are not two years old, these are people [who] should be parents,” said Dan Neuhart , psychologist and author of the Psychology Today blog dedicated to demystifying narcissism .
When they don’t treat you as an autonomous being, reject you for arbitrary reasons, or simply don’t bother to consider your feelings, dealing with an emotionally immature parent is exhausting and confusing. As the adult child of one of them, life turns into a never-ending struggle to mend strained relationships in an emotionally healthy way. Here are some tips to make your journey easier.
Four Types of Emotionally Immature Parents
Emotionally immature parents tend to fall into four main types : controlling parents, emotional parents, rejecting parents, and passive parents. “Some children with emotionally immature parents may feel pressured or controlled in inappropriate ways, while others may feel completely ignored or rejected… [they] are on different ends of the spectrum, but both are the result of an immature parent.” Neuhart said.
Controlling parents tend to set unrealistic standards for their children and may punish them if they do not meet the requirements. Emotional parents tend to have very changeable mood swings, swinging from one extreme to the other. Rejecting parents tend to push their children away, while passive parents tend to avoid confrontation at all costs, even to the point of ignoring their children’s needs.
While it helps identify emotionally immature parents by type, “it can actually be a mixture,” said Molly Alvord, a licensed clinical social worker at Thriveworks. Whatever their immaturity may look like, for their adult children, it is about breaking old patterns of dysfunctional behavior.
Set internal and external boundaries
One of the hardest parts of working with emotionally immature parents is setting healthy boundaries that can help break unhealthy habits from your childhood. Boundaries should be both external, dictating the standards of behavior that you expect from your parents; and internal, defining behaviors that you may or may not personally tolerate.
“Internal boundaries are just as important,” Neuhart said. Internal boundaries involve setting your own expectations for what you can and cannot get from your parents. According to Neuhart, “Part of setting boundaries with emotionally immature parents is mourning what you didn’t have. If you don’t, there’s always some part of you deep down that still hopes they will change, and then you tolerate behavior that doesn’t suit them or you.”
As Alvord often suggests to his patients, when a conversation begins to repeat unhealthy childhood stereotypes, reinforce your boundaries by immediately ending the conversation before you get sucked into the negative conversation. Say something like, “This is not the right way to talk to me, I’m going to end this conversation and we’ll try it another time.”
As Alvord noted, “this is not the right way to talk to me” is often an effective way to end a conversation. However, if you use this strategy, expect your parents to keep pushing your boundaries, she added, because they may be too emotionally immature to understand the importance of respecting your boundaries.
Neuhart also finds it helpful to use a JADE strategy, such as: You don’t have to justify your boundaries, argue with your parents about why you set them, defend your decisions, or even explain why you set boundaries in the first place. If you’re dealing with an emotionally immature parent, they’ll resist, they’ll keep trying to get their way no matter what, which means you need to find a way to turn them off even when they’re difficult.
Find a way to get what you need elsewhere
Part of setting healthy boundaries is mourning what you can’t expect from your parents. “We all want to feel that one day our parent will come to us and say, ‘I’m sorry, I had some problems growing up and I wasn’t very good at my job and made you think.’ you were a problem when they take charge,” Neuhart said. Unfortunately, this rarely happens to the emotionally immature parent, who probably has trouble understanding the damage they have done – and continue to do – to you, beyond their own needs.
Instead, “people should give up on that dream and find it elsewhere,” Neuhart said. Often this can be through relationships with mentors, parents’ friends, or other family members, whether it’s your chosen family or your extended family. By doing this, you can begin to shed some of the old patterns you grew up with. “Being able to break the mold with your adult parents can help you break the mold in your own life,” Alvord said.