Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

Blaming your parents isn’t easy. Even if part of you knows that they have done something wrong with you (or have made little to no effort in accepting their wrong doings), it is really hard to put a black flag on your parents. There is a strange mix of guilt, loyalty, fear, and emotional attachment that makes this realisation deeply uncomfortable, almost taboo. Interestingly, psychological research on family loyalty and attachment consistently shows that children are biologically wired to seek connection with caregivers, even when those caregivers are a source of harm.

Parenthood for someone is entirely the childhood for the kids. The human brain develops only in the early stages of life. By the time we are 25–27, most of our PFC, which is the actual decision-making cortex of our brain, gets developed. Before that, we are still in the process of building our brain, our identity, and the way we emotionally respond to the world. Studies in developmental neuroscience and attachment theory show that early caregiver interactions directly influence emotional regulation, stress response (HPA axis), and self-worth. Most of it depends upon both nature and nurture, but nurture plays a far more active, shaping role in how the child interprets the world.

The main emphasis of this book is on that later part, that is nurture. It subtly points towards how environments shape emotional responses, attachment styles, fears, coping mechanisms, and even the way we perceive love and safety. Research around Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) also supports this by linking emotionally neglectful environments to higher risks of anxiety, depression, relational instability, and chronic stress in adulthood.

Few things that are worth exploring:

1. Have you ever felt like you are the main adult in your family and that you have to take care of your parents when they act like a child? (a pattern often referred to as parentification in clinical psychology)
2. Have you ever felt like your emotional needs are not being met by your parents and that they are either too intrusive or too disconnected from your life?
3. Have you felt like you “hate” your parents but you still want to be with them because that’s the only way you feel connected with the world?
4. Or, if you had a terrible childhood, which gives you a lot of CPTSD, anxiety, depression, and unexplained emotional heaviness?
5. Do you feel disconnected with your children or with your spouse/partner when you are an adult and seemingly don’t know the reason behind it?

All of this might lead to bad parenting, and it is worth discussing in the light rather than pretending it doesn’t exist. Silence, denial, and emotional suppression only make these patterns more rigid and more damaging over time, which is something modern trauma research repeatedly highlights.

I also want to add something tangible for the Indian audience here. Indian parenting has been really problematic, especially in the modern era where surveillance seems to have taken the main seat during parenting. Multiple sociological studies have pointed towards authoritarian parenting being dominant in South Asian households. Plus, the main emphasis of having an elite degree from elite colleges to get a job and later a good social status is slowly making kids suffer in their own heads with no emotional support from their parents. Emotional validation has been replaced with comparison, and curiosity has been replaced with control.

But when we talk about these kids, we forget that there’s another India (which is much bigger than the mainstream India) where parents don’t have money, knowledge, or resources to raise their kids in a most nurtured way. UNICEF and NCRB data consistently highlight high levels of childhood neglect, school dropout due to emotional and socioeconomic stress, and poor mental health infrastructure in rural regions. I suspect this India needs much more attention, as these kids go through an extreme amount of lonely suffering. Later, when these kids become adults, they don’t know what actual nurturing looks like, and that may get translated into the way they raise their kids and how they interact with the world as a whole. Someone from an extremely poor background should be able to raise their kids in a proper emotionally secure place. But that’s sadly not the case, and my heart just sinks when I think about the possibilities of emotional neglect these kids must be facing when I read this book (which is meant for a western audience and may resonate with only the financially/socially stable Indians).

I would also add the generation of our parents and what they and their parents have gone through. The 1947 separation has given us a lot of trauma for the last two generations. Psychological literature on intergenerational trauma shows how unresolved grief and fear can unconsciously pass across generations through behaviour patterns, emotional conditioning, and parenting styles. Also the constant state of religious-political tensions, economical changes, industrialisation, and repeated migrations must have made our parents (and their parents) wrecked to the core, both emotionally and psychologically. Most of them must never have been subjected to healthy parenting and hence never knew how to raise their children. So I highly suspect (and speculate without much data) that most kids and Gen Z must carry some form of childhood neglect. This book might help them understand what that is and what they actually lacked in the process of growing up.

In the end, I would like to say that this book is about understanding a specific form of trauma (which isn’t just PTSD), a persistent anxiety most of us feel without knowing how to react to it and without knowing the actual reason for it. Many therapists describe this as emotional dysregulation rooted in developmental trauma. One of the friends who recommended this book to me emphasised how they felt like they were “finally finding the reason” behind their emotional patterns. Although the book gives formal and fairly practical ways to deal with those feelings, I feel if you truly resonate with this book then you should seek actual therapy (and not just rely on a book).

As someone getting interested in psychology, I felt this book lacking some theory to explain why certain things work the way they do. Though I feel this is for the general audience and for someone who is actually going through some intense feelings, in which case the book hits the spot perfectly. I would’ve liked it more if it had much more relatable examples (again, being from the Indian subcontinent must be the reason for this). But overall, this book made me write about it — so it clearly made an impact on me.

As a young adult, it has changed my views towards parenting and the way I look at adults now. It made me more observant, more reflective, and more critical of patterns that were previously normalised. This was truly an eye opener. I would highly recommend reading it.